path\to\SonyA12VII\VidéosDeFamille\SCScloud\Vidéos\20650612_1321
“Does the red light mean it's recording?” a woman mutters to herself in French as she stares into the lens of the video camera. She's in her early thirties, with the kind of immaculate hair and make-up that must have taken at least an hour to get right, and that’s just about managing to cover up the weary bags under her eyes. There’s a faint pattern on her neck; the tell-tale signs of a bruise reduction cream.
“Stop fiddling around with that thing and start filming,” a man's voice snaps.
“Yes, my love!” the woman almost jumps out of her skin, and the camera momentarily dips down to reveal the elegant cocktail dress she's wearing before turning to reveal the incongruous sight of a children's birthday party.
Ten children are seated along the length of a long table, their ages ranging from five to almost eighteen. The children are not arranged by age, but instead seem to have seated themselves in cliques with clear dividing lines in who's talking to who.
At the head of the table is a man in his late thirties or early forties, with long hair falling down to his shoulders and a wiry, muscular physique visible beneath an entirely unbuttoned, ruffled shirt. There’s a necklace around his neck; a silver chain holding dozens of rings. He was the one who snapped at the camerawoman, and the picture wavers as he glares at her, before turning back to the rest of the table.
At the far end of the table sits a young boy whose party hat marks him out as both eight years old and the birthday boy. He’s sitting there in abject terror, his hands fidgeting even as the rest of the table serenades him with a very enthusiastic, very forced rendition of the French version of Happy Birthday To You.
Alec is almost hard to recognise. He’s seated two thirds of the way down the table, towards the eight year old, in-between two of the cliques without being part of either. He looks supremely bored by the whole affair, but his singing is as loud as any of the others.
As the singing reaches its climax, the camera pans away from the table and passes across the dining room of an expensive penthouse, with a floor to ceiling window overlooking an expansive rooftop garden and the towering mega-blocks of an urban sprawl.
The camera also passes over a dozen women in various states of dress; waiting attentively against the wall with their hands clasped demurely in front of them, following the wordless demands of the kids or their father as they gesture for drinks; two just the other side of the window in figure-hugging taksuits, armed with rifles; and a woman taking a walk further out in the garden, with a baby in one arm and a toddler tugging at the hem of her dress.
It lands on a trolley bearing a cake being wheeled in by two women; a tall, tiered cake that’s far larger than any of the people at the table can hope to eat on their own. The women do not bring the cake to the birthday boy, but to his father – who doesn’t even acknowledge them as a slice is cut and set before him.
As the cake makes its way down from child to child, the boy becomes progressively more upset until the father abruptly stands up and slams his fist against the table, silencing all conversation and sending the boy into hysteria.
“You are supposed to be happy!” he shouts. “All this cake, all those presents and you’re still fucking miserable? Later you will be tested, yes. It will hurt, you will hurt, and then you can cry all you want. But now?”
The man brushes his fingers against the necklace of rings, and when he pulls his hand away it has a strange, ethereal quality that appears as misshapen static to the camera. He stretches out his hand towards the boy, curling his fingers like a puppet pulling on marionette strings as the boy's petrified expression abruptly shifts into exuberance, before he picks up his slice of cake in both hands and begins wolfishly consuming it.
“Now you will eat, drink and be merry.”
path\to\renrakutorii62\Users\Jayne_Graves\OkokuCloud\BackgroundProcesses\DeletedFiles\Camera\20650714_192432
The camera is mounted into the frame of a laptop. A woman is typing on the holographic keys. She’s wearing a partially crumpled suit jacket over a yellow blouse, with a pensive expression on her face.
Behind her a diner is visible with cheap, red upholstery and very few patrons. Out the windows, the sky is lit only by the glare of orange streetlights. Over the woman’s left shoulder, a trio of young men are sitting in a booth.
Brian Laborn looks a lot younger and a little leaner, with a wide-eyed expression on his face and a habit of nervously glancing around the room. He is free from any cyberware, but the same cannot be said of the men sitting opposite him.
The pair are wearing mismatched outfits, with one in an armoured jacket with a grinning skull stencilled onto the shoulder. The second has his hair up in a bone-white mohawk, and is wearing a bulletproof vest over tattooed flesh, with both displaying the outline of a skeleton.
The camera’s microphone is too far away to pick up the details of their conversation, but the man with the mohawk is gesturing animatedly to Brian, clearly trying to persuade him to do something.
Over the next few minutes, the trio of orks go back and forth with the man in the jacket largely staying silent. Eventually, Brian pauses for a few moments, looking away, before turning back and nodding. The man with the mohawk leans over the table and clasps him on the shoulder, grinning from ear to ear, while the other reaches into his jacket and sets down a pistol on the table.
Brian hurriedly grabs the gun and tucks it away into his own jacket, before the man with the mohawk calls over the waitress.
path\to\GartnerFinancialFund\BuildingManagement\Security\CCTV\Camera_01\20650720_1342
The camera is looking down on the lobby of a small branch franchise of a bank, with a brief lobby, a single office, three credstick ATMs and four reinforced windows for actual tellers, though only two are occupied.
The customers of the bank – a mix of largely low to middle income residents of the city – are lying flat on the floor with the sullen compliance of people who knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened in their lives.
Moving among the customers with cocksure confidence are an eclectic band of figures in matching gang colours – black outfits with bone designs highlighted in white. Two of them are obviously the two who recruited Brian in the diner; the one with the jacket laying a strip of thermite tape on the reinforced glass separating the public and private side of the business, while the one with the mohawk keeps an Ultamax HMG-2 trained on the staff – standing behind the counter with their backs to the wall and their hands above their heads.
The third member of the gang is a human woman dressed in a frayed black crop-top with a white skeleton pattern continuing in black tattoos on her pale skin, slumped over next to the ATMs with a wire linking one of the machines to the port in her neck. Besides her, his own posture so similar to hers they could have been mirrors, rests a security guard below a blood spatter that matches the entry wound in his chest.
Brian brings the gang’s strength up to four. He’s standing in the middle of the hostages, cutting an imposing figure in a tight-fitting black biker jumpsuit, an AK-97 resting uneasily in his hands. Like the rest of the gang, his face is obscured behind a full-face motorcycle helmet with a grinning skull sprayed on the visor, but his nerves are clear to see from the way his head keeps whipping around as he tries to keep all the hostages in sight.
The ork in the jacket steps back from the window, pulling a detonator out of his pocket and looking away as the thermite charges briefly white-out the camera. When the picture returns, both of the two men have vaulted over the teller’s stations and passed beyond the view of the camera.
The staff have been forced the other way, and are huddled up against the wall under Brian’s watchful eye, and the barrel of his gun. Brian tries to keep his focus on the hostages, but his helmet keeps turning back to look towards the staff area as the man with the mohawk vaults back over the counter, jogging over to the ATMs and starting to cycle credsticks in and out of them, swapping out each of the thumb drive-sized sticks as fast as the Decker can fill them with cash.
Suddenly, a man with a suit is thrown over the countertop, his jacket tearing as it catches on a stray piece of wire-reinforced glass that the thermite missed. The ork in the jacket follows him, dragging the suit to his feet by his collar before shoving him backwards.
The moment he hits the wall, the ganger draws a revolver from his pocket and puts a bullet right between his eyes. Blood and circuitry sprays across the wall as the bullet rips through the bank manager’s skull, and the moment he hits the ground the scene devolves into chaos as the hostages scream and the man with the mohawk gets into a shouting match with his colleague.
Their argument only stops when the Decker flinches, sparks flying out of her datajack socket as her limbs spasm uncontrollably. She curls up into the foetal position and just lays there, her body twitching occasionally through residual current. With the helmet on her head, it’s impossible to tell if she’s alive or dead.
Either way, the three remaining gang members fall silent as they look at their incapacitated gang member, before the shouting match begins anew. Brian still doesn’t join in, instead staring at the decker as his shoulders slump.
Seeming to come to a decision, he throws a look back at the other two gang members and sprints out the doorway, only narrowly avoiding a reflexive shot from the one in the jacket.
Moments later, a storm of bullets rips through the bank, guided by smartlink software to ensure that only the gangers were hit, and a High Threat Response team in power armour storms into the room.
path\to\GrandHuntOrder\Personnel\PaladinLiafiel56\MonopticCamera\Videos\20670126_1223
An AR window fills the camera view, displaying a picture of Lisa in a school uniform; a pleated, knee-length skirt and a green blazer over a white blouse.
“A real damsel in distress…” the camera’s owner, Paladin Liafiel according to the device’s ID, observes in the lilting, melodious language of Sperathiel. “A nice change of pace from our usual hunts.”
“Check the bio, not the face. She might not be as friendly as she looks.” A woman snaps from opposite him. The cameraman briefly minimises the AR elements of his monocular optic lens, revealing the tightly-packed confines of an armoured transport, with arcane and protective script daubed on the walls. The woman is seated opposite him, dressed in sparse, light armour that seems to prioritize appearing fashionable over actually being protective. The optic’s IFF system marks her as a fellow Paladin.
“So what, we're playing truant officers?” Liafiel almost drawls.
“Don’t know yet,” the other Paladin responds. “She just isn’t where she’s supposed to be. Which you’d know if you shut up and read the file.”
“Asking’s quicker.”
“Settle down back there!” another woman shouts from the far end of the vehicle, and Liafiel turns his head to look past the six other Paladins crammed onto the vehicle’s jump seats to where there’s a single Paladin standing up, her attire similarly emphasising form over function, but with added embellishments that marks out her wealth, status and rank.
“Intel suggests the target is somewhere within a two block radius of the insertion point,” the commander continues. “Standard rules of engagement do not apply; this isn’t some tusker, and we aren’t on the border, so kid gloves on this one. Once she’s in, we dose her with Laes. Then she wakes up in her own bed with everything she’s gone through just a fading dream.”
“Are we expecting any pushback from this?” Liafiel asks. “The High Prince doesn’t want us operating in Cara’Sir.”
“The day we start listening to a damn ork is the day we cut off our ears and start calling the city ‘Portland,’” the commander shouts, earning a cheer from the Paladins. “Nobility cannot be elected! We’re born superior, no matter what the masses say! Now go! Let this city witness your majesty!”
The door behind the commander lowers open, and suddenly the Paladins’ loose hair is whipped around in the downdraft as the helicopter descends towards the streets of the city below. As one, the Paladins stand and sprint for the exit, leaping out into the open air before catching the ropes stretching down from the rear of the helicopter and descending towards the packed streets of the city below.
path\to\AZTFranchiseHub\StufferShack\NAN\SalishShidheCouncil\Stuffer_Shack_ExpressSSC142\Facilities\Security\Camera03\20670127_0625
The CCTV camera looks over the gas station parking lot, a plain concrete rectangle lit by wide floodlights that illuminate the edge of the deep forest that presses up against the borders of the man-made environment.
There are only two vehicles at the pumps – a family sedan laden down with suitcases and a utilitarian pick-up truck with sides coated in dried mud. As the sedan leaves the lot, another vehicle pulls in from the freeway.
It’s an immense truck, with eighteen wheels and solid metal sides on the trailer, bearing the logo of Maersk Overland Haulage. As it rumbles to a stop, the driver – an Amerindian ork – clambers out of the cab and lights up a cigarette, leaning against the vehicle as he watches the driver of the pick-up – another Native American, albeit a human – saunter out of the gas station with a small carrier bag of shopping in one hand and the keys to his truck in the other.
Once the truck has driven off, the ork tosses his cigarette, clenches his hand into a fist and hammers it twice against the side of his trailer. Moment later, a slight figure crawls out from underneath the vehicle, grabbing onto one of the wheels for support as she pulls herself to her feet.
Dressed in expensive yet ruined clothes, Lisa looks every part the desperate fugitive except for the wide smile on her lips as she takes in her surroundings. After a moment, however, the chill catches up with her and she shivers in the cold morning air.
The driver notices, turning back to reach up into his cab. The motion reveals his left arm, and the camera’s resolution is just detailed enough to pick up the tattoo of a snake winding down his arm, its head resting on the back of his hand.
When his hand emerges from the cabin, it’s clutching a bundled-up leather trenchcoat, which he offers to Lisa. She tries to refuse at first but quickly demurs after another bout of shivering, wrapping herself in the coat that falls almost to her ankles.
The ork looks at her before nodding, and the pair exchange a few more words as he points to somewhere out of the camera’s view. Lisa nods, and something in her posture seems to firm up as she starts walking across the lot, leaving the gas station behind.
The ork watches her go for a few moments before clambering up into his truck and pulling back onto the open road.
path\to\PetrovskiSecurityNet\Archive\OfficialSensitive\NorthAmerica\IncidentReports\HanoverHillsMunicipalScrapyard\MCTNissanRotoDrone06\20670406_0324
The drone hovers over a scrapyard on the outskirts of the Pittsburgh sprawl, pinpoint GPS data being packaged into the live feed it’s constantly relaying back to the local security hub. Its target recognition systems are constantly sending data along that link as well, relying on distant software to make the judgement on whether a suspicious shape is a person, a pile of scrap or a discarded humanoid robot.
It passes over a hill of abandoned consumer electronics, scrap metal and other valuable detritus that might one day find value in recycling, but that for now is simply dumped and monitored for a nominal fee.
As the drone crests the hill, the target recognition system immediately latches onto a suspicious shape clambering up the slope. Two point four seconds later, the Identify Friend/Foe software transmits a return package, and the safety catch on the drones integrated rifle disengages.
Its target is Rachel, her body seemingly free from any cyberwear but still gaunt and unhealthy. Her clothes are a mix of tattered hand-me-downs and hard-wearing leathers, all filthy and grease-stained. She's accompanied by a simplistic and seemingly handmade drone that's little more than a large crate on four articulated legs, but that is easily able to keep pace with its owner.
The moment Rachel hears the drone is obvious from the way her head frantically darts around before looking up, her human eyes widening in shock as the barrel of the gun drops to point directly at her. She dives behind her own drone as the first burst is fired, rifles ripping through the fruits of her labour and utterly crippling her crawler.
Rachel stands up, a pistol in her hand, and fires off two shots that fail to hit the drone. It retaliates with pin-point accuracy, one shot shearing through Rachel's pistol before travelling down the length of her arm, while the second lands on her torso and the third just barely misses.
Rachel drops to the ground, and the drone hovers for thirty seconds as she lies still before transmitting the footage of the incident to the central database and marking the location for corpse disposal.
path\to\WinSchNet\Staff_Only\Admin\CCTV\Archive\Camera_06_20670406_1304
The halls of Winslow High School are packed full of students making their way out of the classrooms, all heading in the same direction towards the school’s cafeteria. The camera swivels on its axis, tracking three girls in particular; two human – one red-headed and with a careful elegance to her mannerisms, the other a brunette with an easy-going smile on her face – and one dark-skinned elf with a natural confidence and defined musculature on her arms.
The camera follows them as they walk down the corridor, the redhead eagerly showing something on her phone to the other two. As they pass a particular door, the camera stops moving and begins to slowly return to its set pattern, but it’s just slow enough to catch Taylor as she leaves the empty classroom she had been hiding in, her eyes darting up to the camera before she turns to make her way down the corridor, going against the flow of foot traffic and away from the direction the three girls took.
path\to\GMNissanDoberman\Drivers\CorruptedData\IrrecoverableFile
The drone’s optics are filled from end to end with the surface of a grease-stained tanktop stretched over a pudgy belly. The guy in that tanktop is muttering to himself as he leans over the drone, and faint mechanical sounds can be heard as he messes around with its systems, each patched or broken subroutine captured in the mangled stream of data that makes up the file.
The mechanic steps back, looking down at the drone. He’s in his early thirties; a balding human with greasy skin, his eyes and arms obviously cybernetic. The room is every bit as tired and grease-stained as he is – part mechanic’s shop, part operating theatre with drone components and scrap cyberware stored haphazardly on shelves around an operating table.
Whatever he’s about to do next, he doesn’t get the chance as a door behind him slams open and a truly immense troll ducks into the ripperdoc’s shack, followed shortly thereafter by Rachel.
She’s frighteningly pale – almost bone white – with her left arm holding a dressing against her right, while her clothes are almost soaked through with blood. The troll is similarly unhealthy in complexion, and he’s even fatter than the ripperdoc. He’s heavily modified, with cybernetic eyes and metal poking through his skin.
“Got another one for you,” the troll said, his voice low, rumbling and only made more so by its artificial nature. “Usual mods, and on my dime.” He turns to look back at Rachel, who’s swaying on her feet. “‘Aint that generous of me, pup?”
“Sure, Werewolf,” she manages to stammer out. “I get it. You patch me up, I join your crew. It’s fair.”
“‘Fair,’” the troll repeats the word, chuckling to himself. “Wouldn’t kill you to show a little gratitude, you frigid bitch. A ‘thank you, mister Werewolf, for not letting me die on some fucking scrapheap,’ even.”
Rachel just stares at him, her grip on her left arm tightening, before Werewolf shrugs his shoulders and turns to leave.
“Make something useful out of her, doc,” he says, pausing at the entrance. “Always need more meat for the grinder.”
“Yeah, sure,” the doc nods, turning to Rachel as the door to the shack swings shut. “Alright, on the table.”
Rachel gingerly shifts herself onto the operating table, wincing at every movement, while the doc rummages around in the shelves before returning with an inhaler, a circular saw and a strip of leather.
“Take a hit of this,” he says, bringing the inhaler up to Rachel’s lips. “It’s good shit. Not the best on the market, but I’m not made of fucking money.”
He tosses the inhaler aside, nudging the leather strip into Rachel’s mouth as she goes slack.
“And that’s ‘cos the Bliss don’t stop all the pain. Now then” – he reaches for the saw, almost overwhelming the Doberman’s audio sensors with an electric whine as he activates it – “let’s get that arm off.”
path\to\SonyEmperor\Users\Kristy\MDrive\Videos\StreamCaptures\20670230_2137
“Welcome to the Triumphal Arch, my darlings!” a young human woman exclaims in French, her tone a picture of deliberate enthusiasm as she emotes towards the camera. “The most incredible club in all Montreal! It might not be the most exclusive in the city, but who wants some stuffed-shirt drinking parlour anyway? So, who wants a taste of the high life?”
She’s dressed in a daring minidress with electrochromatic sequins that pulse in time with the lights of the club itself. Her hair is worn in a vibrant fauxhawk that starts bright red at the scalp before transitioning through orange into yellow.
“Aww, don’t worry,” she says, apparently to someone in her chat, “I’m sure if you keep at it, you can make it here someday. But even if you can’t, then you can still see it with me right now! In fact, I think I’m going to see the drinks menu. Any suggestions, chat?”
She flicks a button on her commlink and switches to the camera on the back of the commlink, panning it over the bustling bar before continuing in a panorama of the whole club. True to its name, the Triumphal Arc is built into a bridge that spans across a chasm of megablocks – a slice of opulence suspended amongst the urban sprawl.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” Alec asks from off camera, his voice recognisable even in another language.
“Maybe!” Kristy replies gleefully, flicking the camera back around to show her beaming smile to the world. “My streams are pretty popular!”
“No, that’s not it. You’re Nora Valiquette, aren’t you?” he continues in the same good-natured turn, even as the smile falls from Kristy’s face. “Daughter of Councillor Jaques Valiquette, right? I mean, you’ve changed your hair and your eye colour, but did you think no-one would recognise your face?”
The camera drops as Kristy lowers her arm to her side, the movement stiffer than it had been before.
“Why are you crying?” Alec asks. “You let your viewers choose what colour you dye your hair in the morning, what you wear to the club, even what you eat and drink. You’re already a puppet on strings, the only difference is now there’s one hand pulling them. Not hundreds.”
Kristy – or Nora – begins walking, the club visible in brief snapshots as her legs move in and out of the camera’s field of view. She leaves the club and steps onto an expansive and clearly upper-class avenue that seemingly runs along the length of the building; an elevated street separated by thirty floors from the sprawl below and from the biting cold by a great glass roof.
She steps into a utility elevator, watched over by an attractive-looking elf in discreet workmen’s coveralls.
“Part of me wonders why you do it,” Alec muses as the elevator descends. “It’s not much of a rebellion if your father knows what you’re doing, but we had to take out the bodyguard who’s always following you from a discreet distance. Don’t worry, I know you can’t talk right now. And I’m not really interested in what a songbird does to pretty up its cage.”
The lift descends for another sixty seconds before stopping on what must be the bottom floor of the megablock.
“Oh right,” Alec says. “You won’t be needing this anymore.”
With a flick of her wrist the commlink is tossed aside, and the camera pans briefly over two more women waiting besides a van in an underground car park, before landing camera-down on the floor of the elevator.
path\to\megsdiner\data\camera\archive\20670318_1604
The camera is focused on the till of a fairly busy diner, with most of the customers being teenage kids who clearly just got out of school. Behind the till, a dwarf is perched up on a stool as he takes the orders of a group of kids wearing faux-imitations of Yakuza colours, each of them making the cashier’s life difficult without ever quite going far enough for the employee to hit the panic button nestled into the side of the countertop.
Past tables full of rowdy students, a single booth is a bastion of quiet calm in comparison. Brian looks much more confident in himself; a little older, maybe wiser, and with a kind of natural presence that has even the wannabee gang kids steering clear of his table. He’s wearing a heavy black jacket with armoured inserts and a new cybernetic poking out of the sleeve.
Sitting opposite him, with her back to the camera, is a young woman with a purple streak in her hair and her arms spread wide over the back of the seat. She’s wearing a strapless top, and the skin of her long neck is the same shade as Brian’s.
The pair are deep in conversation, but it’s clear Brian’s doing the lion’s share of the talking. At times, the woman turns her head slightly to look out of the window, at others Brian falls silent as she snaps back a retort.
There’s no sound with the footage, but the change from a conversation to an argument is clear to see in the growing exasperation on Brian’s face. At times, his hand clenches in an automatic response – one he deliberately suppresses each time he notices it happening.
Things deteriorate even further, and some of the diner’s other customers occasionally sneak glances at the pair as their argument gets louder, until the young woman slams her fists against the table and stands up, storming past Brian on her way to the exit.
One of the teenagers spends a little too long looking at her legs – clad in ripped denim shorts and neon green fishnets – only for her to respond by grabbing a knife off the table and bringing it up to his throat in an almost unnaturally rapid movement.
As the kid’s eyes almost bug out of his skull, she tosses the knife aside and saunters out of the diner. For a moment, it looks like Brian’s about to follow her, but he just sighs and looks down at his hands.
path\to\UCASGrid\Hosts\StudentRoom\Restricted\UserData\Bug\History\14_04_2067
»Subject: Help Wanted. Having a lot of trouble with Modern Lit. Does anyone have any notes they can share on Splintered Stars?«
- AnnaBannana (12:45:03/14-7-68)
User replied (32) times
User posted »Subject: Help Wanted. Does anyone have any revision guides for Computer Science they’d be willing to share?« at (14:05:36/14-4-2067)
User replied (8) times
»Subject: Discussion. How are schools supposed to stop Technomancers from cheating on exams?«
- Revolutionary76 (13:15:53/14-4-2067)
User replied (2) times
»Subject: Discussion. Sometimes I feel like my school just doesn’t care about what’s going on outside the classroom.«
- Dragonb0rn (15:45:26/14-4-2067)
»Subject: No Subject. HELP I COLLAPSED AND NOW IM ONLINE« (Thread locked by AutoMod & referred to UCASgrid DemiGOD)
- DylanPalmer (16:12:48/14-4-2067)
»Subject: Discussion. Does anyone else have no idea what they’re going to do after high school/college?«
- CircusFreak (17:45:28/14-4-2067)
User replied (4) times
path\to\wolfpack\leashsystems\bitch\eyespy\20670804_2342
Rachel is waiting on one knee behind a stout tree, methodically cleaning the working parts of a Browning Max-Power heavy pistol. The footage suddenly shifts as she uses the low-spec night vision function of her one cybernetic eye to check she hasn’t missed anything, before she repeats the same motions on the Doberman drone resting next to her, its tracks still covered in the mud and compacted pine needles of the forest floor.
As her gaze shifts to the drone, it briefly passes over dozens of other figures hiding in the shadows, looking down on a busy freeway that snakes through the forested valley. Each one of them is dressed in ragged clothes, their only armour scavenged vests or simple scrap metal and chains. Like Rachel, each one of them has at least one cybernetic limb, and most have two or more. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to the augmentations; some have an arm and a leg, some two cybernetic arms, some have obvious subdermal armour warping the shape of their skin.
None of them are bothering to check their gear. Instead they’re gathered together in smaller gangs within the gang, chatting to each other in hushed whispers while the runts of the litter are the ones to actually keep watch on the freeway. Rachel isn’t part of any of those groups – in fact most of them seem to be deliberately avoiding her.
The conversation falls off, however, as Werewolf lumbers into view. Rachel spares her boss a brief look before loading a belt of ammo into the Doberman’s mounted gun and having the drone rack the slide back.
She looks up again as Werewolf passes her, but he doesn’t seem to have eyes for any of his subordinates. Instead his gaze is solely fixed on the freeway, and he leans nonchalantly on a tree as he watches the traffic passing below.
“Ready!” he shouts after perhaps a minute has passed. Immediately, there’s a mad dash of activity as his soldiers scramble to their feet, cybernetic limbs tightening on poorly-maintained guns. Rachel joins them, her own pistol held in her metal hand as the drone whirrs to life.
A sudden fireball rises from the treeline below them, before a burning semi-truck rolls out of the forest and past a missing span of barriers, traversing the entire width of the freeway before slamming to a half against the barriers on the other side.
“Charge!” Werewolf shouts, his augmented voice audible even over the sudden din or car horns as the traffic on both sides of the road comes to a halt, some of them too late to avoid slamming into the burning barricade.
Caught in the jam is a convoy of six semi-trucks in matching dark grey and yellow livery, flanked by armoured personnel carriers at the front and rear of the convoy. All the vehicles have their allegiance written proudly on their flanks in bold yellow letters; Saeder-Krupp.
One of the APCs tries to turn around, only for a second burning barricade to roll out of the forest and cut them off, smashing into a family sedan that wasn’t able to make it out of the way in time.
Rachel’s cybereye lurches as she sprints through the forest, with dozens of gangers to her left and right. Some of them are already firing – wildly inaccurate shots that barely manage to get near their target – while others are solely focused on sprinting forwards as fast as they possibly can.
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
In the convoy, the APCs disgorge their cargo of corporate soldiers onto the freeway – eight of them in all, each of them covered from head to toe in milspec armour and carrying pristine assault rifles.
They fire as they move through the parked traffic, ignoring or even shoving aside their fellow travellers as they flee their immobile cars for the relative safety of the other side of the wall of slab-sided semi-trucks.
Ahead of Rachel, one of their shots manages to fell a young dwarf who’d been sprinting forwards on two cybernetic legs. Rachel herself doesn’t fire, but she does send the drone to a slight rise twelve feet away from her, where it starts laying down much more accurate fire into the soldiers.
But the weight of fire from Saeder-Krupp is too much and too accurate, and bodies start dropping like flies everywhere Rachel looks. It only gets worse as a remote-controlled rotary gun on the top of the APC turns and unleashes a withering hail of fire that cuts down two dozen gangers in a single pass.
Rachel’s run slows, then stops entirely as her drone winks out of existence thanks to a well-placed shot with a sniper rifle. Instead, she turns and flees back into the forest, accompanied by a handful of other stragglers who’ve decided the risk isn’t worth it.
One of those stragglers falls to the floor as his cybernetic leg suddenly seizes up, before his head explodes in a burst of viscera as Werewolf fires a shot from his revolver into the deserter.
“Fucking cowards!” he shouts, even as he triggers more overrides in their implants. “Get back in the fight or I’ll kill you myself!”
The feed from the camera distorts momentarily as Werewolf tries to override Rachel’s cyberware, but his own cybereyes widen in shock as she simply raises her arm and fires a shot right at his head.
“You tricky bitch!” he shouts, the skin of his forehead degloved to reveal subdermal armour coating his skull.
Rachel simply keeps firing as she sprints forward, her modifications pushing her cybernetics to the limit even as they guide each shot onto the precise point the last one hit, digging away at his faceplate until it finally splinters and he falls.
path\to\SonyA12VII\VidéosDeFamille\SCScloud\Vidéos\20670810_1456
The dining room of Alec’s family home has changed significantly. The walls and floor have been torn out and replaced at some point, keeping up with the changing fashions of the wealthy. The furniture is all different, too, and it’s been pushed to the side of the room to make space for a square plastic sheet, weighed down by two lamps, a stack of three books and a toy drone.
Alec is standing at the edge of the sheet, with his father directly opposite him. His face is a picture of indifference so perfect it’s impossible to tell whether it’s an act or not, even when a beautiful troll woman in combat gear drags a balding human in a police uniform onto the sheet, forcing him to his knees in the centre and holding him there.
Around the edges of the room stand Alec’s siblings and a number of young, attractive women – with very few familiar faces. The women are mostly ignoring the spectacle as their eyes unconsciously wander to Alec’s father, standing with his arms crossed over his bare chest as his eyes flick between Alec and the prisoner. Alec’s siblings, on the other hand, are much more varied in their expressions, with some indifferent, others taking joy in seeing Alec put on the spot while the rest just seem relieved it isn’t them on the sheet.
Alec’s father looks at the camera for a brief moment, unconsciously straightening himself up a little.
“The Gendarmerie took one of my children. They filled her head with poison and lies, weaking her loyalty. But we have paid them back for that insult, and now I must ensure that none of my other children suffer from the same mental sickness.”
He takes a half step forwards, looking across the sheet at Alec.
“Jean-Paul, do you love me?”
“Of course, father,” Alec replied with what sounds like genuine affection, but the sentiment doesn’t reach his eyes.
“That is good,” his father nods. “It’s long past time you were properly blooded; even a traitor can kill when his life is threatened, but loyalty means making sacrifices for your family.”
He walks onto the sheet, grabbing the captured officer by his hair.
“This is your sacrifice.”
With a gesture, the troll woman throws the officer to the floor as both she and Alec’s father step off the sheet. Alec wastes no time in weaving together a spell that locks the officer’s limbs, right as he was about to stand.
“You were too calm,” Alec observes to the officer as he casts another spell. “What was your plan?”
A moment later, he smiles.
“There it is.”
His motions controlled by Alec, the officer’s right arm moves stiffly to his boot, drawing a short punch-dagger a moment later. Alec drags the knife along the officer’s throat and releases his control, letting the gendarmerie bleed out onto the sheet.
He looks up at his father, but rather than showing pride or even just satisfaction the shirtless man shakes his head.
“The path of least resistance. How disappointing.”
He looks over the audience, skipping over his children as he focuses on the enthralled women.
“You,” he points at one, seemingly at random, and gestures to the corpse. “Take his place.”
Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, and with a placid expression on her face, the woman steps out of the crowd and kneels on the sheet, completely indifferent to the blood beneath her knees. She looks like she could be about eighteen; not much older than Alec himself.
“Again,” the cult’s leader says to his son. “And make it interesting this time.”
path\to\AresDuelist\Drivers\AthenaControlSystems\IFF\CameraLog\20670811_2026
The ripperdoc’s clinic hasn’t changed much since Rachel was there; the cyberware and drones scattered around the place may be different, but the overall structure is the same. The ripper himself is even wearing the same clothes, his attention occupied by a diagnostic computer wired up to the bipedal Ares-made drone as he tests its software, which appears as a rolling scroll of code down one side of the drone’s camera.
He's engrossed in his work, but he jumps up in shock as the door behind him slams open and Rachel storms in, her pistol already raised and pointed at his head.
“The fuck are you doing!?” the doc shouts, even as he levers himself up out of his seat and raises his hands above his head. “Werewolf will have your head for this.”
“Werewolf’s dead,” Rachel replies matter-of-factly. “Most of the others are dead, too. If you don’t want to join them, you’ll run.”
“Fuck!” the doc swears. “Arrogant fucking trog! Always knew it’d be the death of him. Can I at least take my shit?”
“No.”
“Well fuck you, too,” he grumbles, before hurriedly making his way out the door as Rachel moves her aim from his head to his crotch.
Once he’s out, Rachel drags over a heavy crate of spare electronics and uses it to bar the doorway, before dragging the diagnostic table over to the centre of the room and laying herself down on the table. She unspools a datajack from her neck, plugging the cable into the computer and assuming command of the Duelist drone.
The drone moves hurriedly around the store as Rachel closes her eyes, seeing things entirely through the drone’s camera as she loads a crate full of the choicest pieces of cyberware – far more than she currently has installed.
Next come medical tools, the good stuff the doc kept locked in a supply cabinet, but that didn’t hold up when tested by the drone’s mechanical strength; laser cutters, diamond-tipped rotary saws, local anaesthetic and even post-op medication to prevent any rejection issues or metal infections.
As the drone wheels her pilfered goods over to the table, Rachel’s own arms undo her belt, which she folds in half and bites down on. Then she lets herself go slack, looking down on her own body like a mechanic might look at a piece of machinery, before she picks up a local anaesthetic and injects it straight into her remaining organic shoulder.
path\to\EagleSecurityCloud\Archive\AlgonquinManitouCouncil\Regina\GridLink\CCTV\DataNotFound\C197_20671123_2213
The camera pans up and down the length of a quiet street in the middle of a large town, its irregular and halting path screaming out for maintenance. The street is mostly upmarket commercial shops that have long since shuttered for the night, and the only pedestrians are hunched-over figures forcing their way through the heavy snowfall.
The algorithm attached to the camera recognises each metahuman outline and marks it in its system, outlining them in yellow boxes flagged ‘area of interest.’ Every now and then, a pattern of snowfall will distort one of the people, or itself form a shape that could be confused for a person, and flickering yellow boxes will appear and disappear as the system struggles to keep up with the picture.
One of those forcing their way through the snow is Lisa, her blonde hair hidden by the hood of a stained grey sweatshirt and the rest of her body wrapped up in gloves, scarves and her long trenchcoat, with a well-worn backpack slung over her left shoulder. All her clothing is ragged, with many previous owners, and her heavy work boots are too big for her feet, though she’s made up the difference by stuffing them with socks.
She looks around the street nervously, quickly ducking into an alleyway between two buildings. It’s enough for the camera to change the colour of the box around her from yellow to orange.
Lisa leans against the wall of the alleyway, hunching over a little as she digs into the pockets of her trenchcoat and pulls out a handful of low-denomination credsticks. She carefully checks the small digital display showing the amount contained within each credstick, and a warm smile spreads across her face before she moves further back into the alleyway.
When Lisa grabs the side of a large dumpster and wheels it over to block off part of the alleyway, the box around her flashes red for a brief moment with the annotation changing to ‘suspected vagrancy’ before a burst of heavy snowfall breaks up the image and partially obscures Lisa from view as she takes a piece of tarpaulin out of her rucksack and uses it to add a roof to her makeshift shelter.
She peers out into the alleyway one last time before curling up on the ground with her rucksack as a pillow, bringing her hands up to her face and twisting her fingers in a complicated motion that appears on the screen as a slight glitch. That seems to settle her shivering, and she reaches up to pull down the tarpaulin over the entrance to her den, obscuring her from the camera’s view.
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20680124_1553
The camera is mounted at the end of the same corridor Taylor’s apartment is on, looking down the length of the wing of the apartment block towards the elevator at the opposite end of the hall.
A woman is walking towards the lift with her purse clutched tightly in her left hand, wearing the uniform of a nearby diner underneath a thick winter coat. Her right hand holds her commlink, and she occupies herself by scrolling through it while waiting for the elevator to arrive.
When the doors open, the woman looks up and flinches at the sight of two uniformed Knight Errant officers, dressed in full gear like they’ve just been pulled off the street. She hurriedly steps aside to let the officers pass before entering the elevator and hitting the button with more than a little urgency.
The officers – a troll and a human – walk down the length of the corridor, their heads tilted towards each other in silent conversation made doubly so by the camera’s lack of any microphone.
About halfway down the hall they reach a consensus and take their helmets off, holding them in the crook of their left arms as they stop outside the door to Taylor’s apartment.
The pair school their expressions before the troll knocks, waiting for about a minute until the door cracks open – still on the latch. There’s a lengthy and largely one-sided conversation, with the Knight Errant officers doing the lion’s share of the talking, before they turn and head back down the corridor towards the elevator.
A few moments later, the door of Taylor’s apartment slowly swings shut, and the footage ends.
path\to\SKLuchs540\Users\grue\Logs\Camera\AutoDeleted\20680308_1121
Brian is staring intently at his hand, inspecting the RealSkin coating on his right arm. Parts of it are already frayed and pockmarked, and the knuckle of his index finger is worn down to the metal beneath, but he seems unconcerned by the cosmetic damage.
He’s standing in a steadily-climbing elevator, the walls daubed with random graffiti, an AR number over the door displaying a painfully slow speed as it rises up past the twentieth floor.
Once it reaches the twenty-third, Brian’s left arm comes into view – itself also covered in RealSkin – as does the assault rifle held in its grip. He wraps his right hand around the trigger and shoulders the weapon, watching as the number above the door slowly ticks up.
Twenty four; twenty five; twenty six.
The lift chimes on the twenty-seventh floor and Brian steps to the left as the door slides open, keeping as much of the metal between him and the corridor for as long as he can. Not that it makes a difference; the corridor in front of him is empty except for the glittering letters and numbers above each apartment door, identifying who’s paid their rent, who’s due and one eviction notice in vivid red letters.
Brian edges carefully along the corridor, watching each door for signs of movement as he passes them. Most of his attention, however, is focused on the sixth door down on the right, with a green smiley face and ‘Rent Paid’ emblazoned above it.
Brian doesn’t stop at the door, instead pausing a few feet before it. He keeps his grip on the rifle with his right hand, but brings his left up to knock on the wall, tapping out a rhythm until the sound echoes slightly – the tell-tale sign of a cosmetic, rather than load-bearing wall.
His left hand reaches into his jacket, coming back with a rectangular shaped charge about the size of a tablet, which Brian affixes to the wall and arms. He steps back from the wall – muttering a countdown to himself – and grabs a cylindrical grenade from his belt, pulling the pin out with his thumb.
The moment the charge detonates, Brian flings the grenade into the room, waiting for it to detonate in a flash of light and a cloud of billowing smoke before storming in after it.
The whole image lurches for a moment as Brian switches on his thermals, before the room becomes clearly visible as a web of heat maps, with staggering white shapes struggling for breath in the smoke, most of them reaching for one weapon or another.
Brian doesn’t give them the chance, bringing his rifle up and gunning down two of the incandescent blobs in a single burst of fire, before turning and dropping to one knee as one of the targets – quicker on the draw than most – fires a roughly chest-high burst through the thick smoke.
Brian’s return fire is much more accurate, dropping the gunman and the other two figures in the apartment – who had been right next to the wall and the grenade when both exploded, and were in the process of picking themselves up off the floor.
Scanning the room for any more signs of movement, Brian moves across to a door on the far end of the apartment, opening it up to reveal a small room filled with chemical stills and manned by a man and a woman, both stick-thin and wearing only their underwear.
From the state of the table in front of them, it looks like they were in the middle of decanting a coarse white powder into partially wrapped packets when the bomb went off, so the table is now coated in a fine layer of dust.
Both of the drug lab workers cringe back at the sight of Brian, frantically pleading with their hands in the air.
Brian seems to consider it for a moment, before sighing and gesturing with his left thumb over his shoulder.
“You’re lucky I’m just here to send a warning,” he says as they scamper past him, frantically grabbing their clothes but not waiting to put them on before booking it out the door.
Brian pays them no mind, instead drawing another cylindrical grenade from his belt – this one yellow, and marked with a red flame in a warning triangle.
He steps back almost to the other side of the apartment, lobs the grenade into the room with an underarm throw and watches the fireball go up before turning and sprinting back out through the hole in the wall.
path\to\ErikaElite\Utilisateurs\CoquetterieCherie\Videos\Camera\Accessories\20680502_1948
The skatepark juts off the side of an immense residential megabuilding, looking over the same Montreal skyline as Alec’s family penthouse does but from much further down the building. Alec himself is just about visible on the other side of the park, disinterestedly looking out over the city.
The person who owns the commlink – Cherie, if her username is any indication – is more interested in recording the skaters with the camera mounted into her sunglasses, even as she talks to a young man sitting next to her.
“So what’s the problem? Because I haven’t been hearing good things.”
“We’ve still got most of the tower locked up tighter than a dragon’s hoard, but some guys from Block 13 set up shop on the twelfth floor the other day. Wiped out the crew that got sent to deal with them, but it should be manageable with some help. Don’t worry.”
“Why would I worry?” Cherie asks, flirtatiously. “A big man like you, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble driving them out.”
“I…” the young man begins, hesitantly, “I was hoping you would be able to send some people from the top of the tower. They’re well-armed.”
“Marcus…” Cherie leans against him, resting her hand on his thigh and looking up at the ganger for the first time. He’s an attractive-looking ork in his late teens, with a tattoo of a photorealistic heart made visible by the neckline of his tanktop.
“I sent myself,” Cherie continues, “and now I’m sending you. Heartbreaker has… bigger concerns,” she says, with a hesitation that goes unnoticed by her companion.
In fact, Marcus’ eyes have wandered from the girl leaning against him to focus on another; a human girl performing an impressive trick on a skateboard, egged on by a small group of her friends and fellow gang members. She notices Marcus looking, and flashes the ork a wide smile.
Cherie just leans in closer, subtly reaching out a hand towards the girl and clenching it shut.
The image momentarily distorts before the girl slips at the worst possible moment and falls back off her board, the back of her head hitting the ground first.
The crowd rushes around her, and Marcus makes to join them only to be held back by Cherie’s hand on his arm.
“That looks like it hurt her,” Marcus says.
“I thought it looked hilarious, don’t you think?” Cherie counters, moving her fingers again.
Marcus chuckles, once, before descending into an unrestrained laugh that draws angry glares from the friends of the injured girl.
Cherie leans in to wrap her arms around his shoulder, only to abruptly stop and stand up, frantically looking around the skate park.
“Jean-Paul…” she mutters, angrily. Sure enough, Alec is nowhere to be seen. “You fucking idiot… Marcus!” she snaps. “You and your boys have to look for my dipshit brother; forget the Block 13 crew for now.”
Marcus stops laughing immediately, springing to his feet as he takes out his commlink and begins frantically sending out messages.
path\to\LeviathanTechnicalLT2100\Users\AiyaOka\Videos\20680603_0032
“I think you’ve had enough,” a burly troll bouncer says to the camerawoman as she and her five friends are ushered out of a club and onto the well-lit street of an upmarket sprawl district.
“I’m totally sober,” the camerawoman – Aiya Oka – slurs. “Hardly touched a drop. But my friends? They are very drunk, yes.”
“That they are,” the bouncer nods. “Which is why it’s good that you’re here to look after them, right?”
“You’re right!” Aiya exclaims. “That’s a very good point, mister…” she turns, but the bouncer has already stepped back into the club. “Huh. Rude.”
“Heey, Aiya-chan,” one of her friends – a very drunk, very white elf – says as he sways for a moment. “What should we do now?”
“I dunno,” Aiya replies, looking over her friends. “I guess we find somewhere else?”
“I don’t know if I can make it somewhere else,” another of Aya’s friends says, her hands on her knees as she stares down at the ground.
“Oh you’ll be fine,” the elf comforts her, helping her back up. “Just need to get your head back in the game, Tori!”
“Not a bar, though?” Aya asks, glancing back at the one they’ve just left. “I don’t think they liked us dancing in there.”
“Hey there!” a voice pipes up from behind them. “You’re new in town, right?”
Aya turns around, tottering for a moment on her heels, only to find herself face to face with Lisa, who’s almost unrecognisable from the way she was before.
The trenchcoat is nowhere to be seen; in fact her clothes look both new and completely impractical – a purple minidress and high heels, accessorised with a coiled snake on a pendant.
“That’s right!” the elven man smiles, stepping forwards. “We’re all in the same student halls!”
“Wow, really?” Lisa asks, hamming it up a little. “I’m a third year medicine student!”
“Ooh!” Aya exclaims! “I bet you know all the best places!”
Lisa smiles, her grin entirely predatory – not that the students were sober enough to know the distance.
“Of course! Only the best places in all Minneapolis! In fact,” she moves closer to the group, lowering my voice, “I was on my way to a place that’s pretty exclusive. Like, secret exclusive.”
“You have to take us there!” Aya exclaims, grabbing Lisa’s shoulders. “Please!”
Lisa chuckles, but she’s unable to hide the slight discomforted expression that crosses her face before she brushes away Aya’s hands.
“Sure, but you have to keep it a secret, okay? It’s one of those basement clubs that doesn’t like to advertise.”
Aya nods, seriously, and Lisa watches as her friends do the same before leading them through the streets of the city.
She turns off the main drag into an alleyway, assuring her marks that it’s a really good shortcut only to suddenly cast a spell that almost whites out the camera in Aya’s decorative glasses, before she and her friends lethargically slump over onto the ground.
Lisa looks down on the stunned freshmen and stars rummaging through their pockets, taking their credsticks and obviously commercial jewellery but leaving the more meaningful-looking pieces, commlinks and everything else they had on them.
From where Aya slumped over, the camera in her AR glasses is just able to catch sight of Lisa as she ducks behind a dumpster, emerging a minute later with her trenchcoat worn open over comfortable, well-fitting clothes and sneakers, with her loot and heels in a backpack and the dress in a carefully-folded carrier.
path\to\VisionCrafterArgusM9\Users\Albin_StAmand\Logs\Camera\AutoDeleted\20680724_2047
Albin St Amand is a wiry man with thin fingers steepled in front of him as he sits at his desk – an ornate affair with a green baize top and what looks to be real wood polished to a high sheen. His office is a similar example of old-world opulence, with wooden panels and photorealistic portraits covering the walls, and a glittering chandelier overhead.
Alec is slouched over in an armchair in the corner of the room, dressed in surprisingly well-maintained clothes in the opulent, neo-Bourbon style popular among Quebecois high society. He doesn’t move as the door to the office opens and a mismatched group of figures stride in, all of them wearing expensive-looking suits and carrying an air of professionalism that immediately marks them out as Shadowrunners and St Amand as a Fixer.
The team consists of three humans and a dwarf, with three of the four being men, and their eyes linger on Alec for a moment before returning to their fixer.
“St Amand. You said you had something for us?” the group’s face – a human woman – asks.
“Indeed I do,” the fixer said, nodding towards Regent. “Meet Mr Dupont. He is going to pay you to smuggle him into the United Canadian and American States.”
“Nothing we haven’t dealt with before,” the woman shrugs, before turning to Alec. “One rule, though. You might be footing the bill for this, but until we’re across the border you do what we say when we tell you to do it. There’s no point hiring professionals if you just ignore what they say.”
Alec simply shrugs his shoulders. “So long as I get out of the country, I don’t care.”
path\to\BrocktonBayMunicipalGrid\Hosts\BayWatch\Restricted\UserData\Bug\History\14_08_2068
»Subject: Tech Support. Need someone to lift the locks on some trideo files I bought at the market.«
- Chr0mehead (15:31:14/14-7-68)
User replied (3) times
»Subject: Tech Support. Can someone track my wife so my lawyer can serve divorce papers?«
- Throwaway12332 (15:56:26/14-7-68)
User replied (2) times
»Subject: Tech Support. nuyen reward for the location of card cheating bastard slugger williams«
- DonFuckWithMe (16:46:49/14-7-68)
»Subject: Tech Support. Opening a new restaurant with a physical and digital presence and looking for a skilled programmer to decorate its Host.«
- Rory2042 {17:02:36/15-7-68)
User replied (7) times
»Subject: Media General. Under the Dragon’s Wing, by Zoh Rothberg, review and general discussion thread.«
- NetBunny (18:56:12/15-7-68)
User replied (32) times
path\to\SKLuchs540\Users\grue\Logs\Camera\AutoDeleted\20680823_1459
Brian unloads a chest of drawers from the trunk of his Ford Americar, holding the heavy piece of furniture one-handed for a moment as he closes and locks the trunk.
He carries the chest across the packed expanse of an underground car park, full of mid to low range vehicles with a few more expensive models visible behind metal gates in secure parking spaces close to the elevator.
There’s a woman waiting at the elevator, a middle-aged dwarf with two plastic carrier bags full of groceries in one hand. Brian waits beside her until the doors open, when she gestures for him to enter the elevator first.
“What floor?” she asks, having already thumbed the button for the ninth.
“Seventeenth, thanks,” Brian replies.
“No trouble,” the woman shrugs, and the pair of them spend the journey up in comfortable silence until the woman disembarks on the ninth floor. When the elevator reaches the seventeenth floor, Brian steps out into a corridor that might not be perfectly clean, but it’s free from graffiti and all the lights are working.
His apartment door – number 1765 – slides open as Brian triggers the lock remotely. His apartment is obviously freshly-bought, with sparse furniture and a few boxes of unassembled pieces scattered around the place. It’s narrow – pressed right up against the side of the tower block – but that means it has actual windows letting in natural sunlight.
Brian passes a room that’s clearly his bedroom – with rumpled deep blue sheets on a double bed – and brings the chest of drawers into a smaller room at the back of the apartment; the kind of room that’s only really good as an office or spare bedroom.
Brian has chosen to make it the latter, with a partially assembled single bed running almost along the length of one wall. Brian sets the chest of drawers down opposite the bed, taking a moment to look over the room before nodding and heading back to the kitchenette attached to the main room.
He pulls a cold beer out of the fridge and uses his thumb to flip the bottlecap off, taking a sip before wandering towards a door in the wall, right next to the window.
The balcony is small, but from it Brian has a commanding view of the next building over and when he cranes his head to the right he can see down the entire length of the block. More importantly, the angle of the afternoon sun is just enough to bathe the whole balcony in golden light.
Brian takes a seat on a worn garden chair, drinking deep from his bottle and leaning back with a contented sigh.
path\to\GMNissanDoberman\Drivers\hunterkiller\targetrecog\CameraLog\20680829_0715
The back of Rachel’s van lacks any seating whatsoever. Instead the space is taken up by drones in varying states of disassembly, racks of tools on the walls and a diagnostic table by the rear doors on which the Doberman is resting while Rachel leans over it, fiddling around in its innards.
Her grease-stained tanktop shows off her obviously cybernetic arms, along with seams of metal running down her sternum marking out the insert points for subdermal armour or the access port for a cardiovascular implant. The cluster of lifeless optic lenses that have replaced her one organic and one cybernetic eye twist slightly as she zooms in and out, while her hair has been roughly cut short. Her face briefly lights up as she applies minute spot-welds to the drone’s innards.
Past Rachel, the other drones and all the other flotsam and jetsam of what looks like an entire workshop packed up into a single van, streetlights flick past the windshield at regular intervals as the van’s own drone software navigates its way through the morning traffic.
Rachel pays the road no mind as she stands up and steps over a deactivated Aztechnology Crawler as she retrieves a long-barrelled light machine gun from a case and carefully buckles it onto the back of the drone, linking the gun’s software to the drone’s main drivers.
She steps back as far as she can, reaching over the passenger seat to grab a tennis ball that she waves in front of the drone, watching its target recognition software as it tracks the movements of the ball to make sure there aren’t any errors.
Once she’s satisfied, she tosses the tennis ball back over the seat, switches on the Crawler and takes a clear plastic case of miniature screwdrivers and wrenches off the wall, before shutting down the Doberman.
path\to\StrangersRestMotel\Facilities\CCTV\Archive\Lobby_01\20680902_2314
The camera is looking down on the reception of a small motel, quiet except for a bored elven woman sitting behind the front desk, her head buried in her commlink. She looks up as the door chimes open, setting the commlink down as Lisa walks in and up to the front desk.
Lisa is looking a lot more confident, her clothes a mix of practical slacks, a button-up shirt and layered shamanistic necklaces, all worn beneath her trenchcoat. Her backpack is new as well – larger and a lot more rugged than the one she had before – and she’s trailing a suitcase behind her.
“How much for a room?” she asks the receptionist.
“Single room, right?” the receptionist asks as she flicks through an AR desktop.
“I’m not one for company,” Lisa answers, with a faint smile on her face.
“Uh huh,” the receptionist replies, noncommittedly. “A hundred nuyen gets you twenty-four hours.”
“I’m not going to need that long,” Lisa says, leaning against the desk. “I’m leaving town in the morning.”
“Sorry,” the receptionist shrugs her shoulders. “It’s a hundred for a full day or twenty per hour.”
“That’s a hefty mark-up,” Lisa remarks.
“If people are going to use us as a brothel, the least we can do is profit from it,” the receptionist replies, bluntly.
“Hah!” Lisa laughs. “Alright then, I’ll pay your hundred. Just get me a room as far from those entrepreneurial men and woman as possible.”
“Sure thing,” the receptionist says as she makes a selection on her screen. “Just slot in your credstick.”
As Lisa pays for her room, her eyes drift to the wall of flyers behind the receptionist.
“Hey, is that a bus schedule?”
“Yeah,” the receptionist nods, reaching behind her and placing both the flyer and the room key on the desk. “Someone from Greyhound came by with a bunch of them, I guess maybe as free advertising. Going anywhere in particular?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Lisa answers. “Somewhere interesting, that’s for sure.”
path\to\BrocktonBayMunicipalGrid\Hosts\BayWatch\Restricted\UserData\Bug\History\24_12_2068
»Subject: Tech Support. Bought a second-hand TV, but it’s broken. Looking for someone to remove the anti-theft measures.«
- Wi1dcat (14:12:05/24-12-68)
User replied (1) times
»Subject: Tech Support. The power in my building has gone out, and the emergency engineer said it’s a problem with the Matrix, not the electrics, and that they can’t get someone out until the 28th. Can someone have a look at it? I have tenants without heating.«
- DMarshall (13:32:58/24-12-68)
User replied (6) times
»Subject: Tech Support. A matrix gang has vandalised my shop’s Host. Need someone to come and clean it up.«
- Frank006 (16:15:27/24-12-68)
User replied (13) times
»Subject: Discussion. Is anyone else spending the holidays alone?«
- WannabeeRazorGirl (18:52:46/24-12-68)
»Subject: Discussion. URGENT My computer has just been hacked and I don’t have a security package. I need someone to make sure it’s clean so I can keep my till open.«
- BellasBodega (19:01:13/24-12-68)
User replied (9) times
»Subject: General. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.«
- HugoRune (23:59:58/24-12-68)
path\to\AegisHomeSecurity\CCTV\Camera_03\20681229_2354
The screen door of the bank shatters inwards as the shaped charge detonates, slicing apart the couch of the open-plan luxury apartment before the camera’s screen whites out as a grenade detonates right in the middle of the room, filling it with light, noise and billowing smoke.
Lisa, fully clothed and with her hand deep in the open jewellery box of the woman unconscious on the floor besides her, freezes in shock as Brian storms into the apartment, his pistol drawn but pointed at the floor.
Brian falters as he catches sight of Lisa before striding across the room towards her, causing Lisa to scramble to put the bed between her and the imposing, balaclava-wearing intruder, only for Brian to keep one eye on her while he makes straight for the jewellery box.
Brian fishes around in the box with his left hand, before muttering a quiet “fuck it” under his breath and simply taking the whole box with him as he sprints back out the window.
Next to Lisa, the owner of the house starts to stir from magical unconsciousness. Lisa looks between her and the spot where the jewellery box was, a stunned expression on her face.
“Fuck!” she shouts, before jogging over to the door of the apartment.
path\to\SKLuchs540\Users\grue\Logs\Camera\AutoDeleted\20690114_1742
Brian drives his fingers into the doorframe, warping the metal before forcing the door open with the sheer strength of his cybernetic limbs. Immediately, he lets go of the door and grabs his rifle from where it’s slung on his back, shouldering it and flickering on the torch attached to the end of his rifle – a strange-looking weapon without a visible magazine.
“Clear so far,” he says as he steps into the derelict room, kicking up dust.
“Looks that way,” Lisa says as she steps in front of him, a scarf wrapped around the bottom half of her face to protect her from the dust. “But look at this,” she points to a part of the floor that’s entirely free from dust, as if something has been dragged through it. “Our boy’s definitely been through here.”
“How did it get here, anyway?” Brian asks.
“Could’ve escaped from a truck on the interstate, I guess,” Lisa says, “or a lab somewhere. Or maybe someone in this city just has a really fucked-up zoo and it broke out from there. Then someone else comes and hires me to get it for their own lab, truck or fucked-up zoo, I bring you on to help and the circle of life loops back on itself.”
“Okay,” Brian says. “Let’s take this carefully; it probably heard our entrance. Stick behind me, like we discussed.”
“Believe me, I plan to,” Lisa says. “Just be careful about looking at it, okay?”
“You said my cyberyeyes would make me immune,” Brian observes, his grip on his rifle tightening.
“I said they’d probably make you immune,” Lisa retorts. “I know what I’m doing, but I’ve never hunted a basilisk before. We just do this as quick as possible, and we’ll probably be fine.”
“I’ve met lots of people who’d say things like ‘it’ll probably be fine,’” Brian says as they edged down a set of stairs, “or that they’d ‘hope for the best,’ or ‘just wing it.’ Most of them are dead now.”
“Except we’re not just winging it,” Lisa counters. “We’ve got the tranquilizer rifle, the building plans, and I’ve been practicing my stunbolts for a week now. Partial information isn’t the same as no information at all.”
“Sure,” Brian shrugs, before holding up his left arm and whispering. “Keep it quiet, I think I hear it.”
He creeps up the corridor, almost pressing himself against the wall as he takes up position past a doorway. He turns to see Lisa waiting on the other side. She holds up three fingers, then two, then one.
Brian drives his elbow into the door, knocking it open before lobbing a flashbang through. This time there is no smoke to accompany the flash, and Brian and Lisa both rush into the room at the same time.
At the far end of the nest – the floor strewn with discarded bones and half eaten chunks of viscera – a two and a half meter long lizard is hissing in pain, its beady eyes looking around blindly as it overcomes the effects of the grenade.
Brian fires three tranquilizer darts into its flank, as Lisa hurls staticky stunbolts that light up the room even as they hit the beast – which rears back and roars in anger.
path\to\bitchpersonalareanetwork\sensors\optics\standardspectrum\logs\20690228
Rachel is sitting in the open doorway of her van, her feet resting on the floor of an old auto shop. Across from her, Alec is leaning against a sedan, looking at Rachel with what seems to be morbid curiosity on his face.
In-between them, a middle aged man in a suit – with a balding head and a pot belly – checks his watch and mutters to himself.
All three of them look over to the door as someone fiddles with the lock, before Brian and Lisa step through, both of them dressed like they’re ready for a job.
“Grue, Tattletale,” the man greets them with a smile, his voice bearing a faint Irish-American accent. “So glad you could make it.”
“Sorry about the delay, Mr O’Daly,” Grue apologises. “We hit some traffic on the way over.”
“Ah, think nothing of it,” their fixer shrugs his shoulders. “These things happen. But, to get down to business, let me introduce you to Bitch and Regent.”
“Bitch?” Brian asks, looking at Rachel.
“Yeah?” she snaps back.
“It’s an… unconventional name.”
“To be fair,” Lisa points out as she walks over to Rachel, holding out her hand, “so’s Grue. It’s nice to meet you.”
Rachel grunts as she shakes Lisa’s hand, and Lisa gets the hint, turning to Alec.
“So I take it you’re the mage?”
“What gave it away?” he drawls, his accent still slightly audible.
“Well,” O’Daly interjects, “I’ll leave you four to get acquainted. The building’s a bit of a fixer-upper, but I had some of the boys move a few beds up into the loft. The rest is up to you, but as safehouses go it’s not bad.”
“We’ll make it work,” Brian says, looking over the team.
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20690228_0000
The camera is staring down an empty corridor, as the seconds tick down. A young troll man staggers out of the elevator and down the corridor, resting his palm against the wall as he fumbles with his keycard.
The footage speeds up, minutes passing like seconds as the corridor’s lights darken overnight before coming back on in the morning – when a flood of people emerge from their apartments over the course of an hour as they leave for work.
Taylor’s door stays shut, as morning passes into midday before the people return from their shift in the hours after five PM. The footage speeds up more, until the whole corridor is in flux with people coming and going.
The whole corridor, except for the door to Taylor’s apartment. That only opens occasionally for delivery drivers who make their way up with bags of groceries or takeways in heat bags.
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20690315_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20690407_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20690523_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20690612_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20690716_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20690930_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20691001_0000
path\to\SamsungNebulaA9\Users\Tt\PairedDevices\ZoeAviatorsLilac\Camera\20691114_2053
“Remember, stick to the plan,” Brian’s voice comes in clear through the radio attached to Lisa’s glasses. “This place is designed to trick you.”
“And here I was hoping to strike it rich,” Alec jokes, visible in the periphery of Lisa’s vision. He’s circulating the tables of an opulent casino done up in deep red and golden yellow, with ‘Ruby Dreams’ emblazoned across the wall.
“You’d have more luck finding a street performer with three cups and a ball,” Lisa observes. “A place like this? They’ve got whole algorithms for swindling people out of their money. The classier the joint, the more the house takes.”
“So we’ll take from them,” Brian replies. “Me and Bitch are ready for exfil if you need it, but so long as you’re careful you shouldn’t need it.”
“Oh we’ll be careful,” Lisa laughs as she saunters over to a game of roulette. “A firefight in a casino? You’d be telling that story for years, and we’d be stuck listening to it.”
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20691229_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20700109_0000
path\to\AtlanticReachEstate\Operations\Security\CCTV\Camera_1302\20700218_1754
The door of Taylor’s apartment slides open and she hurries out into the corridor – dressed in a crumpled hoodie and a faded pair of jeans, with a sickly complexion visible even through her grey-blue skin.
She almost jogs down the corridor as the door automatically closes and locks behind her, keeping her eyes fixed firmly in front of her even when she reaches the lift. The doors close behind her, the number of the lift slowly counting down from thirteen to one.