The sky was lit by a thousand fires, mingling with the light of the setting sun to cast a blood-red glow over the plains beyond the city walls. The city was under siege, the sloped and angled walls surrounded by the besiegers own earthen trenches as cannons ceaselessly pounded away at the stone and magical artillery arced through the sky, momentarily overwhelming the red glare with brilliant light.
From the city’s fleches and bastions, the defenders fired back as best they could, and the ceaseless barrage had churned the land between the two sets of fortifications into a swampy quagmire, full of ghouls feasting on the quiet dead, while the unquiet dead rose as zombies, banshees and ghosts.
Warriors strode amongst that hellish landscape, wearing a myriad of colours and standards but ultimately in the service of either the city or the besieging army. They descended into that man-made swamp to cull the number of ghouls, to escort sapping parties as they pushed the lines forward, even to raid their enemy’s camps in hopes of hastening or delaying the fall of the city.
And that was where the ambience broke down, because no matter how realistic you make your game’s world, players will always break that illusion. For one, they were far too clean. For two, they were wearing all the wrong outfits. For three, they were reliant on UI interfaces and floating numbers that got in the way of the visuals. But no game is built purely for the satisfaction of the developers, and ultimately it was the player’s sandbox to roam.
Warring Leagues was a fairly typical VRMMO, conceived by some captive creatives on an exclusive contract and given life by a veritable army of programmers, artists, designers, play-testers, marketers and random hangers-on in a Horizon-owned studio, sealed away from the outside world in a constant environment of crunch and deadlines.
The setting might well have been picked by throwing a peg at a dartboard, but it was popular enough, with a player base in the low millions. For every decker using VR as a tool to enable their hacking, there were thousands more who used lower-power cyberdecks for this exact sort of entertainment. Rather than cranking up their device’s processing power to boost hacking, they’d focus on enhancing their auditory and visual senses until their virtual playground almost felt more real to them than meatspace itself – chasing the impossible sensation I felt every day.
I stood atop a dismounted gun, a great bombard cut loose from its carriage and half-buried in a muddy rise. Its surface bore intricately detailed engravings depicting battle scenes from its nation’s illustrious past, with the words “the final argument of kings and men” wrapped in a loop around the muzzle in cursive script. The metal giving way to rust, the richly-worked engravings, even the past those engravings depicted were all the product of a team of designers and artists, ordered to pursue greater and greater realism as a mere marketing tool, while the player ignored their efforts as she slaughtered a party of scouts in the shadow of the gun.
The letters above her head identified her as Valk1R3, and showed her allegiance to the ‘Free Cities of Hansaal,’ which told me that she was fighting on the side of the besieged today, rather than the besiegers.
Her avatar was human, though that wasn’t a surprise for multiple reasons. From the small icon next to her name, I could see she was a Rogue who specialised in evading damage rather than tanking hits or delivering killing blows, which explained why she felt confident enough to head out here on her own.
As was typical of video games, her apparel bore no resemblance to what could be called ‘armour,’ revealing more than it protected, and – as was typical of people – her avatar was an idealised interpretation of how she looked in the real world. Generally speaking, people only tended to depart from that pattern on their second or third character.
Sarah Lancet went to the same school as our target, though they were a year apart. In their final year, they both worked part-time in the same corner shop during the evenings. The corner shop was in a neighbourhood with a small but noticeable Chosen presence, and it was where Garcia had made the jump from frequenting human-supremacist forums to plotting ways to impress the Chosen themselves. Since he didn’t know any Chosen, that meant grabbing their attention.
Sarah’s saving grace was that she never went as deep down the rabbit hole as Andrew did, though she still had some racist leanings. They’d started dating each other, before her boyfriend shot Jess Montrose and vanished into thin air.
When I’d run the list of Garcia’s social media contacts past Tattletale, she’d immediately latched onto two possibilities. The first was that the killing had driven Garcia off the deep end, and he’d become increasingly radical, hiding out for the last seven years with the Chosen under an assumed identity. In which case, Sarah would be useless.
The second possibility was that the resulting outcry and riots had caused a change of heart, or – more likely – given Garcia cold feet, and he’d hidden himself away from both the DA’s office and the Chosen. That possibility was more unlikely, but Sarah’s dad was a badge with Knight Errant, and could have provided the way into witness protection.
Either way, Sarah could know something. So I’d taken her, while Grue and Rachel picked up a buddy of Garcia’s who was still in the Chosen, and Tattletale walked Regent through some more social investigations that she couldn’t conduct herself thanks to having the wrong ear shape.
It had been expectedly easy to fool Warring Leagues’ systems into thinking I was just another player on a premium subscription. After all, I’d done it before dozens, if not hundreds, of times for all sorts of different games. I didn’t play them myself, but there were a lot of people out there who were interested in playing games like this, but not interested enough to cough up full price.
Getting myself admin permissions had been significantly harder, and I’d proceeded slowly and methodically to avoid drawing the attention of Horizon’s ICE or the host’s live-in monitors. I could afford to go slow; Sarah spent hours online each night. She wasn’t going anywhere.
I watched her slaughter the last of the scouts, her avatar dancing around them with impossible grace as the software in her VR link interpreted her will into movement that rivalled that of professional gymnasts, mystically-fuelled martial artists or cybernetically enhanced Samurai.
My own body was the same avatar I had used when fighting Bakuda – an insectoid woman hidden beneath spidersilk robes. Using my hacked admin privileges, I’d given it statistics and attributes roughly equivalent to Valk1R3, then multiplied them by ten. I could have gone further, but Horizon’s anti-cheat measures would have detected the abnormal stats.
Instead, when I leapt off the cannon and landed in front of her, my robes flying off as four long limbs grew out of my back to arrest my fall, the rogue’s eyes widened in shock as she dropped fluidly into a combat stance, before a grin spread across her face.
It wasn’t hard to figure out what she was thinking – I wasn’t displaying any of the information a player would, so to her eyes I must have come across as a hidden enemy.
She darted forwards, her rapier held out in front of her, and – on a whim – I decided to play along. I leapt backwards, driving my insectoid limbs into the ground with far more strength than any real legs could manage, then used the reach of those same limbs to stab out at her.
My movements were fluid, efficient, and driven almost entirely by programmed move sets I’d pulled out of the game’s files. Still, it was exhilarating to dance around her, and for a brief moment I felt I could understand why people would get sucked into these games. If you lived in Meatspace your whole life, bound by the limitations of your flesh, then games like this would let you experience and even surpass the limits of that flesh, without the years of exercise or invasive augmentations needed by someone like Brian.
Valk1R3 managed to drive her sword into my torso, but I abandoned the move set’s instinct to stagger back, instead grasping her wrist and dragging myself down the length of her rapier with one hand, while reaching out with the other and dragging it down her neck.
She gasped, as the simulated pain kicked into action, but I couldn’t help myself from comparing it unfavourably to the genuine pain I’d seen on the faces of the gangster’s at the freight warehouse. She let go of the sword, backflipping out of reach just as my spear-tipped limbs closed in.
In my chest, the sword disappeared, reappearing in her grip. A skill, perhaps, or just a feature of the game. The power fantasy would fall flat if people were fumbling with their weapons all the time, after all.
“Okay,” she said out loud – to herself, not to me – “this is interesting.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I snarked back, then – as her eyes widened in shock – lunged forward, driving a limb into her torso with inhuman speed. As the tip pierced her persona, I poured myself into the wound, driving a resonance spike into her code.
The rules of the game meant that her persona needed to open itself up in ways that simply wouldn’t apply on the rest of the grid. Where most personas – particularly those used by people expecting to be hacked – were a carefully-coiled bundle of data designed to keep attacks out, hers was deliberately set up to allow certain attacks that fit the rules of the game.
It was a crack in her armour, and I’d just widened it into a chasm. I stepped towards her, my insectoid limbs folding together and retracting into my back, and reached out with a hand to pluck at the tether of data tying her to me. It was simplicity itself to edit that stream, borrowing a programme from the game’s code to inflict her with a paralysis effect below the neck that would have had her slumping bonelessly to the floor, if I hadn’t elected to hold her in place so our eyes were level.
“Sarah Lancet,” – she gasped in shock – “I have a question for you.”
My eye was drawn to a single stream of data, trying and failing to get past the web of resonance I had coiled around her. She’d just tried to log off, and the realisation that she couldn’t, that I wouldn’t let her, sent her into a panic attack. She started hyperventilating; a pointless physical response in this digital world.
The failed log off attempt had drawn a lot of attention; I could see Horizon snoopers casting out exploratory datastreams in search of their distressed customer. I reached out, pulling on those streams and twisting them into a veil of static that fell like a fog around both of us – digital chaff sealing us away from prying eyes. For now.
“You can go when I have my answer,” I said, trying to calm her down. The fear of being stuck in the matrix was an instinctive one that tickled at the most inherent fears of the metahuman mind; the loss of the self. The fear of being cast loose from their body, from meatspace, and becoming a ghost in the machine.
It was never a fear of mine, but then I was something in-between meatspace and the matrix. There were times when it didn’t even sound so bad.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Sarah was still obviously terrified, but at least she’d quietened down.
“I’m looking for Andrew Garcia,” I said, and Sarah let out an involuntary laugh, her face contorted in a manic expression.
“He’s what this is about?” she asked, incredulously. “What the fuck!?”
“You used to know him,” I continued. “Perhaps you still do. You tell me what you know, and I’ll let you go.”
“I haven’t spoken to him in four years!” she shouted, desperately.
“Four?” I leaned in closer. “He disappeared seven years ago, after murdering Jess Montrose.”
“He didn’t do shit to that pixie bitch,” she retorted, and I frowned at the slur. “Andrew was an edgy dick, but he didn’t have the balls.”
“You dated him,” I snapped back.
“Before I realised what a creep he was, yeah. Broke it off when the pawns came looking for him, not that I ever told him it was over.”
“So four years ago he came back looking for his output?”
“Fuck you,” she shouted, trying to spit at me. Of course, nothing came out, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“You’re not in meatspace anymore,” I said. “This is my domain, so you’re going to answer my questions. Unless you’d like to stay here. Forever.”
“Goddamn freak!” she shouted, before she seemed to sag. “Fucking fine. He came by to try and pick up where he left off, but I turned him down.”
“He say where he was working?” I asked. “Where he lived?”
I let the paralysis effect fade, to reward good behaviour, and Sarah dropped to the ground on her hands and knees, faux-breathing for a few moments before staggering upright. She didn’t run, not that there would be any point.
“Wouldn’t shut up about it.” She coughed, her mind still tricked into thinking she was in a biological body, with biological lungs. “Medhall. He works for Medhall.”
Medhall? Some sympathetic middle-manager take pity on the poor, persecuted, human teen and offer him a job?
“Fetch and carry? That sort of thing?”
Sarah shook her head.
“Said he was a duty manager. He was very specific about that. Said he had money now, I said I still wasn’t interested.”
The fuck? People don’t go from stacking shelves in a convenience store to junior management in a near-megacorp. Definitely not when they’ve got a murder charge chasing them.
“You’re sure about this?” I asked her. “Sure he wasn’t bullshitting you to get in your slot?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “He was dressed the part, and he showed me his corp ID.”
I paced around her for a moment, thinking it over. I couldn’t tell if she was lying to me, but I also didn’t have any way of verifying what she’d said. Not quickly, at least. In the end, I just had to take her at her word.
“The corp ID. Don’t suppose you remember where it was for? What building?”
“Uhh… shit.” Her eyes darted around, looking anywhere except at me. “Manufacturing, I think. Wait!” she exclaimed, realisation lighting up in her eyes. “Charter Hill. He was bragging about his new digs in Charter Hill. A company pad.”
A Medhall plant in Charter Hill, tied to a corporate living space. That narrows it down, but not by much. Hopefully the others have more.
“Thank you for your assistance,” I said, removing my presence from her data as she staggered at the sudden return of control. “You’re free to go.”
“Never touching this game again,” she muttered to herself, before turning to me. “You could’ve just fucking asked.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Had to be sure. Oh, and don’t tell anyone about this.”
“Like I’m that stupid,” she said, before her persona vanished as she logged off. I followed, leaving the host behind before Horizon could finish tracking me down.
Once I was back in the comfortably familiar networks of Brockton Bay’s public grid, I called up Grue’s commlink. He picked up after a few moments.
“Bug? What is it?”
“I’ve got a lead, but something’s off about it.”
“Same here. We should talk face to face.”
“What’s wrong with the comm?” I asked, a little annoyed.
“Bitch and I have just arrived back,” he said, and I heard the sound of a van door slamming shut in the background. “Come on out, we’ll go over it as a team.”
“Fine,” I sighed, taking a last look at the vast expanse of the matrix before pulling myself back down to Earth.
I blinked away at the ceiling light as my eyes adjusted, shifting forwards in the couch so that I wasn’t looking directly at it. I hadn’t been gone for long, so my body only ached a little from how long it’d spent in one place. Still, compared to the limitless freedom of cyberspace it felt like I’d suddenly developed arthritis. It always did.
I stood up, leant against the wall to steady myself for a moment, and pushed the door open before stepping out into the corridor.
The others were all there, waiting on the couches in the loft’s living space. I shrank a little under the four pairs of eyes that had turned to look at me, but pressed on regardless. Brian and Rachel looked like they had only just got in, their jackets still wet from the rain I could hear pounding against the loft’s roof – even through the makeshift insulation. He and Rachel had taken one of the long couches, while Lisa was sat in the armchair. Alec was sprawled out across the last remaining couch, his head resting on one armrest and his feet on the other.
“So, what did you find?” I asked Grue as I slumped gracelessly onto the human-sized couch, trusting Alec to move his legs or lose them.
Grue leant forwards in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees.
“We snatched Dante Kaur off the street,” he said with a nod to Rachel. Kaur was another former friend of Garcia’s, but he was unique among the bunch in that he’d actually managed to graduate from posting about trogs online to actually being a card-carrying, flag-waving member of the Chosen.
“It took us a while,” Grue continued, “but we managed to get him talking. Not only is he still in contact with Garcia, they’re regular business partners. Garcia sources the Chosen opiates, which they then distribute to their dealers across the city. And he gets the opiates-”
“From Medhall,” I interrupted, frowning. “But that doesn’t make sense.”
“Something you want to add?” Grue asked.
“Garcia’s ex confirmed he worked for the corp,” I explained. “He has citizenship and everything, which explains why his UCAS SIN has completely dropped off the grid. But he’s a manager, not some factory floor worker slipping a few stray pills to his buddies. A duty manager, sure, but still.”
“It’s not a few stray pills, either,” Grue said. “I’m talking boxes of the stuff, though Kaur didn’t confirm how many in each shipment.”
“Taylor’s right,” Lisa added with a frown, “something doesn’t add up. Let’s say some Medhall manager with Humanis sympathies – and we all know there are plenty in the company – took pity on him and offered him a job. A patron would explain how he wound up in junior management, but why would he spit in that patron’s eye by stealing product? And why hasn’t the Corp noticed and shut him down?”
“Maybe they have,” Grue pointed out. “Could be our client is Medhall, and they’re using us to close the leak without drawing attention to the company.”
Lisa and I shared a brief look, but neither of us spoke up. We both knew that wasn’t true, but we couldn’t exactly tell Grue that without revealing we’d broken the unspoken rules of Shadowrunning.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Lisa said after a moment, shaking her head. “The client wants Garcia, and it’s our job to deliver him to her. Hopefully his corporate SIN doesn’t complicate things; if she was expecting some thug in hiding, it’ll come as a surprise.”
“That’s her problem to deal with,” Grue shrugged. “Ours is getting the guy out.” He turned to look at me. “Bug, is there anything you can do to track down a Medhall employee?”
“That depends,” I answered. “What drug is he supplying?”
“Dopadrine.”
“Then I know which factory he works at.”
Grue looked surprised. “Just like that?”
“Medhall’s factories have limited extraterritoriality because of a deal with the State government, so they don’t have to declare what they make, but they still ship it through the port, and those shipments do have to be declared – for now, at least. They have four factories in the city that ship out dopadrine, but thanks to Ms Lancet I know Garcia lives in corporate accommodation in Charter Hill. That narrows it down to one.”
“Excellent work.” Grue genuinely sounded grateful, and I couldn’t help the smile that crept across my face. “Now we just need to work out an extraction plan.”
“If I can get close enough,” Alec spoke up for the first time, “I can take control of his body. Walk him right out the front door.” His tone made it sound like he was doing us a massive favour.
“It’d be better than sedating him and carrying him out,” Brian mulled the idea over, stroking his chin. “But we’d still need to get ourselves into the building. Bug, do you know his home address?”
I shook my head. “I might be able to get it, but data on corporate employees is tightly guarded, even for junior managers. It’s to prevent armed talent scouting.”
“So it would have to be the factory. Great.”
“Places like this tend to have large rotating staffs,” Lisa explained. “At least on the lower rungs of the ladder. There’ll be a high turnover of building custodians and other menials, maybe it’ll even be subcontracted out. All we’d need are some overalls with the right logos. How long do we have?”
“Not long,” Brian shook his head. “Kaur was supposed to pick up the next shipment in three days.”
“You didn’t…” I hesitated, not sure I wanted to ask. “He’s still alive, right?”
“Welded his arms to an I-beam,” Rachel explained, her tone matter-of-fact. “He isn’t going anywhere.”
“We’ll cut him loose when the job’s done,” Brian elaborated. “For now, we don’t want to complicate things with loose ends.”
He paused for a moment, looking at me before continuing.
“What about on your end? Is Garcia’s old flame going to be a problem?”
“No, she won’t,” I answered quickly. “I scared her pretty good, and she and Garcia didn’t part on good terms regardless.”
“Glad to hear it,” Brian nodded. “Then I suggest we move tomorrow. Tattletale and Bitch will stay outside with the van, but we can bring in Bitch’s Crawler in a bag to scout the place out. Me, Regent and Bug will go in and extract the guy. Bug, I can get us generic fake ID cards but I’ll need you to spoof whatever punch clock system they have.”
“Wait a second,” I leant forward. “Why do I have to go in with you?”
“A second pair of strong hands might come in handy if Regent can’t maintain control,” he explained. “Besides, Regent doesn’t exactly look like a janitor. The two of us fit the profile, especially in Medhall.”
“Fuck,” I sank back into the seat. “If mom could see me now…” I murmured to myself.
I looked up at Brian, but I saw nothing but confidence in his eyes.
They’re cybernetic. Confidence is easy to fake.
“If this turns into a shootout…” I began, but Brian cut me off.
“Then I’ll take point, and Bitch will roll drones through the front door to create a distraction. You’ll be fine, Bug.”
“Damnit, okay,” I said after a moment. “But I want to be thorough about this. We can’t just wing it like last time.”
I spun a sprite together and sent it off into the Matrix, to snoop through building plans in City Hall, techno-anarchist datadumps, anything else that would help give us an idea of the building layout. Then I slumped back onto the couch, falling into a trance-like state as I re-entered the Matrix and accessed public data from the city’s traffic management system, beamed in real time to hundreds of thousands of sat-navs across the city. When combined with the feeds from any CCTV cameras in the neighbouring buildings that even so much has glanced at our target, it gave us a picture of how people moved in and out of the site.
I left the matrix behind, pulling up all the information I’d gathered into an augmented reality display on top of the coffee table. I fed the data directly to Brian and Rachel’s cyberyeyes, while Lisa and Alec put on their own AR sunglasses to add their own input – though Lisa contributed a lot more, there. We planned long into the night, over a Jamaican takeaway – that Alec ordered – and cans of soft drinks, and at the end of the night I almost felt optimistic about the idea.
I was still having second thoughts, and third thoughts, fourth thoughts, and so on, but I was just barely confident enough that I wasn’t going to let them stop me.
“So if there’s nothing else, I think we just planned a hostile extraction before midnight,” Lisa said with a grin.
I reached out in the matrix, idly tugging on a passing datastream and checking its timestamp. Sure enough, it was only eleven thirty, with a night and most of a day before we went in with the evening shift.
I couldn’t help but wonder if that was a good thing.