“Would you care for some refreshments?” the serpent asked as we sat down, his razorgirl bodyguard moving over to the fridge, and the bottle stacked on top of it. “Alcohol does very little for someone my size, but I understand it is still traditional in certain circles to drink a toast to new business.”
Mom would be disappointed in me for it, but I was expecting him to drag out the ‘s’ sounds in his speech. Instead, he only struggled slightly to enunciate the harder consonants.
“Tradition has its place” – Grue said, admirably composed in the face of perhaps the second most unexpected client we could have faced after a resurrected Dunkelzahn – “but we all have to move with the times.”
“My philosophy exactly,” Mr Johnson said, before his lips moved in what I thought might be a smile. “Besides, I have no hands. So I can’t clink glasses.”
Across from me, Lisa’s mouth curled up in a wry smile. I couldn’t tell if she actually found the attempt at humour amusing, or if she was just humouring our client.
“An intriguing piece of data recently fell into my grasp,” the serpent continued, the levity draining out of his tone in an instant. “It concerned an illegal operation being run out of a Medhall facility in this city.”
Brian’s eyes momentarily flicked over to me while Lisa blinked, slowly – maybe satisfied that she’d managed to solve the mystery of that anonymous online purchaser.
“We can verify the validity of the information,” Brian said, though there was a faint hint of disappointment in his tone; if that was all the serpent had dragged us out here for, we wouldn’t be taking much of a payout.
“I saw to that myself,” Mr Johnson remarked offhandedly. “Not that I had any reason to doubt your hacker” – his elliptically-pupiled yellow eyes drifted briefly over the group, assessing us at a glance before landing unerringly on me – “but I had no reason to trust her either. Once the data was verified, I reached out to the owner of the auction house.”
He bared his teeth, in a gesture that might have been a smile but that really didn’t fit on his face.
“This ‘Faultline’ was closed-lipped about the details of how and why you came across the data, but I’d expect nothing less from someone in her line of work. Truth be told, I’m disinterested in the why and I don’t need to know the how since ultimately the data ended up in my possession. I asked your fixer to arrange this meeting because I need a team in this city who can get results. You qualify.”
“So what exactly do you need us to do?”
“You’ve stumbled across a tail in the rainforest. I want you to pull on it and show me the head. Investigate the local human supremacist gang – these ‘Chosen’ – and answer some questions for me. Where do the shipments go? How are they distributed throughout the network? Who coordinates it all? Then, contact me for further information.”
“That’s not how we work,” Grue countered even as Mr Johnson’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “We won’t take on a job with only half the details.”
The client sighed, a short sound that was just this side of being irritated. “It’s no great secret, simply a two stage plan. It is in my interest to place a mole in the Chosen. Once you have identified the coordinator, I simply require you to determine whether he has any vulnerabilities to which leverage could be applied. Mistresses, dependents, behaviours that do not align with his ideology. That sort of thing.”
“So you can blackmail him?” Grue asked.
“What I do or do not do with them, whoever they may be,” the serpent countered, “is beyond your concern. I do not care how you find the information I want, so long as the Chosen do not realise what you’re after.”
“You want us to run silent?”
“Not necessarily. If your last client sent you to retrieve this data you wouldn’t have sold it. I’m sure you’re inventive enough to create suitable smokescreens.”
Grue leant back in his seat, looking between the rest of us. Tattletale simply smiled, curiosity burning like fire in her eyes. I nodded immediately, before doubts could creep into my mind. Regent shrugged his shoulders, while Bitch sent a quick pulse to Grue’s cyberware, the datastream all the more visible in the null space of the faraday cage.
“We’re used to having a clearer target to go after,” Grue said as he turned back to the serpent, “but we can handle this job. Subject to the proper payment, of course.”
“Naturally,” Mr Johnson nodded, baring his teeth. “I am prepared to offer forty thousand nuyen.”
Eight thousand per person… I thought. That’s a lot more than our last runs.
“As a lump sum?” Grue asked, pretending like he wasn’t impressed. “This could take a while. A retainer fee would-”
“Would slow down your investigation,” the serpent countered, cutting Grue off. “I’m not interested in haggling like some flea market carpet seller.”
He turned and looked at the ork shaman behind him, who stepped forwards and pulled a hard plastic folder out of his jacket. He set it down on the coffee table, turning it to face us before flipping the folder open. Inside was a faintly-glowing sheet of electronic paper, with plain white letters on black text. A contract, of all things.
The ork reached into his jacket again and set a wood-coated stylus down next to the paper, before returning to his position opposite the elf.
Grue was looking down at the paper with uncertainty starting to creep through his controlled expression. It was understandable; this was a bit beyond the world he was used to. He probably hadn’t had to sign a contract since renting his apartment.
Instinctively, I reached out into the claustrophobically small confines of the faraday cage, twisting the scant resonance emanating from my body into a flat surface on which I projected the file. I started looking through the contract; the non-disclosure agreement, task to be completed and payment details provided.
I was almost expecting a mafia-like promise of violent retribution if the contact was ever breached, but it was almost depressingly dry. Not that I really understood what regular contracts looked like, even outside of the cutthroat world of Shadowrunning. Dad had more than a few old contracts and agreements stored in his files, but while I enjoyed rifling through his memories I hadn’t yet got desperate enough to start rifling through case law.
Grue reached out to take the contact, and as he did I saw Tattletale subtly trying to grab his attention with pointed looks that went from staring exasperatedly at him to hungrily devouring what little of the contract she could see. I quickly compiled a message and sent it to Grue’s cybereyes.
«I think Tattletale knows something about contracts»
He didn’t acknowledge the message, but he smoothly took hold of the folder and held it out to Tattletale, who nodded gracefully before scanning through the document.
“No salary, no listed hours,” Tattletale murmured as she read through, loud enough that we could hear it, “and the part for our signatures has a clarification that the names we put down don’t have to be tied to any SIN.” Her eyes flicked between Grue and our client. “This is more of a receipt than a contract.”
“I like to track my outgoings,” the serpent said, baring his teeth in another predatory smile. Or a genuine one, I supposed. It’s not his fault how he looks. “Financial security is the foundation of a good life.”
“Perhaps,” Tattletale smiled, before turning back to the rest of us, handing the folder back to Grue. “There’re no traps that I can see. It’s as straightforward as a contract gets.”
“Okay,” Grue said, leaning back in his seat as he scrolled down the electronic page to the section for signatures. He reached out to the coffee table, grabbing the stylus and bringing it to the paper, but not signing. Not quite yet.
“So we have a decision to make,” he said, turning away from our client to look at us. “We know the job and we know the price. Take it, or leave it?”
“Take it,” I answered quickly, as Tattletale cocked her eyebrow in exaggerated surprise, but with real interest in her eyes. I faltered a little at that, and if the client hadn’t been right there I would have explained my reasoning.
The last job was an investigation as well, and we did fine. Besides, I thought to myself, I’ll get to hunt through the Matrix again.
“I’m in,” Tattletale said, her expression smoothing changing to an eager smile. “It sounds interesting.”
“It pays good,” Bitch nodded. “I say we do it.”
“You know, for once I agree with you,” Regent confirmed, and with that we were unanimous – I seriously doubted Grue would turn down a paycheck like this, and even if he wasn’t lured in he still wouldn’t overrule the rest of us. This wasn’t that kind of group, and he wasn’t that kind of leader no matter his confidence.
Sure enough, Grue quickly signed the contract before passing it to me. I noted that he’d signed it with his Shadowrunner handle, so I quickly scrawled out ‘Bug’ in cursive. The name didn’t quite seem to fit as well anymore – it felt a little close to the person who’d hidden away in her apartment for two years – but it wasn’t like I could do anything about that right now.
I passed the folder over to Bitch, on the next couch, and soon enough it had made its way down the chain; Tattletale setting both it and the stylus back down on the coffee table where they were swiftly collected by our new client’s bodyguard.
“Now that the formalities are over and done with,” the serpent said, like our acceptance was just a foregone conclusion, “I will take my leave. My associate will provide you with a number by which you may contact me once you have found the information I seek.”
Making an educated guess, I sent a ping to the cybered-up elf woman and received a short string of numbers connected to an anonymous commlink – one not tied to any particular persona. I quickly relayed the numbers to Grue and loaded them into the others’ persona area networks for good measure.
“These rooms are booked by the hour,” the serpent said, almost conversationally, “so please feel free to make use of it for the remaining time.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
He uncoiled himself from his seat, his lengthy body languidly slithering past us until perhaps ten meters of smooth black scales had gone by. The razorgirl followed him out, her steps completely soundless until her metal feet hit the hard floor of the corridor outside.
“So,” Grue began once the door had swung shut, leaving us alone save for the panoramic view of the bustling apple orchard, “how are we going to play this?”
“The Chosen are busy right now,” Tattletale said. “What we did with Garcia kicked the hornet’s nest across the whole city.”
“Luckily he wasn’t the one running the dopadrine network,” I said. “Just a duty manager who was in on the scam.” I paused for a moment, lost in thought. “I bet their matrix network is bustling right now, trying to fill the gap.”
“The forums too,” Grue nodded. “Even if it’s not about the dopadrine, they’ll still be flooded with new members, the riots and everything else going on.”
“Which means a few new usernames on their favourite forums won’t draw attention,” Tattletale said, nodding. “Maybe even new faces at their favourite hangouts.”
“I’m not sure that would work out,” Grue said, flicking his tusk. “Bitch is the only one of us who could pass for one of them.”
I nodded. Regent was the right metatype, but he just didn’t fit.
“I’m sorry,” the man himself interrupted, “but am I the only person here wondering why our client is a giant talking snake?”
“Never heard of Naga before?” Tattletale asked him.
“No! They don’t have those in Quebec.”
“Probably too cold for them,” I muttered, smiling, before I remembered what, exactly, Alec had spent his time in Quebec doing.
“There aren’t that many of them,” Grue said. “Maybe a couple hundred thousand, worldwide. Security companies used to catch them and use them as magical attack dogs, before people realised they were sapient.”
“It’s a bit more than that,” Tattletale said. “They pretended to be animals when captured, all while learning about the modern world from their captors. The ones that escaped gathered at Angkor Wat in Cambodia and formed the Naga Kingdom. That’s got to be about eight years ago, now.”
“And this is all stuff you guys just know?” Alec asked. I smiled a little; one of my last memories of mom was her talking excitedly about the new sapient species that had just broken its chains and found its own place in the world.
“I’d never heard of them,” Bitch deadpanned. “Just didn’t see any point in asking.”
“It does raise some interesting questions,” Tattletale said, leaning forwards. “UCAS doesn’t offer citizenship to Naga, so what is one doing in Brockton Bay?”
Hurriedly, I let my mind drift away from meatspace, ignoring the claustrophobic feeling of the faraday cage, and scanned the tiny space for electronics. Nothing, thankfully.
“Is that really something we should be worrying about?” Grue asked, exasperatedly.
“Of course it is!” Tattletale exclaimed. “This isn’t just some local power making a move, or a concerned citizen who’s scraped up the cash. We’re performing reconnaissance for someone, and reconnaissance always comes before something big.”
I spoke up, unintentionally cutting Grue off. “I’ve gotta say, I agree with Tattletale. Even if we don’t go digging, this is weird and I think we do need to talk about it.”
For a moment, it looked like Grue was going to shut the conversation down, like he did when Tattletale brought this up with our last client, but then he sighed.
“Fine, but we can’t investigate him. If he finds out, we’ll be done. Faultline rolled out the red carpet for this guy; she’d burn us to keep him happy.”
“He’s too rich to be SINless,” I said. “Unless he works for the Yakuza, I guess, but that doesn’t add up.”
“No, he’s too classy,” Tattletale nodded. “Expensive bodyguards, expensive meeting rooms… and then there’s the contract. All of the big ten offer citizenship to Naga, though in a lot of the Japancorps that’s just as high-paid security guards. If our guy is corporate, there’s only a few that fit.”
“Ares,” I said. “You’re thinking about Ares.”
“It’s definitely a possibility,” Lisa nodded. “This city’s already divided politically between Medhall and Ares. Medhall cut ties with Garcia, so maybe Ares wants some dirt that’ll stick?”
“The election for DA is coming up…” I mused. “If a candidate with ties to Medhall wins, they can cut the teeth out of Knight Errant.”
“And if a candidate is praising Medhall when the company is haemorrhaging drugs to street gangs…” Tattletale said, letting us fill in the blanks.
“None of which affects the job,” Grue pointed out. “If your guess is even right. I do think he works for a corp, but all that means is that we have to be very careful not to piss him off.”
“Okay, great,” Regent cut in. “Don’t piss off the giant Awakened snake, got it. I could have told you that. How are we going to do this?”
“I still think our best bet is to try and sneak into one of their meetings,” Tattletale said. “Even if we don’t find anything tied to the distribution network, chances are there’ll be a few dealers there we can follow.”
“I can ask around, but I don’t think I’d get anywhere,” Grue said. “I have a couple of gang connections, but with the wrong sorts of gangs. It’s not like they’re going to be advertising these things in the open. It’s about hanging out in the right bars, knowing the right people-”
“Or visiting the right forums,” I butted in. “My mom was with the Ork Rights Commission, and I kept all her files. I think there’s some packets on spotting radicalisation in there somewhere that might have a few likely forums.”
“The Ork Rights Commission?” Bitch asked, though to her credit she sounded genuinely confused, rather than snide. I doubt there was much talk of policlubs in her cyberpsycho street gang.
“They do trolls as well,” I explained, though it was something that had always frustrated mom; they’d given up too much for a snappy acronym. Mothers of Metahumans had a better name, but mom always used to say they were a bunch of wet blankets who’d never achieve real change.
“It sounds like as good a place as any to start,” Grue nodded.
“Can’t do it here, though,” I said. “Not with the faraday cage. Feels like I’m trapped in a washing machine.”
“Okay. Back to the loft?”
I paused. My first instinct had been to head back home, but was it really the right choice to make? Thinking tactically, it’d be a lot easier to speak to the others if I could actually just… speak to them. Besides, I knew how the Matrix worked, but gang politics were Greek to me.
“Sounds good,” I nodded.
We left the club via the cloakroom, where I picked up my street clothes, and made our way to where Bitch had parked her van – in a dingy underground car park that charged by the hour. As she weaved her way through the crowds of drunks spilling off the sidewalk and into the street, I let the Matrix flow back into my sight, gladly abandoning the real world now that Bitch had fit a troll-sized seatbelt on my seat.
I left the van behind, passing invisibly over the city in a burst of data as I made my way back home, recognising the familiar systems long since suffused with my resonance. Mom’s files were on an old physical hard drive, but I’d ordered in an antique adapter so I could wire it into matrix-linked computer dad used to use. Originally it had been so I didn’t have to read through it with a screen, mouse and keyboard – like looking at the world through an antique diving helmet – but it meant that I could access them even from halfway across the city.
Mom was a true academic, with an academic’s eye for organisation; her folders were a cluttered mess that no doubt made perfect sense to her, but were almost labyrinthine to her own daughter. Sometimes files were arranged by date – grouped together around whatever projects she was working on at that time – while others had been put into haphazard categories that overlapped and in some cases were outright duplicated.
Still, I was able to work my way through the mass and find some things that might be useful. The most promising files were found in an unexpected place; resources earmarked for use in schools.
It turned out mom had collaborated on a series of documents meant not for schoolkids, but for their teachers and staff. It contained a list of warning signs for radicalisation; changes in behaviour, off colour jokes being used more often, bullying specifically targeting other metatypes and a long list of media and sites that kids might have been radicalised on.
There was a report on the programme’s effectiveness; only a third of the schools in the city had signed onto the programme, and most of those were owned by corps. Not Medhall, but the schools run by Ares, Horizon, Maersk, Aztechnology and Saeder-Krupp had all either made use of the materials or coincidentally rolled out their own programmes that contained much of the same information.
I guess it made sense; can’t have your future employees holding divided loyalties, after all.
It was the list of sites I was most interested in. The dragon’s share of them were independent ‘news’ websites, but a lot of the rest were smaller forums that were used as gathering points and chatrooms for racists. Exactly the kind of place where you’d see mods quietly inviting potential prospects into ever more exclusive chatrooms where they could mingle with their fellow radicals until they picked up extremism by osmosis.
I didn’t smile – there wasn’t any point in the matrix – but I did feel a shiver of satisfaction pass through me, probably similar to the feeling a spider has when it feels the vibrations of a fly landing on its web.
That feeling wavered, however, as I saw the old way the forums were formatted. I’d missed the obvious; the latest of mom’s files were from twenty seventy three, so all the listed sites had gone down with the old Wired matrix when it was burned by the Jormungand virus and the EMP blasts of fifteen modified atomic bombs detonated at key points on its infrastructure.
Of course, there were rumours beyond that, and I’d gone digging for them – if only because Crash 2.0 was the whole reason I hadn’t told anybody about me being a technomancer before joining the team. Everyone knew about Winternight; the apocalyptic cult that sought to bring about Ragnarök by destroying the Matrix, which they believed was the prison of their god Loki. They’d worked alongside a group of rogue otaku – people who could interact with the wired matrix the same way I did with the wireless one – and after they all disappeared, Technomancers seemed a good enough substitute for the world’s rage.
But in the secretive corners of the new matrix there were other rumours, too. That Ragnarok had been as much a war as a single attack, fought against a rogue AI who sought to make itself god and had taken over the East Coast Stock Exchange to do it. The rumours went that the nukes, Jormungand, the rogue otaku, had all been a way to destroy the AI, before it became powerful enough to destroy everyone else.
In those strange forums, the AI’s name – DEUS – was almost never typed. There were people out there who lived in fear of its return, who believed that it lay dormant waiting to be resurrected, or that another AI would rise up to take its place.
Whatever the truth, the new Matrix hadn’t even been built on the ruins of the old it was so thoroughly destroyed. The architects of the wireless network had needed to start completely from scratch, which meant nothing of the old Matrix had been grandfathered in.
But the people who made those old websites were still around afterwards – most of them, at least – so there was a lot of duplication. Mom’s web addresses – meant to allow school IT techs to block off certain sites from their networks – weren’t useful anymore, but some of the forums had probably sprung up under the same names. I just had to find the right ones.
I reached out into the matrix and a dragonfly spun to life on my outstretched palm, its golden wings already humming with potential energy. I fed it the names and sent it off into the matrix, watching its golden trail disappear into the constellation of light that made up the city before allowing the Matrix to fade from my view.
I slumped forwards in my seat, rubbing at my temples to dispel a slight headache as sensations rushed in from meatspace. Tattletale was sitting next to me, and she wordlessly handed me a bottle of water.
“Thanks,” I mumbled as I unscrewed the cap, suddenly realising that I hadn’t drunk or eaten anything since Labyrinth sent me into the resonance realms. I drained the bottle in a couple of gulps – it looked big in Tattletale’s hand, but it was barely what I’d consider a full glass’ worth – and sighed contentedly.
“I think I have something,” I said. “I found a list of forums in my mom’s files. Pre-crash, all of them, but I have a sprite looking to see if any of them came back.”
“Great,” Grue said from the front of the van, “we’re almost back at the loft. But, uh, could you give us a little heads up the next time you dive in?”
“You kind of just sat down and fell unconscious,” Tattletale said.
“Ah.” Once again I was grateful that blushes don’t show on stone-grey skin. “Sorry about that, it’s kind of instinctive. You could’ve sent me a text, though.”
“No texting at the table,” Regent said from the back of the van, with a wry smirk on his face. “Have to talk to each other.”
“Uh huh,” I snarked. “I’m sure your family had a lot of fireside chats.”
For the briefest moment, something close to anger passed across Regent’s face and I paled, realising I’d just drawn on information I really wasn’t supposed to know. The moment passed quickly, though, and his face slipped back into placid indifference.
I was saved from putting my foot further into my mouth by Tattletale falling into a conversation with Brian over our new client, and what exactly this meant for our status as Shadowrunners. Regent joined in and even Bitch put in a word or two, but I was content to just sit back in my seat and listen to the sound of the engine as we made our way back to the loft, and to whatever news my sprite brought.