I left the metro two blocks away from the Palanquin, and immediately found myself in the middle of a protest. The road had once been part of Lord Street, and its four lanes should have been packed full of grid-linked cars and trucks moving through the city in an orderly jumble. Instead the road was packed from end to end with people, and I could see the grid-link data passing through the ether as the city-wide traffic monitoring network routed navigation systems and the occasional autonomous vehicle around the obstruction.
At first, my heartbeat quickened in my chest at the sight of so many people, and I found my hand unconsciously drifting to my gun as my mind slipped back into the matrix, drawing on the myriad data of the crowd’s commlinks as I tried and failed to take in all that massed data at once.
It was only a moment later that my eyes finally caught up with my brain, and I relaxed – somewhat – as I saw that a little over half the crowd were non-humans. Most were about my age, too, and I had to figure that they were drawn to this protest in particular by Constitution Hill’s proximity to New Brockton University.
So while it was hard to head down the stairs and join the crowd on the street, at least I got fewer glances than normal as I carefully manoeuvred through the protest. Still, I couldn’t help my heart quickening at the sheer mass of people that surrounded me. The subway had been hard because of the confined space, but this was something else altogether; I could still see over the crowd just fine, but all that meant was that I was entirely aware of just how many people were surrounded me right now.
Down at the other end of the protest, a raised stage had been set up beneath some traffic lights, right at the cusp of an intersection through which traffic was still passing. There was a small cluster of speakers standing on the stage, all listening to an elven woman speak – her voice carried to the crowd by a microphone on her lapel that was linked to quad-rotor speaker drones that hovered over the crowd.
Similar drones were busy in augmented reality, projecting her image on great screens that floated in the air, or were projected on the sides of buildings. At the same time, hacktivists had filled the air with slogans and banners that easily matched the amount of meatspace placards being enthusiastically waved in the air.
To my surprise, I recognised the speaker. I didn’t remember her name – though the subtitles attached to the video feeds identified her as Donna Hawthorn – but I remembered her face from some events mom had taken me along to. She was a prominent member of Mothers of Metahumans, and she wasn’t local to the Bay.
I couldn’t help but think about how strange it was that a small team of people could have such an effect. Things were relatively calm for now, but the news seemed to think there would be riots tonight. Sure, it’d blow over in a few days but it was still really weird that I was one fifth of a team that had managed to shake up the city by kidnapping a single person.
After so long spent as an organic ghost in the machine, I wasn’t sure how I felt about being in the limelight like that, even if none of these protestors knew I was the reason they were out here.
Suddenly, a strange ripple in the matrix drew my eye. I looked closer, allowing the mundane world to slip just a little further out of reach as I focused my attention on the datastreams around me. There was a second network in the area, beyond the one linking the speakers to the stage. Its code was utilitarian, robust, uncomplicated and familiar. Knight Errant.
They had their own drones in the air over the protest, quadcopters hiding in and amongst the traffic overhead. They were unmarked, and to the untrained eye would appear just the same as any of the other camera drones that were busy filming the event for news stations, social media feeds or just because someone owned a drone and had to find some way to justify the purchase.
Strings of data tethered the drones to figures in the crowd, plainclothes officers circulating amongst the protestors with facial recognition scanners running in their cybereyes. They were flagging those with criminal SINs, and those who’d been linked to violent protests in the past. It didn’t look like they were preparing for a crackdown, more like they wanted to know who to prioritise if things got ugly later.
But their presence wasn’t entirely hostile. There was a Knight Errant officer up on the speakers’ platform, some mid-level bigwig in a dress uniform. A liaison officer, maybe, or someone who was here to reassure the crowd that they actually were going to make sure Andrew Garcia made it to trial.
As I reached the other side of the street and the edge of the crowd, I found there were more Knight Errant officers around the perimeter of the protest. These ones were wearing actual uniforms, though there were only three of them standing out on the street – next to a car and a large eight-wheeled truck in their colours.
I could see the IFF tags of an additional eight officers in the back of the truck, and all they’d need to do is turn it around a little to block off the whole street, but it seemed that they were making a deliberate effort to appear unobtrusive, and two of the three officers were actually looking away from the protest.
No private police company was without controversy, but Knight Errant was widely regarded as the best of them. They had a reputation for professionalism and even-handedness that extended beyond the tightly-controlled circles of corporate media circuits. I dreaded to think how companies like Lone Star might have handled this whole situation.
Of course, as mom would have been quick to point out, that wasn’t the whole story. Knight Errant was the flagship project of Ares Macrotechnology, receiving disproportionate amounts of funds and expertise. What’s more, they still suffered from the same problems that had plagued police forces since long before they were ever brought into private hands, they were just better at managing them.
The three officers – a troll man, and two women, one of them lithe enough I thought she might be an elf – were all in peak physical condition, something that was emphasised by the close-fitting black and yellow taksuits they all wore; a style that was more reminiscent of old superhero films than the modernised versions of classic police uniforms favoured by other companies.
Two of them – the elf and the troll – wore the standard all-over helmets that hid their faces behind a one-way yellow visor. The human, on the other hand, was a mage, with her face visible beneath a hooded tabard worn over her taksuit. All of them had pistols, stun guns and electric batons worn on belts that cinched around their waists, but that was it. I could only presume the riot shields were in the van.
If any one of them brought the company into disrepute – whether by being filmed brutalizing a suspect or just falling below the fitness standard to the point where that same close-fitting getup made them look like an overstuffed sausage – they wouldn’t be dragged through a lengthy internal appeals process like cops in other corps were. Instead they were fired, then rehired on the spot by another Ares subsidiary; Hard Corps.
In the end, everyone won out. Knight Errant got to keep their reputation, the people under their jurisdiction got a speedy response to problems – even if it couldn’t be called justice – and the officers themselves got shuffled away from the public eye rather than dragged through a media spectacle and left out on the street. Everyone except for the people in the prisons Hard Corps ran, that is. Or those unlucky enough to be caught breaking into buildings they guarded.
The trio of Knight Errant cops weren’t stopping the steady stream of people filtering into the protest, so I moved against the flow and tried to make my way past them and out of the press of people.
The moment I made it clear, I suddenly found myself face to chest with the troll officer, who’d moved out to block my path.
“You can’t come this way, miss,” he said, as I froze, his right hand held out while the other rested on his belt – away from the taser, baton and pistol but that didn’t help me feel any more confident.
“Is-” I stammered, “Is something the matter?”
The elven officer turned from where she was leaning against the car, resting a hand on the hood as her featureless visor moved to look at me.
“There’s a Humanis rally a block away from here. So far things have been calm, but we don’t want to leave things to chance so we’re closing off the streets between the two groups.”
Sure enough, the flow of people coming into the protest had dried up completely.
“I have to get to the Palanquin,” I said, thinking on the spot. “My shift is starting soon and I don’t want to be late.”
The elven officer cocked her head, though without her face being visible I could only guess at what emotions the gesture represented. The troll, on the other hand, just looked up and down the street like he was weighing up his options.
“Hmm,” he exhaled, lost in thought. “You could try the old pedway.” He lifted up an immense arm, pointing down the length of the protest. “The entrance should be about thirty metres that way. Normally I wouldn’t recommend it to a young woman like yourself, but it should take you over the rally rather than through it. Just don’t poke your head out, okay?”
“Thank you, officer,” I nodded, as the elf abruptly turned back to look down the length of the road, apparently dismissing me as a threat.
“Just be careful, okay?” he said. “The Palanquin doesn’t have the best reputation.”
I shrugged as I turned to walk away. “It’s a living.”
Sure enough, about halfway down the length of the next building, in between a bustling sandwich place that was making a killing and a jewellery store with the shutters down and magnetic locks engaged, was a set of stairs seemingly leading up into nowhere, the walls and some of the steps covered in so much layered graffiti it was impossible to make out any individual tag.
Even with the full crowd down below, people had stayed away from this place. The stairs led up into an almost unlit corridor, with only two out of the ten overhead lights actually functional. Once it would have acted like an indoor street, with shops on either side. But the shops had been shuttered and closed, and the shutters themselves had been torn open or crowbarred off their mountings by urban treasure hunters in search of whatever scraps the shops left behind.
The air was weighty and oppressive, with a chill to it that had me hugging my arms against my chest as I hurried through. Back at school, places like this were the topic of urban legends. Of monsters and spirits and cyberpsychos hiding to ambush the girls who ran in there on dares, or who were forced in there as part of some sadistic prank.
Using the matrix to orient myself with the rest of the city, I turned at an intersection and went up a second set of stairs that led me out of the building and into a covered walkway that spanned the width of the next road over. While it might once have held a commanding view, the sides had been covered up by electronic advertising hoardings that covered up all but the smallest gaps in the structure.
As I caught a glimpse of a crowd of hundreds of humans working themselves up into a tornado of self-righteous anger, I counted myself lucky that the boards were there.
I descended from the pedway after the next block, pushing past a half-closed metal shutter into a section of shops that still had some life in it – even if that life seemed to take the form of BTL dens and what might have been a pop-up brothel. The entrance to this section of the pedway was tucked into the side of a building, up a set of dark stairs that continued downwards into the much more well-lit entrance to a nightclub. It was a little enclave of seediness, one that I’d never have noticed from the outside.
It was twenty three minutes to six, and the Palanquin was getting ready to open. Already a small line had formed outside the entrance to the club, where a burly bouncer with cyberware-enhanced muscles was watching over a line of people dressed for the club, with most of them already a little bit drunk.
I wasn’t really sure what the etiquette was for this sort of situation, but I didn’t want to wait in the line. So I swallowed my nerves and stepped up to the door. The bouncer took one look at me, and I saw streams of data linking his cybernetic eyes to the club’s network, matching up my face to their list of contractors.
He stepped aside and let me past, ignoring the complaints of the people in the line.
Inside, the nightclub was as tense as a drawn bowstring, with staff waiting in their place like soldiers on parade while others hurried to and fro on last minute errands. I recognised one of them – a brown haired human woman who looked to be about my age, talking to a man whose eccentric clothes marked him out as the night’s DJ.
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She turned as I entered the room – an earpiece linking her to the bouncer outside – and looked at me with a confused expression before making her way across the club’s floor. She was still wearing her name badge, which was good because I’d completely forgotten her name was Emily.
“It’s Bug, isn’t it?” she asked. “We weren’t expecting your team tonight, though you’re welcome to use the club when it’s open.”
“I’m not here on business,” I shook my head. “Well, not that kind of business. Is Labyrinth in? I was hoping to ask her something.”
Emily looked surprised, and when she spoke her voice was a little bit more hesitant. “You’re here to see Labyrinth?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “We ran into each other the first time I came here, and she gave me some advice when I sold some paydata through your auction house. We have the same… well, never mind. I was hoping to ask for some more advice, if she’s in.”
“In?” Emily asked, confused. “She’s near-comatose in her room with her head in the Matrix, as usual. How did you meet her?”
“Oh right!” I chucked. “Sorry, I’ve been on my feet all day and I guess I got stuck in a bit of a meatspace mindset. I swear I’d forget my own horns if they weren’t stuck to my head. Is there somewhere quiet around here where I can dive in?”
Emily looked at me like I’d grown a third head, but I couldn’t figure out what her deal was.
She’s a little too young to be a luddite, unless she’s a mage.
In the end, she sighed and muttered something under her breath before looking back up at me.
“Upstairs, the VIP floor. Just pick an empty booth and close the curtains; nobody will bother you.”
“Thanks,” I nodded before she immediately turned back to the club as the evening’s lights – but not the sound – came to life, filling the space with strobing lights in a way that looked really weird when it was so empty.
Most of the booths on the mezzanine floor that served as Palanquin’s VIP area were empty, but there were two that had curtains drawn tightly shut in front of them. I had to figure they were soundproofed somehow, not just because of the importance of having a private meeting but also because this part of the club had to get deafeningly loud when the night was in full swing.
I picked the furthest booth from the stairs and closed the curtains behind me. This close, I could see that they were made of some special material that stuck to itself when drawn shut, creating a seam between each curtain rather than leaving them loose. I doubted it was designed to stop people opening them, but it would stop them drifting open of their own accord and that was good enough for me.
So I slumped down as best I could on the couch, and let my body go slack as meatspace drifted away.
The moment I looked around the digital facsimile of the club, a familiar crow flittered into view. I held out an arm for it to perch on, my persona the same robed insectoid woman I tended to default to, and watched as it cocked its head at me before disappearing into the matrix with a burst of ephemeral data.
Labyrinth appeared moments later, her persona stepping through a wall that shimmered and frayed around her to create an opening. She’d changed her persona again; instead of the Greek robes she’d worn in the auction house or the flowing dress when I’d first met her she was dressed almost like a combat shaman, with a hooded cloak of black feathers worn over a deep green bodysuit. The hood of the cloak cast an impossibly deep shadow over her face.
“Bug,” she greeted me. “I was not expecting you.”
“I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry if you were busy, but I was hoping you could help me out.”
She paused for a moment, seemingly lost in thought. At first I thought she was debating what to say, but then I caught a glimpse of datastreams twisted around her fingers and I realised she was busy multitasking.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“It looks like I’m going to be Shadowrunning for the near future, at least,” I began, quickly in case she changed her mind, “and I want to help out my team how I can. That means getting better at hacking, but hacking doesn’t work for me like it does for people using technology and you’re the only other technomancer I know. So I was hoping you’d be willing to teach me something.”
“Faultline always says not to work for free,” Labyrinth replied, and for a brief moment she sounded so much less mystical; so much more like a kid seeking her parent’s approval. I couldn’t help but wonder how old she really was; her persona was that of a fully-grown elven woman, at least, but it’s not like that really indicated anything.
“That’s good advice,” I nodded, even as my heart sank. I was really hoping this would pan out. “I can pay you?”
“Your money does not mean much to me,” Labyrinth said matter-of-factly.
I guess it wouldn’t, if these guys were Prime Shadowrunners before they were fixers. I can’t afford her.
“Yeah, okay,” I sighed – a strange thing in the matrix. “I had to ask.”
I was just about to jack out when Labyrinth held out a hand for me to stop.
“Faultline has given me a task to complete. If you want to learn, you can come with me. Watch my back, pull your weight, and I will give you one lesson.”
“What’s the job?” I asked. “Wait, scratch that. What’s the lesson?”
“Does it really matter?” Labyrinth asked.
It didn’t take me long to decide.
“No, it doesn’t. I want to learn.”
“Then follow me,” Labyrinth said, before abruptly passing through yet another wall as she left the Palanquin. I followed in her wake as we passed over the city, moving around hosts and through seas of glittering datastreams that went unseen by the personas thronging the grid like swarms of fireflies.
As we drifted through the city, I couldn’t help noticing that something seemed different about Labyrinth. That ethereal air that always seemed to surround her wasn’t quite gone, but it was massively diminished. It took me a while to figure out why; I’d always seen her in digital domains she herself created. She’d spun the auction house into existence, and the same with Palanquin’s digital presence. Maybe that created a harmony between herself and her environment, one that was lacking now we were out in the open.
“How much experience do you have as a hacker?” Labyrinth asked, and even her voice sounded a little less than it did before. Less of an echo, though there was no audible difference. After all, the five senses didn’t exist in the matrix. There was only data in different forms, interpreted for mundane minds by hardware and for technomancers by whatever was up with our brains. The data that made up Labyrinth’s voice was still noticeably different from that created by software, but it lacked the reverberation caused as it harmonised with the environment around it.
“Not much,” I admitted. “I’ve hacked a lot of devices before, and lifted a few files, but I’ve not really gone much deeper than that.”
“Have you ever attacked a Host?”
“Is that what we’re doing?” I asked, fear and excitement rising from my core. “No, never. Well, not a proper host, with proper security.”
“Faultline wants to know how the Yakuza intend to capitalise on the unrest, so we’re infiltrating one of their hosts to acquire their orders.”
“Which host?” I asked.
“One of their larger operations. They purchased an employment agency in Japantown and use its host as cover for a brothel, as well as a hub for their activity in the neighbourhood.”
“So people visiting the host don’t draw attention because the low-paying clients look like they’re there for work, and the high paying clients look like they’re there for workers?” I asked.
“Presumably,” Labyrinth replied, clearly not interested in speculating.
We drifted back down to the tightly-packed data hubs that were the city’s streets. Our target was an unassuming host in the shape of an office block in miniature – though it was still about the size of a large house. It was probably an idealised representation of the physical building the shell company occupied. It was too late for any jobseekers, and too early for any brothel customers, so there was nobody around as we drew close to the host.
“So how does this work?” I asked, as we looked up at the building.
“When you hack a device, you need to mark it in order to fool it into thinking you have permission to access. Think of this building as the host’s icon and its gateway. You need to fool it into letting you in.”
I looked closer, shifting mental gears as I focused less on the set-dressing of the host’s appearance and more on the raw data that made it up. I watched the patterns of datastreams flowing in and out of the host as it connected with other distant points in the matrix and waved my fingers through one of them, letting the data flow over and through me as I tried to make sense of the pattern.
It was hard – definitely harder than I was used to. My reactions felt somewhat sluggish, a feeling I recognised. It was always harder to hack something that was physically further away, but that hadn’t mattered so much before because I was working on low-level security. Once I felt I had a firm grasp on it, I shifted my fingers so that I was brushing against the stream, and let some of the raw resonance that made up my incorporeal form stick to the stream, where it was carried into the host.
Maybe Grue has a point about getting closer. Not close enough to get shot, but there’s no point in working from home if it’s just going to make everything harder.
A small scarab mark appeared on the host, almost unnoticeable to anyone who wasn’t actively looking for it. Beside me, I felt an affirming burst of code from Labyrinth as she rested her palm against the host itself and pushed code into it. When she removed her palm, she left behind a green fractal maze-like pattern that almost hurt to look at, until I stopped looking at just the visual layer and saw the way it was intertwined with the host’s code.
“Everything we do sends out ripples,” Labyrinth said, almost to herself. “Projecting ourselves into the world sends out a few, as does interacting with that world in the expected ways, but when we change the world like this the ripples spread much further.”
She looked up, past the hosts and data traffic to the sky above.
“It draws the eyes of GOD.”
I felt a chill go through me, and instinctively looked around for dark figures in old-time suits.
“It is harder for them to track us than mundane users. Our minds don’t follow the same patterns a cyberdeck does, but that can be a double edged sword. If they do notice the pattern, it can act like a beacon.”
“And what happens if they find us?” I asked.
“They will converge on our location in force, and if it happens when we’re inside the host it will also inform the host’s owners of the location of… our bodies.”
This time, it was more like a stab of fear directly into my heart. I’d always thought I was safe in my apartment, that what happened in the Matrix would stay there.
“But we’re safe in the Palanquin, right?” I asked, suddenly glad I’d hiked across the city rather than finding a quiet corner of the gym.
“We are,” Labyrinth nodded, “but if the Yakuza become aware of our intrusion they will change their plans and the data will become useless.”
“Right, okay,” I said, psyching myself up. “So where do we go from here?”
Rather than answering me, Labyrinth simply stepped through the side of the office block, and I went to follow her.
For a brief moment, I felt an incredible sensation of weightlessness as my digital form passed from the local grid to the private host before it was abruptly lashed down by crude artificial physics made to represent the limitations of the real world.
Similarly, the host itself had been made to mimic the interior of a meatspace building, though I very much doubted the physical offices of this employment agency matched the faux-Japanese décor, with paper walls and mats on the floor. Ruining the image somewhat was the almost entirely Western furniture of the place, with office chairs around long meeting tables and little alcoves with plush armchairs – one for the employee, one for the client.
There were a few employees around, with simple personas sitting cross-legged in front of moving tapestries as they processed data. I was worried about being seen, but Labyrinth was already spinning a veil of pure resonance around us, masking our own personas from sight while letting us communicate with each other.
“Tell me what you see,” Labyrinth said, and I got the feeling she wasn’t just talking about the wallpaper.
So I let the set dressing fade from view and tried to see the host as raw data, taking in the different sub-networks that made up actual functions of the host, rather than the space those functions existed in.
“I think I see the brothel,” I said, looking at a number of systems that were only loosely tied to those of the employment agency. There was somewhat of a link, and I had a horrible feeling that some of the more vulnerable people who came here would be automatically referred to the other side of the business.
What’s more, I could see a clear dividing wall between the two spaces. It was solid enough to fool a cursory inspection, but anyone who actually went looking for it would find a firewall that slid open at the whims of an automated greeter programme – represented in the host’s architecture by a floor to ceiling painting of a geisha that would slide aside.
Looking closer at the myriad of devices that made up the host I saw that they weren’t just tied to the customer facing sides of the business. There was a system that managed the physical building’s facilities, with paired marks linking it to lights, temperature controls and magnetic locks. There was even a number of monitoring systems that I couldn’t quite make sense of, until I realised the data I was looking at registered the stress levels and heartbeats of the brothel’s employees, to use the term loosely. The more I thought about the implications of why they’d need that system, the more it sickened me.
So I pulled back a little and focused more on the devices themselves, rather than what they were linked to. That was when I noticed a common pattern among their marks. Each work terminal and alcove had dozens of marks, which I presumed meant the company practiced hot-desking in here, but very few of those marks also existed on the brothel’s systems, and only two had sway over the brothel, the agency and the facilities hub.
So I followed the trail of breadcrumbs, finding that the owner of one of those marks wasn’t in the matrix – probably the day’s general manager – while the other was here, but out of site. The fact that their mark was a pair of crossed red samurai swords just cinched it.
“I think they have a Spider,” I said.
“Then be careful you do not become caught in their web,” Labyrinth replied, and it took me a moment to realise she’d just made a joke.
“I can’t… I can’t figure out where they are,” I said, looking at the data. I knew there had to be more to the host – Labyrinth said this was a hub for their work in the area, but everything I’d seen so far had been limited to the legal and illegal functions of the physical building’s business. If I was a little closer, I might have been able to cut through the noise and see what was really there, but everything was just a little too blurry.
“I can see him,” Labyrinth said, nonchalantly. She held out a hand in front of her face as datastreams emerged from her palm, taking shape as her black crow sprite. She caressed its feathers as if it were a real pet rather than an extension of her will, and sent it out beyond our veil.
I followed its path as it slipped past the tapestry and into the wall, moving around the firewall in a pattern that was nonsensical even when viewed as pure data. Then it moved through a second wall, and I suddenly became aware of an entirely new segment to the host. One that no doubt held what we were looking for.
“You occupy the spider,” Labyrinth said. “I will find the file. Are you ready?”
I didn’t take a breath, because there was no air to breathe.
“Only one way to find out,” I said, as I spun together sprites of my own.