The next morning, I didn’t wake up when the first rays of the sun poked through my curtains, or to the shrill noise of an alarm clock. Part of that was because my bedroom didn’t actually have a window, but it was also because regular light and regular sound never seemed as real to me as the Matrix was. They couldn’t hold my attention like it could.
The longer I spent in the Matrix, the larger the footprint I left, the more I risked drawing attention to myself. In following Hellman, I’d leapt from device to device, leaving my mark across half the school. Winslow’s systems were kept on Brockton Bay’s local grid, and that kind of trail had the potential to draw the attention of the Grid Overwatch Division, sending them hunting after my virtual persona and trying to dig up my body’s location.
It was a small risk with a low-priority network like Winslow’s, but there could be some unusually dedicated DemiGOD out there who decided to take the bite.
So, every night before I went to sleep, I’d focus on my connection to the net and let all its brilliant datastreams fade away into nothing, essentially cutting myself off from the Matrix. Sleep generally came easily after that – I was essentially turning all the lights out in my brain, after all – and overnight my brain would reboot, for want of a better word, until I’d wake up when all that data came flooding back into my mind and I could face the day with a fresh – and legally clean – persona.
For normal people, cyberspace was something they had to go out of their way to interact with. Even if it was something as simple as switching their optics over to augmented reality, there was still a degree of separation between their meatspace senses and the digital ones. Without those implants, or a commlink or something, their brain wouldn’t be able to make sense of the data.
What set Technomancers apart – what set me apart – was that our brains were capable of interpreting that data on their own. There was no distinction in my mind between augmented reality and reality; between the icon on the wall showing the date, time and weather forecast and the worn synthwood desk covered in a decade’s worth of wear and tear. I saw both, and both were equally real.
As I walked to the kitchen to make myself an unsatisfying breakfast – probably out of the packet of ramen I’d ignored the night before – I couldn’t help seeing memories with every step. Dad’s memories were laid out in the photos on the wall – of him shaking hands with government officials in City and State halls, corporate executives in front of immense infrastructure projects, and oil-stained engineers down in the bowels of some machine room – and in the data on his computer.
I’d long since read through the entirety of the latter, and it had given me a clearer picture of my father than actually knowing him ever could have. Or rather, it completed the picture. I knew what he was like as a father, what he was like at home, but you don’t truly know a person until you know how they act in both public and private.
My dad’s files were an account of a long struggle, against rent payments, against discrimination, against every petty little obstacle in his path. It was a record of meetings, whip-rounds, covert sales and backroom deals, charting the changing character of the Dockworker’s Association as he and his friends slowly worked from the inside. The last files on the computer showed the fruit of all his labour; a Union by stealth, with its employees its biggest shareholders and a stranglehold over all non-Ares shipping in the city.
The last email he ever sent was a short note agreeing to meet with one of his major stakeholders, a woman he’d known for years. She wasn’t there, of course; the Marche were waiting for him instead, and he was cut down by mafia bullets.
Mom’s stuff was more neatly separated between work and pleasure. One wall of the living room was taken up by nothing but bookshelves, filled from end to end by paper copies of all sorts of literature. She had a digital library that held even more, along with all the files associated with her professor work for Brockton Bay University.
On a separate drive, she kept her work for the Ork Rights Commission – despite the name, they pulled double-duty as a troll advocacy group. Mom had been an active member of the polyclub since she was a university student herself, and her files were a long list of minutes from meetings, materiel for awareness campaigns, plans for protests and even a few files on a secret drive that detailed the work she’d done as ‘Ms Johnson,’ using the ORC’s covert funds to hire Shadowrunners in service of the cause.
I’d gone digging through the Knight Errant files, but as far as I could tell her death was exactly as it seemed. Distracted driving. It seemed a poor death for someone like her, but I told myself there was no such thing as a good way to die.
The last memories in the apartment were my favourite, because they were the memories where all three of us came together. Dad’s work photos took second place to photos of the three of us on a family holiday in Boston, or mom trying and failing to teach me to bake a cake, with more flour on the walls than in the bowl. There was a bring your child to work day photo of me using an industrial crane as a jungle gym, surrounded by a cluster of burly dockworkers who were clearly terrified and waiting to catch me when I inevitably fell.
Memories were all I had left of them, and all my memories were tied into this apartment. It’s why I couldn’t sell it, and it’s why I spent so much of my time trying to scrounge up enough money to keep it. The neighbourhood had gone downhill with the Association moving its offices closer to the city centre, and the rent had gone down with it, but it was still right next to the docks. Prime commuter territory for any number of junior managers or dockworkers with the kind of specialised skills that earned them a little more financial respect than their peers.
My life was defined by the three thousand five hundred nuyen I sent off to the landlord at the end of each month. I had an automated system sending the cash, and he had an automated system receiving it. I wasn’t even sure he knew who lived here, but I was fine with that.
If I missed a payment – even one – then it would flag on his system and he might actually start paying attention to me. Attention – of any kind – was the last thing I wanted, so most of my day was spent making sure I had money in the bank. Once I’d gathered enough to make the month’s payment, then anything left over would be spent on essentials. Never anything fancy. After all, if I wanted to try steak made from real cows then I could just hop into the Matrix and steal the experience from a virtual restaurant. The taste would be just as real.
I’d actually done that for a job once. A restaurant on the edge of town wanted to flesh out the menu in the VR mirror of their meatspace mirror, so had paid me some Nuyen to acquire ‘samples’ from around the city, scrub the files of their attached RFID tags, and hand them over to create an instant menu of food they’d never be able to supply in the meatspace restaurant. I think the plan was to lure people in with premium virtual food so they’d be suckered into spending more money on the ultimately disappointing meatspace fare. I kept copies of the files for my own personal use.
You’d be surprised how heavy the security can be on some real avocado on wheat-bread toast, and I didn’t even touch the city’s fanciest Matrix restaurants.
I was paid one thousand five hundred nuyen for that job – two hundred and fifty short of half a month’s rent for only three days of work. Most of my jobs paid significantly less than that, but they also involved significantly less work.
My bread and butter consisted of cleaning up tags on stolen property. Nobody wants a washing machine that doesn’t work because it’s supposed to be tied into the DRM software of the corp that built it, or a car that wouldn’t work if it was repaired with non-standard parts – meaning parts that hadn’t been bought at a premium from the manufacturer.
The turnover was never high – a couple of hundred nuyen at the higher end, and a couple of dozen at the lower – but I could wipe the security in a few hours, max, and do it all from the comfort of my own little corner of cyberspace, without the need to dig through unfamiliar hosts and dodge hostile ICE.
But to get paid, I had to find work first. So I finished my morning the same way I always did – by slumping bonelessly into an armchair and unshackling my persona from my body, casting myself out and into the Matrix.
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Most people who interacted with the net tended to make their persona a carbon copy of themselves, the occasional cleaning-up notwithstanding. This was because most people were boring. Given the chance to be anyone – anything – else, they chose to be a carbon-copy of themselves.
What my persona looked like changed almost every day, but I usually stuck to the same theme. Calling myself ‘Bug’ had initially started out as a joke. Back before I’d even heard of the term Technomancer, I used to think of myself as some sort of glitch in reality. Some bit of code that wasn’t quite playing right, was messing with systems I shouldn’t have been able to. So, Bug.
Consequently, most of my icons tended to be insect themed: a woman with chitin in place of skin and translucent wings growing out of her back; a swarm of wasps that would fly together in ways that suggested a metahumanoid shape; a silken woman manipulated by the threads of an ecology of spiders; even an oversized cartoon of a bee. When I accessed a device, I left a mark in the form of a stylised scarab – a digital trail that was an unavoidable part of life in the Matrix.
I drifted through the matrix, flying through the innumerable datastreams passing from icon to icon as each linked system communicated with each other. On the system below, I could see streams linking commlinks to shops as their owner walked past them, so that they could see at a glance where the nearest Stuffer Shack, gas station, gym or dive bar was and what their services cost. Longer streams tied servers to each other, with the largest stretching out of the city as they carried data elsewhere.
Most people who interacted with the Matrix filtered them out by default. Without the filters, the sheer number of datastreams would block out the stuff they actually wanted to see. From what I’d gathered, even deckers filtered them out unless they absolutely needed to see them for a job. It seemed incredibly limiting to me – like they were trying too hard to make the Matrix mirror meatspace – but, then, I’d never had any trouble seeing past the datastreams. Just another quirk of my biology, I supposed.
Some of these datastreams weren’t heading from device to device, or from the city to somewhere beyond it. A tiny fraction – maybe two or three in a million – instead drifted away from the glowing brilliance of the Matrix, falling down into the inky black abyss that surrounded the Brockton Bay grid. There was no natural light in the Matrix, no world to exist beyond that generated by its inhabitants. High-traffic areas were almost brilliantly bright with the weight of their dataflow, while more remote parts of the city had small pinpricks of light like constellations of stars.
But below the city, deep beneath where the physical ground would be, there were no devices to generate data, and so the city floated like an island of light over an immense abyss. Most people in the Matrix paid no attention to that void, others found it uncomfortable to look at, but I found it strangely calming. If I ever felt I needed to step back from reality, I’d slip into the Matrix and stare into its depths, watching stray data disappear into nothing.
I wasn’t interested in the abyss today. Instead I drifted through icons and hosts until I found myself in a network hub that received and transmitted hundreds of messages every second. I let the datastreams fade away and saw the space as its creators intended it to be seen; a bar on an immense scale with walls lined by individual nooks and booths, each containing a screen or screens that displayed scrolling text.
Hundreds of commlinks were connected to this host, their programming skipping the virtual space in favour of displaying their owner’s chosen forum directly onto the comm’s screen. The virtual space existed for those who were a little deeper into cyberspace, and wanted somewhere they could scroll without leaving the Matrix.
BayWatch was a message board service, local to Brockton Bay and largely dealing with regurgitating bulletins from the harbourmaster’s office on which ships and trains were coming when, providing social spaces for dockworkers to meet and gripe, along with anyone else who didn’t want to pay a premium for corp-owned social media, and hosting low-level help wanted ads on specific subforums.
A lot of them were either job adverts or people putting their resumes out there to see who’s hiring. Others were simpler tasks like someone offering ten nuyen to anyone who could help them carry a new flatscreen up to their nineteenth floor apartment – apparently the elevator was busted. Some of the boards were dedicated to tech requests, and those were the ones on which I made my bread and butter.
Most of them weren’t worth the data they were printed on – they’d either take too long for the money to be worth it, or the request was made by someone who clearly hadn’t the slightest idea what technology was actually capable of – and I’d long since become used to filtering out the wheat from the chaff.
The jobs on offer today were poor at best. There were a couple of desperate attempts to remove the ownership details from stolen property, which I’d normally be alright with but they were asking for someone who could unlock some smartweapons. Guns were much too hot to handle – particularly for the money on offer. Other jobs were longer term, like someone asking for a skilled coder who could give their new fast food joint a proper VR presence. I’d taken on that sort of contract before, but not for that sort of money.
There was one job that grabbed my attention, in the same way that a poisonous frog might grab attention with its brightly-coloured skin.
»Subject: Tech Support. Skilled hacker needed for one-off job. Must be able to operate in a high-stress environment. 3,000N¥ on completion of job. Send a message,«
- Tt (08:56:27/15-2-70)
Obviously the pay was what first caught my eye. Almost an entire month’s rent for a single job was the sort of thing that sounded too good to be true, which meant it usually was. Still, that was more money than I’d ever seen offered for a single job on this board before, and the job itself was a lot more vague, too. People were generally upfront about what they wanted doing.
Naturally, the money had drawn quite the crowd. A dozen different wannabee deckers had already thrown their hat in the ring, but I couldn’t help noticing something about the responses. The thread had been up for almost two hours now, and yet the job was still open. It was possible that ‘Tt’ hadn’t come back to the thread yet, but four of the responses had been posted within half an hour of the original message. If it was important, surely they’d have stuck around for that long?
The last post was someone condemning the whole thing as a hoax, but I was growing increasingly curious. So I let the virtual dive bar fade away, and saw the Matrix as it really was. If I focused, I could see the marks of all the devices that had interacted with this board, hidden within the code of their messages. There was no such thing as anonymous interaction, not truly. Everything left a mark.
It didn’t take me long to find the mark left by Tt’s post – a stylised eye with a slit pupil. It was recent, meaning they’d been on the site since the message was sent, but there were no datastreams connecting them to any of the people who’d posted on the thread. They hadn’t spoken to any of them, no matter what resumes they’d listed. In fact, Tt had gone further; their account on the site was set to block all incoming messages.
That was what reconceptualised the offer in my mind. If it was a trap or a prank, they would have made themself as accessible as possible. Instead, they clearly didn’t want to be contacted.
No, that’s not right, I thought. They said ‘send a message.’
Three thousand nuyen was enough to mean I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of the month, and, with what I’d already gathered since the last payment, it would leave me with more than enough left over to actually treat myself for once. This was looking more promising by the second, and all I had to do was accept Tt’s invitation.
Everything in the Matrix left a trace, no matter how hard it might be to follow. It was simply a matter of using the trail to find the source, and I could find an excellent tracker. A quick glance at the virtual bar showed that the other personas’ attentions were firmly fixed on their own browsing. I reached out to the Matrix itself – to the resonant harmonics of its datastreams – and plucked raw data out of the air, weaving and compiling it into what looked for a moment like a kludgy mismatch of code fragments and data snippets before it seemed to curl in on itself and take shape as a luminescent dragonfly.
The sprite was a persona without any machine on the other end. It was a creature of the Matrix, with no presence whatsoever in meatspace. A Ghost in the Machine. It was life made by my hands, and with the compound insectoid eyes I gave it, it was a creature made to seek and find.
I held it in the hand of my persona, bringing it up to look at the mark left by Tt’s device. I could feel its attention latch onto the small piece of data, as well as something close to eagerness as it waited for instructions. I let it skitter around my hand and onto my arm, bringing it up so I could speak to it directly.
“Find the owner of this mark,” I commanded, “and send me its trace.”
The dragonfly’s wings unfurled and it took flight, flitting in-between personas as it darted out of the bar and into the wider Matrix. It would hunt for other marks left by the same device, and gradually build up a picture of its movements. Once it had found the persona, it would contact me before vanishing back into the resonance.
The process took hours, and I used the time to clear the copy protection on a whole folder of bootlegged films, but eventually I received a datastream from my sprite. It had found Tt’s commlink, and the persona attached to it. She presented herself in the Matrix as an almost painfully beautiful blonde elven woman, with her hair worn down and a third eye open on her forehead. Her persona wore a skintight black outfit with a purple eye on her chest – fashion in the Matrix was less constrained by real-world norms. The same slit-pupiled symbol as her mark. Something about her screamed Shadowrunner, but I’d already come this far.
I sent the message.
»Re: Subject: Tech Support. Interested in the job.«
- Bug (12:34:51/15-2-70)
The response came back in seconds.
»Welcome aboard. We should meet. Come find me at 2pm.«
- Tt (12:35:01/15-2-70)