I didn’t hear from Grue or Tattletale again until the next night, when I got a message from Tattletale out of the blue while I was busy watching pirated trideo.
»Hey, Bug! Could use a hand with some tech stuff, if you’re free.«
- Tt (23:49:13/16-2-70)
Her commlink was pinging me from somewhere south of the docks, in the part of the city where the Yakuza tended to operate. She actually wasn’t all that far from me, physically speaking, even if my neighbourhood had gentrified a bit over the last decade. More important than that was the fact that she was pinging me from inside a hotel – the Osaka Palace – that wasn’t hosted on the public grid.
»Need a moment to access the metro grid.«
- Bug (23:49:23/16-2-70)
»Decker things, say no more.«
- Tt (23:49:31/16-2-70)
Technically, the Matrix was free for all. In reality, that only applied to the public grid, a world-wide web put together by the architects of the new Matrix largely so that they could say it was free, and so that even the most illicit activity still happened somewhere they could watch.
In reality, most civilised members of society interacted with the world through one of innumerable private or semi-private grids. Some of these were corporate owned and boasted access across the world, while others were set up by local municipalities. If a business was only on the public grid, it was seen as second class, and the same applied to the people who exclusively used it.
The Osaka Palace was on the Brockton Bay municipal grid. It was a mid-range place at best, but even mid-range comes with its own expectations and codes of conduct. If I wanted to do more than send text messages to Tattletale without exhausting myself, I’d need to access that grid – which I couldn’t do legally because it was an expense I hadn’t wanted to take on before now.
So I paused at the threshold, looking at the gateway to the municipal grid – shaped like the arch of a dockyard crane. I reached out for the datastreams around me, drawing them into myself rather than using them to form a sprite. I twisted them into motion, spinning them around myself until they took shape as a complex form.
For a moment, I felt as if I was a spider perched at the centre of an immense web, stretching out datastreams to anchor myself across the entire Matrix, without regard for the flimsy boundaries of the different grids. The effort of spinning this form was draining, and I could feel myself fading ever so slightly as I exerted my will on the Matrix itself. I’d already spent all day in the Matrix, and my physical and digital bodies were both tired.
Still, it was more than worth it as I drifted through the halls of the hotel like I belonged there, ignored by the security ICE programmes – in the form of simple geometric shapes – while I cast my senses out through the matrix, looking for any sign of a security Spider. There was nothing, which meant the hotel was too cheap to hire a decker to watch its host, instead relying on automated systems and occasional check-ups. Perfect.
The Osaka Palace wasn’t much to look at. Its host was laid out like the meat-space version, presumably, but all the graphics were very low-poly, like an impressionist painting of the real thing. Clearly it wasn’t somewhere that saw many Matrix visitors, and even a semi-regular security Spider would have spruced the place up a little – if only for the sake of their sanity.
Tattletale’s signal was coming from room five-thirteen, a double-bed space with an en-suite bathroom and not much else. It’s nightly rate was reasonable for this part of town, but I couldn’t help noticing that the electronic door lock had been opened by a staff key, rather than receipt of payment.
Tattletale’s commlink was resting near the middle of the room, probably where the bed was, and there was another commlink nearby. That was almost it as far as devices went, though the room’s lights could be wirelessly adjusted, as could the trideo screen mounted on the wall. Tattletale’s AR sunglasses were nowhere to be seen, but she had accessorised with what looked like a vibration-based speaker and a similar microphone. From their signature, I could see they were wafer-thin and meant to blend into the skin of her neck and behind her ears.
“So what am I looking at?” I asked through the speaker.
“Mean to say you can’t see it?” Lisa asked.
“I see the comm’s icon, but hotels don’t put cameras in the rooms.”
“Eh, you’d be surprised,” Lisa replied, and I got the impression she was shrugging her shoulders. “But I see your point. Here, have a look.”
Her comm’s icon moved upwards, and I took control of its inbuilt camera, streaming its feed right into my vision.
The décor in the hotel room leaned a lot more towards opportunistic one-night-stands than the kind of place someone would stay in on a business trip. The sheets were red and had a plasticky sheen that was probably supposed to look silky, while the floor was mostly easy-clean red carpeting. More noticeably, there was a guy slumped over by the end of the bed, his face planted in the carpet and his fortunately fully-clothed ass in the air.
Tattletale spun the camera around, and I saw her lying back on the bed itself, wearing a lilac cocktail dress underneath a waist-length syn-leather jacket topped by a faux-fur collar. She’d dyed her hair red, and there was a confident grin on her face. From the fact she was still wearing the jacket and heels, I guessed she’d probably knocked the guy out the moment they were alone. She was also still wearing her necklace, with the slit-pupiled eye looking up at me.
I took control of her comm’s screen, replacing the mirror image of her with a different avatar, this one of a vaguely female form buried beneath silken robes that covered her from head to toe, with spiders crawling among the folds.
“So, what’s up?” I asked.
“Lightweight over there is a Yakuza foot soldier who’s involved in their raids to snatch containers, something he clearly thought would impress the pretty elf at the club – who, of course, was just out to get laid.”
I shook my head. “Typical.”
“Hey, a stereotype can make a great weapon if you use it right,” Tattletale said with another shrug of her shoulders. “You wouldn’t believe how much information I’ve managed to squeeze out by playing up the nymphomaniac elf routine. Besides” – she gestured to the comatose man at the end of the bed – “it got him here, alone.”
“Which is when you put him to sleep.”
“Exactly! Normally this is the point where I’d rob the guy blind, swipe his commlink, and take it to someone who knows how to decrypt it, but since I’ve got your number I figured I’d cut out the middlewoman. Then lightweight wakes up tomorrow morning with a head full of warm fuzzy feelings and a distinct smell of alcohol on his clothes.”
“Alright,” I said, shifting my attention to the second commlink in the room. “I can take a look.”
Of course, when I said I, I really meant a sprite. I reached out for the tangled skeins of data that passes through the hotel’s host, gathering and twisting them together into a cohesive shape. Tattletale’s faint digital presence had me thinking more about what I was doing; I knew I could do more than a decker, was more than a decker, and I guess some people might have called it digital magic. I wasn’t sure it was that simple.
The dragonfly I’d used to track her comm was what I’d come to call a courier sprite. It’s multi-lensed eyes were great for hunting down specific targets, and it’s wide wings and narrow body allowed it to travel effortlessly through the matrix, relaying data to a target or back to me. The sprite I was weaving to break into lightweight’s comm was different; a relentless woodlouse that would slowly but surely chew through any security in its path, but that lacked mobility as a result.
I wasn’t sure where their forms came from – whether I was consciously making them that way or my subconscious was taking over. I hadn’t spent much time on the few Technomancer forums out there – I was afraid they were traps meant to draw us out of hiding – but I’d seen some people had an almost shamanic attitude to their sprites, like they were spirits bestowed upon them by some patron deity. I thought that was too limiting a view, and one rooted in a very magical view of the world that was incompatible with the Matrix.
The woodlouse flew from my outstretched hand – unconstrained by the physical limitations of its assumed form – and landed on the commlink, where it began steadily unspooling the tightly-wound chains that secured its secrets. I whispered to it through gentle streams of data, slowing its pace to avoid unintentionally triggering any alarms. We had time to wait.
“Once I’m in,” I said to Tattletale, “I’ll copy any relevant data onto your commlink.”
“Can’t you store it on your deck?” she asked, and I instinctively froze.
Regular hackers had to interact with the matrix through a datajack and a cyberdeck, crude augmentations that provided by technological means what I could do simply by thinking, but the one thing they had that I didn’t was a hard drive. In a way, I guess it was a blessing. Given the ability to edit my own internal memory, I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to resist the temptation.
“You’ve been doing all the hard work,” I flubbed. “I figure you should be the one who gets to bring the data to your team. Take the prize.”
“Huh, thanks,” she said, as I desperately wracked my brain, hunting for a way to draw her attention onto other things.
“So, what’s with the necklace?” I asked. “Only you have the same sign on your VR persona. And your commlink’s mark.”
“Perceptive, aren’t you?” she said with a chuckle. “But sure, I’ll bite. How much do you know about mages?”
“Only what I’ve-”
“Seen on trideo, right,” she cut me off, graciously leaving the ‘you need to get out more’ unspoken. “Well, one of the things you might have seen in your sanitized, sensationalised drek is the idea of a mentor spirit.”
I thought back for a moment. “Yeah, I think it’s come up a couple of times. Voices in your head, that sort of thing?”
Tattletale laughed. “You make me sound crazy, but honestly, you’re not far off? This” – I didn’t need to see her to know she was holding up her pendant – “is a symbol of my link to Snake. Some people like to think of their spirits as guardians, but I say it’s more transactional than that. Snake keeps me safe, helps me work, and in return I keep her well fed.”
“I assume you’re not talking about the occasional dead mouse,” I joked.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Secrets, Bug,” Tattletale responded, sounding deadly serious. “I feed Snake secrets. The less well known, the more carefully guarded, the better. So I hunt them down, no matter where it takes me or who it might piss off if I’m caught.”
I paused for a moment.
“I have to say, that sounds like a compulsion.”
“Maybe it is,” she admitted, “but I know you’re a borderline agoraphobe, so you don’t have much of a leg to stand on there.”
“I’m not afraid of open spaces,” I replied, defensively. “I just don’t need to go out. I can work fine remotely, can order groceries from my nearest Stuffer Shack. Everything I need is in the Matrix.”
“Except it’s not the space you’re afraid of,” Tattletale responded, cryptically, but I was saved from answering her as my sprite chimed up, having finished unlocking the commlink.
“I’m in.”
Windows opened up in front of me, a branching web of file directories and message logs. One caught my eye, but not for the reasons I was expecting.
“Got a secret for you,” I said. “Lightweight here has been writing a film script.”
“Ooh, interesting.” Tattletale preened with predatory glee. “Not the sort of thing he’d be bragging about to his street-gang buddies. It any good?”
“Got an elevator pitch. Um, ‘Mai Murai is a regular in the New York nightclub scene, with an easy laugh, a love of the crowd, and a body to die for.’ And then there’s an ellipsis, followed by ‘literally’ and an exclamation mark.”
Tattletale was clearly relishing every word, if her laugh was any indication.
“Let me guess, vampire?”
“Quiet down; you’re ruining the flow of the pitch. ‘This sweet-talking razorgirl has a dark secret, of the vampiric kind, and when it’s exposed she finds herself on the run from a team of shadowrunners, but is there more to their leader than meets the eye?’”
“Another vampire?” Tattletale asked, eagerly, and I quickly started skimming the script.
“Nope. Looks like he’s just hot. And an expy of the author, of course.”
Tattletale’s laughter gradually trailed off into smug chuckles, while I set the script aside.
“A hidden masterpiece that’s only masterful so long as it’s never seen by anyone besides the author. That’s a good secret, Bug. Anything else on there?”
I flicked through the file directory, unfolding new webs of data as I sifted through the comm’s operating system, muttering to myself and Tattletale in equal measure.
“Pics of a bike, pics of a girl, pics of lightweight and the girl, girl on the bike, mutual nudes, more pics of bikes. Let’s see… recent texts from his mother, from his dealer, breakup text from the girl – hard luck, lightweight.”
I switched my attention from the files to the comm’s programmes, and immediately struck gold.
“Now this looks promising.”
“What does?” Tattletale asked.
“‘The Anarchist’s Phonebook.’ Looks like some sort of messaging programme with end-to-end encryption.”
“Can you crack it?”
“Don’t need to,” I replied, with a little smugness of my own. “End to end, remember, and this is one of the ends.”
I pulled apart the app, ignoring the front-facing messaging feature in favour of digging through the comm logs collected by the app as a matter of course. I could see a web of illicit work unfolding in front of me, and I felt like a true professional before a hidden programme within the app initialised, and I was confronted by an image of an old fashioned cartoon bomb with a lit fuse and a digital clock on its front, counting down from ten.
“Oh fuck.” I murmured.
“Oh fuck?” Tattletale asked, panicked – though I barely heard her. “‘Oh fuck’ doesn’t sound good.”
I dug into the bomb, finding a simple numerical lock backed up by fiendishly complex code. If I was whoever set this up, I could input the right combination at the speed of thought. As it was, I could only frantically yet futilely dig at the code while the numbers steadily ran down. The number hit zero, and I almost jerked back as a stab of pain shot through me. It wasn’t enough to kick me out, but it hurt like hell and I knew I’d feel it later.
“Data bomb hidden within the code,” I said, futilely watching as a single datastream slipped past my code and out of the hotel, travelling out into the city. “Think it sent an SOS.”
“Fuck the SOS,” Tattletale snapped. “What’s in the logs?”
I abandoned subtlety entirely, pulling apart the file directory of the hidden app like I was frantically tearing apart an office in search of gold.
“Got it.” I said, triumph seeping past my urgency. “Escort route from the raid to the storage warehouse. Transferring to your comm.”
As an afterthought, I gathered together a file on lightweight’s drug running routes as well, hoping that it would be enough of an obfuscation to get the Yakuza to write this off as a raid by rival dealers.
“Tattletale, you need to get out of there,” I said, as I spotted a steady stream of data broadcasting from the comm. “Comm’s sending exact location data, down to the meter.”
“Okay,” Tattletale replied, doing a good job of hiding her panic – if she was even feeling any. “I’ll need your eyes; I’m unarmed.”
“You went after a Yakuza lieutenant, unarmed?” I asked, incredulously, even as I left the hotel room and soared through the walls and floors of the hotel like they weren’t even there, hunting for the security office on the ground floor.
“I couldn’t find a piece that matched the dress,” Tattletale snarked back.
The hotel’s CCTV system was as utilitarian as the rest of the place, with occasional inputs that told me someone in meatspace was monitoring it. That was encouraging, even if it complicated things. More to the point, there was no sign of an alert yet.
Might have seconds, but seconds are all I need.
The system was old and poorly maintained, and I was able to slip in my own data among the incoming feeds from the wireless cameras, tricking the monitors into showing a loop while relaying the real feeds straight to my brain.
Suddenly, I was bombarded by the images of sixteen different cameras across the entire hotel, from the garage to the rooftop. It stretched my consciousness, drawing upon my persona until it felt like I was fading slightly, losing my connection to the Matrix. With an effort of concerted will, I was able to wrest control of my mind and keep my hold on the surveillance system.
Immediately, I had every member of staff tagged. There were twelve in the building in total, not including whoever was behind the CCTV console, but only three were obviously security – a guard on the door, a bouncer in the bar, and a lone guard grabbing a bite to eat in a staff break room. Two of the three were armed, though the orc bouncer looked like he could get by with his immense fists alone.
Tattletale wasn’t being idle. She was on her commlink, frantically calling someone marked down as ‘Bitch’ – which I chose to believe was a Shadowrunner handle rather than a character assessment – as she made her way to the lift at the end of the hall.
As I watched, an incoming datastream slipped past my hold on the security system, and the guard behind the console immediately started contacting his associates on the comms. The guard on the door stayed where he was, but the bouncer and the guy in the break room left their posts and made their way into the halls.
Surprisingly, an elf woman behind the bar started moving as well, ducking behind the counter and emerging with a submachine gun. Her and the bouncer were both dressed in sleek blazers, but below the waist she wore a miniskirt that displayed legs covered from top to bottom in Yakuza tattoos. The pair nodded to each other as they left the bar, moving for the elevator.
“Tattletale, skip the lift,” I said, urgently. “Got two guards moving up, one armed.”
“Stairs it is, then,” she replied. “Think you can slow them down?”
I reached out past the security centre, my mind reeling again as I focused on maintaining my connection to the cameras while I moved my persona out into the hallway, close enough to snatch control of the elevator mechanism. I watched through the elevator’s camera as the two guards got in, letting the doors close behind them before sealing it shut and sending it on a journey to nowhere – or, more specifically, to halfway between the top floor and the one below it.
“They’re slowed,” I said, “but they don’t know it yet.”
The other guard – the one from the break room – had moved to cover the delivery entrance to the hotel, his gun drawn as he tried to simultaneously watch the entrance and the exit. The guard in the security centre still had his eyes on the screen – I’d been selectively editing the feed to show the guards movements, but not Tattletale’s. It wouldn’t hold up much longer, though.
“Oh shit!”
Tattletale’s panicked shout immediately drew my attention away, but she was out of sight of the CCTV system. A moment later, I saw her slamming open the stairwell door on the floor below. She turned back for just long enough to throw her high heels at some unseen target before sprinting barefoot down the corridor.
A moment later, a truly immense troll battered aside the door as it was swinging shut, ducking to get his horns underneath the door before barrelling down the corridor like a charging rhinoceros.
“Bug!” Tattletale shouted, the ponderous footfalls of her pursuer audible in the background of her audio.
Frantically, I took in all the cameras at a glance, my subconscious outpacing my mind as I noted the distance between Tattletale and the elevator in the middle of the corridor, and the two goons stuck a few floors above, who by this point had realised their predicament and were trying to pry open the elevator doors.
“Elevator!” I shouted, even as I pulled at datastreams, tugging on the elevator like it was a marionette. It was brute force hacking, and I could feel my presence in the Matrix fading from the effort of it all as I overrode safety after safety.
I let the lift plummet five floors, then nearly burnt out the motors as I brought it to a jarring halt only a few inches off from being perfectly aligned with Tattletale’s floor. The thugs inside had first been lifted up by the negative g of the drop, then slammed into the floor by the force of the brakes.
It had knocked the elf out, and the ork was dazed enough that he wouldn’t be an issue.
I let the doors open a couple of feet, and watched through the camera as Tattletale practically dove into the lift, using the ork to catch her momentum before rolling off him and shuffling backwards.
The moment she was clear I closed the elevator doors, and the troll was unable to stop himself in time to do anything about it as I sent the elevator downwards at a brisk – but still safe – pace.
“Couldn’t have warned me about the troll, Bug?” Tattletale snapped.
“There’s no cameras in the stairwell,” I said back, paradoxically breathless with digital fatigue. “What was he even doing there?”
Tattletale jerked her head back in frustration, hitting the metal wall of the elevator, before pulling herself up to her feet.
“Fucking smoker sneaking a puff. I could smell it on him.”
She gingerly moved the bartender’s submachine gun away from her with a foot, but didn’t pick it up herself.
“You’ve still got three guards on the ground floor,” I said.
Tattletale sighed, her formerly perfect poise gone as she bent over, resting her hands on her knees and breathing heavily. Then she straightened herself up, checked her expression in the mirror, and her resolve seemed to return.
“The others aren’t far. Think these doors can stop gunfire?”
“You’re the Shadowrunner,” I said. “Two of them have pistols, the third has another submachine gun. The troll could probably force them open, but he’s got five flights of stairs to descend.”
“We’ll risk it.” She turned to the semi-conscious ork, stretching out an arm and launching a ball of energy into him, the brief burst of magic messing with the camera feed for a millisecond. His eye’s closed and he slumped over, properly unconscious now.
The next thirty seconds was maybe the tensest half a minute I’d ever experienced, even though I myself wasn’t in any physical danger. Maybe it was because of that danger that I was having trouble treating this as just another job, but as the three gangsters tried to force open the doors with a crowbar, I found myself unable to look away from Tattletale, who still seemed unphased.
In the end, it was a sudden burst of movement on the lobby’s camera that caught my attention. Like a lot of hotels, the lifts were set into the back of an open-plan lobby, behind a reception desk and a decorative sculpture of a Japanese castle that would be the first thing people saw when they stepped through the doors.
The doors at the front of the lobby were glass, and they shattered beautifully as a grey panel van reversed through them, crushing the flimsy plastic castle before coming to a halt just before the reception desk.
The rear doors of the van opened, and the lobby was immediately filled with gunfire as a GM-Nissan Doberman drone rolled out the back of the van on tracked wheels, already firing it’s machine gun into the lobby. I could see the network it was part of – linked to the van itself and another couple of drones stored in the back – but the encryption on it was fiendishly tight. It was all tied to the driver, but she was outside the camera’s view.
The three gangsters dove behind the reception desk, but the Doberman’s bullets cut through their cover like it wasn’t even there. Within moments all three of them had been hit, and one of them was definitely dead.
I’d never seen someone die before, and I knew it should have horrified me, but I could have cheered in relief as all the tension drained out of me. I let the elevator doors open, and watched as Lisa ran across the lobby, one foot landing in a pool of blood as she vaulted over the reception and dove into the back of the van. The Doberman trundled in after her, before the van doors slammed shut with a pulse of data from the Rigger’s implanted control rig.
As a final fuck you, I let go of my stranglehold on the hotel’s emergency lockdown, and heavy steel shutters clattered down over the shattered doors just in time for the troll to stagger breathlessly out of the stairwell, with nothing waiting for him but a bloodbath and a locked room.
“Thanks for the save,” Tattletale said, her voice shaking a little. I couldn’t tell if it was elation, stress or fear.
“Bitch,” she continued, catching me off guard, “meet Bug. Bug, this is Bitch; the best Rigger in the city.”
The ‘best Rigger in the city’ just grunted, her attention focused on her drones and her ride. Or she was just living up to her namesake. Either way, I could feel fatigue pulling at my persona. I’d exerted myself more than ever before in that hotel, and my presence in the Matrix had faded because of it. I needed to step back, gather my strength. Especially since I knew the actual job would be even harder.
So I said my goodbyes to Tattletale, telling her to message me when it was time to go, and gathered the last of my presence into a simple bedbug with instructions to wake me when that message came through. Then I pulled back from the Matrix, not even seeing Meatspace before I fell asleep right there in the armchair.