“Regent!”
Grue shouted out even as he dove to one side to avoid the troll charging down on him, his fingers replaced by razor-sharp claws and his already significant musculature enhanced by an exoskeleton drilled into the bone.
Regent responded by taking a step to one side and clicking his fingers again, except this time the gesture seemed to carry a lot more weight to it – the sound of it was harsher, like an audio glitch. Through the periphery of Bitch’s cybereyes, I saw the air around Regent shimmer and distort in a digital haze until suddenly there was a figure standing next to him; a Greek Adonis with cracked stone skin that seemed to shift unnaturally, its feet seemingly planted on the ground by choice than any ties to the laws of gravity. The effect it had on Bitch’s camera was… strange, the image subtly distorted as if the machinery was only grudging admitting it existed.
I caught a brief glimpse of its stone face, locked in an angry rictus, before Regent waved it forward with a dismissive gesture. The spirit charged straight into one of the enhanced orks, bowling him over before attempting to stave his head in. The female ork switched its attention from the Shadowrunners, turning her arm-mounted submachine gun on the living statue instead.
“Don’t… Don’t kill them.” I managed to force the words out through the pain. “They’re victims.”
“Might not have a choice, Bug,” Grue said, even as he drew his heavy pistol and tried to unload the rest of the magazine into the troll, only for the weighty rounds to fly off course. His smartlink had been hacked.
I tried to gather myself, forcing my persona to my feet as a psychological shorthand for drawing the streams of data that made up my virtual form back together. I reached out into the matrix and pulled, spinning strands into a trio of wasps before sending them to harass Bakuda’s persona.
The trio of sprites compiled sequences of their own, generating an electron storm that engulphed Bakuda, shrouding her from sight behind the electric-blue tornado even as it wore away at her form like a belt sander.
It wasn’t enough to stop her, but it would slow her down enough to let me get my head back in the game. The Shadowrunners were almost overwhelmed, with Tattletale forced to duck and weave beneath the extended blades of the last ork while Grue was gradually being battered into submission by a troll.
Regent’s spirit was just about holding its own, but Bitch’s Doberman had been scrapped by gunfire and the woman herself was in cover behind a pillar, firing at the puppets with the submachine gun in her arm while she called up her other Doberman from where it had been watching the van.
I reached out for the resonance again, stretching myself to compile another spirit. A spider this time; a black widow. The effort of it drained me almost as far as I could go, and I knew I’d feel it when I left the Matrix. Still, it worked, and I flung the spider at the ork attacking Tattletale.
In the Matrix, the four combat cyborgs were exaggerated parodies of their meatspace forms, with the flesh minimised in favour of emphasising the chrome. Each bore Bakuda’s mark on their torso, neck or cheek – the same cartoon bomb I’d seen on lightweight’s commlink.
The ork had jammed a blade through Tattletale’s jacket, pinning her to the ground as it lined up another with her throat. The spider dug its legs into the back of the beast, stripping away its defences while the cyborg’s mistress was occupied and causing it to malfunction. The cyborg’s blades retracted back into its arms as the motors spun out of control, burning out in a shower of sparks and rendering the weapons useless. At the same time, Tattletale crawled backwards and held out a hand, firing a stunbolt into the cyborg that overwhelmed its organic components. It toppled over, unconscious for the time being.
My eye was drawn right back to the Matrix as the electron storm dissipated, the three wasps shrinking backwards with great wounds torn into their code. Bakuda herself hadn’t escaped unscathed – her cloak was ragged and frayed – but the lenses of her gas mask were glowing with an even greater intensity.
I stood up, the flowing silk robes of my persona dropping into nothingness as they faded away to reveal a bipedal Arachne, formed from chitinous brown plates and with a quartet of spindly limbs jutting out of her back. I gathered myself into that form, loading complex forms of resonance into each taloned finger or razor-sharp spider leg.
I drove the legs into the digital ‘floor’ of the space, raising my body upwards even as the limbs drew in the surrounding datastreams, weaving them around my persona like a web. At the same time I recalled my fault sprites, and the trio of wasps began circling me as they awaited my command.
“Fancy,” Bakuda chuckled, even as she reinforced her own defences. “But it’s style over substance, Bug.”
I didn’t respond, driving my limbs into the virtual ground as I slowly swept forward. She was right, of course. Personas were just visual white-noise; a necessary feature to help the metahuman brain make sense of the digital world. Somewhere in the city, Bakuda was using technology to make sense of it in a different way. She had an implant hooked into her brain that took in the raw data and made it understandable.
But I had no such limitations. I used a persona because it was expected of me, but I never really saw it as a necessity the way everyone else did. If Bakuda was watching the datastreams rather than the Arachne in front of her – like I was – she’d have seen the sprite that slipped past her and latched onto her cyborg troll.
As it was, she only noticed once it was finished digging through the troll’s defences and importing gremlins into its cyberware, causing it to miss a swing that would have pulped Grue’s skull.
She turned in shock at being blindsided, and that was when I pounced. I drove a limb into her back, the tip loaded with a resonance spike that injected esoteric data into her persona, tricking the device with logical impossibilities and nonsensical information that overheated it even while spinning the fans out of control. Short of finding her in meatspace and shooting her in the face, the only way to deal with a Decker was to brick the device they were using.
She rebounded quickly, a skeletal limb darting out of her cloak as she tried to hit me with a data spike of her own, only to hit a sprite that I’d brought up to block the blow instead. As it withered and died, its code spilling out into the resonance, Bakuda jabbed out with a second limb and this time managed to catch me. The same junk data that would have damaged a machine ran rampant through my brain, the attached biofeedback causing synapses to burst. While I was in VR, I couldn’t feel the physical damage, but I knew there was only so long I could last.
So I leapt back, sending the two remaining wasps to harass her even as I weaved datastreams around myself, layering them into armour that protected me at the cost of restricting my ability to move unhindered as I tethered myself to the passing data, using it to offload the lingering effects of her spike.
Bakuda hit hard, and she hit lethally. I couldn’t risk getting close to her again, so I started to slowly shuffle backwards, roughly dragging another wasp out of the resonance even as I saw the edges of my persona start to fray back into raw data as I cannibalised myself to give it life.
It went to join the other two, and they darted around Bakuda. She couldn’t hit them, but they couldn’t do much to her either. Like me, she’d pulled together a defence that was more than enough to blunt their stings to the point where the damage was negligible. I’d surprised her once, but I wouldn’t be able to do it again.
Not unless I stopped thinking like a brute-force Decker and started fighting like a Technomancer.
A sudden realisation ran through me like an electric shock, and I focused my attention not on her persona but on the strands of data linking it to her distant body like marionette wires. I reached out, drawing on those wires and clouding them with false data. I took advantage of all those systems that worked to make the unreal understandable, disconnecting them from reality with a heavy veil of resonance even as I loaded up my own information.
She saw my persona lunging for an attack, and responded to a blow that didn’t actually exist. As she danced with shadows, I set the one surviving wasp onto her back and had it sting. While she fought shadows, and my spider disabled the female cyborg, that wasp slowly filled her data with poison and ate away at her persona, burning out her device as her defence became all the more frantic, desperate and futile.
And then she was gone, booted out of cyberspace with nothing but a crippling headache and a bricked cyberdeck for her troubles. The digital attack had ended as quickly as it came, with only the physical fight still ongoing.
One of the male orks was unconscious, and my spider had managed to shut down the woman’s cybernetics, but even half-disabled the troll was still managing to threaten Grue. So, with a whispered apology, I drove a resonance spike into its cybernetics and crashed the governor system running the bunraku software. The troll collapsed, and I could feel the mind beneath the software stirring. He was terrified, the software told me – locked into a body that no longer felt familiar – but I couldn’t risk any further alterations to the bunraku system. If I messed up, I could leave him permanently paralysed or braindead.
Miraculously, all the cyborgs were still alive, though the ork girl’s inbuilt biomonitor was reporting several bullet wounds that would need attention at some point. The biomonitor of the only ork I hadn’t touched, however – the one Regent’s spirit had been fighting – was dangerously close to flatlining, and I quickly pulled up the available camera feeds to see what was going on.
Through Bitch’s Doberman, I saw Regent’s spirit wrestling with the cyborg, its stone hands wrapped around the ork’s neck even as he stabbed at the living statue with razor-sharp hand spurs that slid off the stone with a sound that didn’t seem real. The statue’s face was locked in a rictus of rage, and it was slowly throttling the ork.
I quickly tore into the defences on his cyberwear, forcing a backdoor into Bakuda’s command and control system in order to cut his arms off from the cyborg’s digital nervous system. They fell limp, the metal claws scraping against the ground, but the statue didn’t let up its attack.
The ork had a SIN, buried beneath the bunraku software. Park Jihoo.
“You can stop now,” I said over the comms. “They’re down, and the Decker is gone.”
Regent didn’t answer. He just stood over the statue, watching the life slowly drain from the ork’s eyes.
“You don’t have to kill him,” I pleaded. “Knight Errant will have noticed the RFID tags coming back online. They’ll be here soon.”
“Regent,” Grue said, looking not at the ork but at the stacks of containers, “we have a job to do.”
“Right,” Regent answered, blinking uncertainly. He snapped his fingers again and the spirit disappeared, leaving Park Jihoo writhing on the ground until Tattletale stepped up and hit him with a stunbolt.
I felt the ground swaying beneath my virtual feet as fatigue finally started to catch up to me. I pushed through it, managing to mark out the right container on Grue’s HUD, but I knew I was spent. It’s like I was exercising a muscle I’d never used before; none of the work I’d done before had been half as intense as this.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“That’s the container you’re looking for. I have to go… throw up or something. Just wire me my cut, okay?”
I didn’t wait for their response, drifting aimlessly back through the matrix as I reeled myself back along the datastreams linking me to my meat. All the while, I could feel myself fading away, my presence in the matrix growing weaker, until finally, I was out.
I woke with a start, my mouth filled with a bitter flavour. My vision slowly started to return, blotchy patches gradually disappearing. My head pounded like a dockyard crane had dropped a container on it, and as I looked down I saw that I hadn’t been honest to the Shadowrunners; I’d already thrown up, and my shirt was stained with blood and vomit in equal measure.
There was a pack of tissues on an end table next to the armchair, and I wiped up the vomit as best as I could, obscurely grateful none had got on the chair itself. I hauled myself up onto trembling legs, stumbling across the apartment before half-falling onto the wall and using it to prop myself up as I staggered to the bathroom.
I caught sight of myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, and had in fact been weeping bloody tears down my ashen cheeks – more ashen than normal, that is. It mixed with yet more blood from my nose and mouth to leave me looking like nothing less than the monster in some low-budget horror flick.
Slowly, agonisingly, I pulled off my ruined top and pants and tossed them aside, wincing as each motion sent spasms of pain through my nerves, before stepping into the shower in my underwear. With my palms flat against the wall to hold me up, I looked up into the showerhead as scalding hot water cascaded onto me, staining pink as it washed the gore off my body. The heat helped me centre myself, and slowly I could feel the biofeedback fading from my nerves.
After perhaps half an hour, my connection to the matrix returned and I cut of the shower off as the graphic showing the ticking cost of the hot water appeared next to the temperature control lever.
Grue had sent me a message ten minutes ago, telling me that they’d retrieved the case and would be in touch later to discuss payment. In spite of how unbearably shit I felt, part of me was sad it was ending soon. That job had been the most hair-raising experience of my life, but I also felt alive while I was doing it. I didn’t have anything waiting for me at home, and it was like I’d finally found a way to live through the matrix, rather than just exist in it. It had been days since I’d last gone on a trip down memory lane, trawling through mom and dad’s files to try and recapture their lost memory.
Ultimately, though, I didn’t give it much more thought. I wasn’t really conscious enough for thinking, so I staggered into my room, fell face-first onto my bed, and immediately slipped into unconsciousness.
I slept through the rest of the night and most of the day, only to wake to an incoming phone call from Grue – with Tattletale’s comm piggybacking off the link. I answered it as I rooted around in my closet for some clean clothes.
“Hello? Did the handover go okay?”
“Well that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Bug.”
I was struck by another sinking feeling in my stomach, but I didn’t have anything left to throw up.
“What do you mean?”
“We were wondering if you wanted to make this a more permanent arrangement,” he said. “I thought we worked well together, and the team agrees.”
“They do?” I asked, doubtful Bitch thought that way.
“Regent is indifferent,” Tattletale said, “but Bitch said you ‘might be useful.’ Good job hacking her drones, by the way. Not a lot of people would have thought to do that, but Bitch is big on shows of force. She thought you were a coward, and you proved her wrong.”
“So, what do you say?” Grue asked. “We’re moving up in the world, and the payouts are only going to get bigger from here.”
“I haven’t been paid for this job yet,” I countered. “How did the handover go?”
“Well,” Grue sounded a lot more hesitant, “that’s why we’re calling. I told you this job was essentially an interview that would get us in with a new fixer, but what I didn’t say was that the offer was conditional on us bringing a Decker onto the team. To fill a gap in our capabilities.”
“I see,” I said, but I’d already made up my mind. “Well, I’m happy to work together more, so mission accomplished?”
“Except the fixer wants everyone there for the handover,” Grue continued. “In person.”
“Well that’s stupid,” I snapped. “I can work just fine from the Matrix, so what’s the point in dragging myself halfway across the city?”
“It’s about showing you’re committed, Bug,” Grue answered.
“Fuck that,” I snapped at him. “You know Bakuda was using biofeedback, right? I returned to meatspace in a pool of my own blood and vomit. I was in just as much danger as you were.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Grue asked, incredulous. “What’s so bad about showing up in person?”
Tattletale piped up before I could respond.
“People don’t get into Shadowrunning because they’re the picture of mental health, Bug. We all have our neuroses, and it just so happens this fixer is obsessed with everyone ‘having skin in the game,’ as her contact put it to us. Look, I don’t know exactly why you’re hiding yourself away behind fake personas, but I’ve got a few educated guesses.”
I didn’t respond, and Tattletale let the line hang silent for a couple of seconds before continuing.
“The thing is, none of those guesses matter, because we’re all a little fucked up. You saw Bitch and Regent, heard me talk about my pathological compulsion for secrets. Even Grue has his own neuroses and hang-ups that made him decide getting shot at for a career was the smart thing to do. We don’t care if you’re deformed, or on the run from a corp, or a rogue AI passing yourself off as metahuman. It doesn’t matter.”
“A rogue AI?” I asked, hesitantly.
“My profile of you gives it three percent odds,” Tattletale answered. “Stranger things have happened.”
The line fell silent, as I thought it over. I looked over myself – my ashen skin, my gangly limbs, the room full of oversized furniture that only made the few regular-sized items stand out more. I clenched my hand into a fist, feeling the weight of muscle and bone. I looked up, and saw the walls of my room. They were covered in memories: the notches on the closet where dad had charted my growth over the years; the few school prizes tucked at the back of a high shelf; paperbacks mom had bought me.
My entire childhood was laid out before me, but my childhood was a long time ago, and I suddenly noticed that there wasn’t a single memory of my life after that. It was like the room was stuck in stasis, like I was living in a time capsule that had been buried the moment my dad died and the world dropped out from under me.
“Alright,” I said, stamping down my nerves. “Send me the location of the meet. I’ll be there in an hour.”
Most of my tops were wide-necked – they had to be, to fit over my horns – so I threw on a zip-up hoodie over the top of it. Coupled with a pair of faded jeans, and I was about as nondescript as I could make myself while still being over eight feet tall.
I didn’t have much time to reach the meeting point, but that was by design. It forced me out of the door and into the corridor, when I would otherwise have stood there until my doubts swallowed me. From there, there was nowhere to go but onwards, down the elevator and out into the streets.
I caught the metro, and there found myself face to face with more people than I’d seen in years. There were dozens of commuters all crammed into the carriage, pressed in side by side. I had to hunch over to even fit below the low ceiling, but I still had enough headroom to look out over the sea of faces. It made it easier to deal with, somehow.
The journey was just long enough for worry to start sinking in, but the metro wasn’t going to stop just because I was having second thoughts. The streets were easier, in a way. I could focus on putting one foot in front of the other, and my paranoia kept me too busy with half-glimpsed shadows to make stopping seem appealing.
The neighbourhood was mostly industrial buildings that had emptied out as the evening rush died down, with only the occasional twenty-four hour factory still showing signs of life. The streets still held a steady stream of factory workers making their way towards the metro line, as well as other waifs and strays who were just cutting through the district on their way to other places, but all of them gave the Shadowrunners a wide berth.
Bitch’s van was parked out the front of a failed factory, its doors chained and its windows boarded up. The woman herself was sitting in the open doorway of the van, fiddling with one of the components from her drones. Her cyberarm had split apart into an array of screwdrivers and tools that I couldn’t even begin to make sense of, and she seemed to be wholly consumed by her work.
Regent was occupied as well, scrolling through something on his commlink as he leant against the van. Grue and Tattletale, on the other hand, were keeping their eyes open, looking up and down the street at the passing commuters. Grue actually looked at me a few times, his eyes passing over me as I drew closer and closer. Then Tattletale turned, scanned the crowd, and landed right on me with a smile that was at first satisfied, then genuine.
She nudged Grue with an elbow and pointed to me. Grue looked closer, but didn’t seem to actually believe the mage until I awkwardly waved a hand at them. Then he looked at me again, his eyes focusing on my clothing before he shook his head and stepped forward, holding out a hand.
“Good to meet you in person,” he said, “and welcome to the team. I’m Brian, by the way.”
“And I’m Lisa,” Tattletale piped up, “and those two are Rachel and Alec.”
Right. Probably not the best idea to let on that I’ve known Grue and Tattletale’s real names since our first meeting.
“Taylor,” I reciprocated. “Is the contact arriving soon?”
“Any minute now,” Grue answered, still looking me over. Having looked through his eyes enough times and become used to that frame of reference, it was disconcerting and strangely confidence-boosting to find myself looking down on him.
“Didn’t you…” – he begins, hesitantly, before pressing on – “have anything more… I don’t know, professional to wear?”
I looked around at the group, my eyes lingering on their leather jackets, magical accessories, body armour, holstered pistols and all the other tricks of their trade.
“Not really,” I shrugged my shoulders. “You know I was just lifting copy protection on stolen goods before this, right?”
Grue looked like he wanted to say something more, only to stop as a bulky four-by-four with tinted windows rounded the corner.
“Alright everyone, look lively,” he said, his voice raised. His left hand tightened its grip on a small grey briefcase – presumably the very thing we’d all been looking for. Bitch and Regent – Rachel and Alec, I suppose – set aside their distractions and stood up, watching as the Ares Roadmaster approached.
Tattletale sidled up to me, looking as pleased as punch, and stood on her tip-toes to whisper in my ear.
“I gave Technomancer nine percent odds.”
I stiffened, looking around for an escape before I realised how pointless that would be, and that I probably didn’t need to escape. Instead I sighed, and whispered back.
“How did you figure it out?”
“Astral perception. You don’t have any cyberware at all, and when I try to get a closer look things become a little weird. Like my sight doesn’t want to acknowledge you exist.”
“Are you going to tell anyone?”
“Of course not,” Lisa smiled. “Remember what I said about how a secret is more valuable the fewer people know about it? You should tell the others, though. If only because otherwise they might figure it out themselves and get all mad.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said with a sigh.
“Speaking of astral perception,” Lisa continued, a little louder this time so that Brian could hear, “the guy in the back of that truck is Awakened. Which means it’s not our new fixer, but her head gofer.”
The armoured car pulled to a stop in front of us, and the passenger door swung open before a truly immense figure stepped out. He was a troll, and with his horns he was easily taller than me. More to the point, where I was comparatively skinny he seemed to have been hewn from fat and muscle in equal measure.
He went bare chested beneath a long leather jacket that was covered in shamanic totems and fetishes, and when he spoke it was with a noticeable accent that I couldn’t quite place beyond a passing familiarity to some of the Scandinavian dockworkers I’d grown up around.
“Grue. My congratulations on the success of your mission.”
“Gregor,” Grue nodded in acknowledgement. “We were expecting Faultline.”
“For a simple handover? The case, if you will.”
Grue stepped forward and held out the case for the troll, who took it carefully and held it in his immense grip.
“Then our business here is concluded. The funds shall be wired to your accounts,” he fixed me with a weighty look, “Grue, we will send you your Decker’s share to your account as we do not have her details on file. If that is acceptable, miss?”
“Bug,” I answered after a moment’s indecision. “I go by ‘Bug.’”
Gregor nodded, turning and walking back to his armoured car.
“So, we’re in?” Grue called to Gregor’s back.
Gregor paused, halfway into his custom troll-sized seat, and turned back to look at Grue.
“Faultline will review your conduct and make a decision. We will be in touch.”
We watched in silence as the Roadmaster disappeared into the city streets, taking the case with it. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering just what was in it that was worth all the trouble. On all the jobs I’d taken before this one, I knew everything there was to know about it, whether that was because the job was simple or because I was free to dig as deep as I wanted. I’d probably never be able to figure this one out, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“Hey, Taylor,” Lisa grabbed my attention. “We’re going to have a few drinks to celebrate a job well done, then head back to our place. You want to come with?”
“That sounds perfect,” I replied, surprised at how easily the answer had come.