Shadowrun: Nothing Personal

by Olivier Gagnon

  “Wow,” says Irish. Zoë scoffs. They all look pretty disgusted. That gets me a little angry. “Look, I get it. On this side of the fence, you all cherish your ‘freedom’ and stuff, and you never lie down for The Man, and all that. That’s fine, I get that. But, with all due respect, you have no clue how the world really works. You think of corporations as one monolithic entity with one mind. That’s the same as if I said you’re crazy for still wanting to be a shadowrunner after Raven came for you.”

  “He came for you,” corrects Irish.

  “Whatever. My point is, it’s as illogical as saying ‘The streets tried to kill you, why are you still trying to be friends with the streets?’ Megacorporations like Renraku, are not of one mind. Some slitch with the right access is trying to roll me over. I’m going to fuck him right back, and then I’m going to ride on my horse right back into my office and be even more powerful than before, and fuck anyone that’s going to try to stop me. That’s my plan.”

  They all shuffle a little bit. Titanium Angel looks back at me with some respect. Irish shakes his head but doesn’t say anything more. Zoë looks convinced, as if she wanted to ride the fucking horse back to my office with me. I give a sideways look at Vanity. As ever, she’s just staring at me.

  “You all right?” I ask her in a soft voice, a private question as the rest of the team gets back to finishing their prep drills.

  “Yeah,” she answers.

  Again, I don’t know what’s going on with her. Par for the course. If she were taking one of my trainings, I’d know how to take this tension between us and turn it to sex by nightfall. Here, though, I’m off my game. And the power dynamic is all wrong.

  Anyway, I go to check in with Zoë, who’s in a side room, rummaging around and pulling out gizmos.

  I move some crap off a chair and sit down.

  “So, how are the new Matrix protocols working out for you?” I ask, conversationally.

  She gives a small groan. “They kicked my ass for a while. When they flipped the switch, there was this moment of panic in the hacker community, like nobody could hack anything. Well, for like a day. Then people figured out how to get around it. It was the old-timers, they noticed they could adapt their old cyberdecks and at least get around. That shit was before my time, but I had friends, and they showed me how.”

  At Renraku, there was a lot of buzz about the new protocols. They said it changed everything. I didn’t really notice anything different. But some of our in-house hackers said it was a radical shift, they couldn’t get over it. So I’m curious to see what a black-hat hacker like Zoë thinks of it. I have to admit, I don’t understand that side of things much, so I’m keen to use this rare opportunity to gain some perspective.

  “So, now that you’re used to it, is it harder or easier?”

  “Oh, it’s harder, in some ways. But it’s easier to do quick things. It’s like, soft shells with a hard candy inside, you know?”

  I didn’t really, but I found her use of candy analogy kind of cute. She reminded me a little of this girl in Marketing, with whom I had an on-again, off-again sex thing. She was young, so not really good for conversation or going out, or much else other than sex. But damn was she nubile. Little bit insufferable in her damned youthful arrogance and mind games, but it was good sex. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a good idea to, you know, dip my pen in the corporate vagina, but it worked out all right. We kind of grew apart and that was it. All that being said, Zoë looks way smarter. I’m guessing she’s had a bit of a rougher time in the streets, so likely grew up a bit faster and wiser. That makes me think of something.

  “Zoë, I was talking to Vanity, she told me you guys speak Portuguese to each other. How come?”

  “It’s from Capoeira,” Zoë says.

  “Capoo eh what?”

  “Capoeira, Brazilian martial art. Well, calling it a martial art is a bit of a stretch. Acrobatic dancing with some fighting elements, I guess. Anyway, we all do it, it’s our thing. It keeps us tight, like a family. Titanium Angel is from Metrôpole, in Amazonia. He brought it, he showed it to us. We play when we have downtime, make a roda, train some moves. It’s cool. And with it comes some of the culture, some of the language. So we all kind of speak it, but just a little. Obviously, Ta knows a lot more.”

  “Ta? Oh, Titanium Angel. Yeah, I won’t be calling him that. Metrôpole, huh? You don’t hear much about Amazonia, you know, except for the war stuff.” I try to conjure up what I know about the place. I come up with very little. I picture giant man-eating snakes in business suits arguing over third-quarter financial statements. I assume I’m probably not on the ball.

  “Yeah, not much gets out. But I think that’s about to change. It’s messed up to say, but losing the war was probably good for them, at least for the people.” I can tell she is definitely making a distinction between the people living in the city and their Awakened overlords. I realize there is probably a divide there I never knew existed. The business person in me can’t help but wonder at the opportunities that might be opening up down there. Hmmm, maybe I can get a transfer from Renraku to an office down there; play the shadows there for a while.

  And then I realize, my life may not be like that anymore. Being out with Renraku is hitting me in waves. I’ve never done anything else, never worked for anyone else. I might get my life back, yeah, but let’s face it—maybe it won’t be with Renraku. Maybe the best I’ll be able to do is get in another corp. Ares, somewhere. Horizon? I try to picture their corporate culture, and the thought of the change scares me. All I know is Renraku, and I like it.

  I get a little more somber. I look at Zoë and I noticed she is too. Renraku for me, Metrôpole for her. Way to pick good conversation subject. I take a breath. “All right, are we doing this?”

  “Yep, all set,” she says quickly, relieved at the change of topic. She places two devices on the table.

  Two, I don’t like that. “What’s this, why two? You don’t expect me to …”

  “Oh yeah you are. You’re coming with me. You’ve got passwords I need. I ain’t cracking files I don’t need to when I’ve got you around. Besides, it’ll be good for you. These babies are hot-sim. You’re gonna like this.”

  I don’t think I will, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have a choice. I reluctantly plug in after a brief “Hacking 101” lesson from Zoë.

  We jack in to the Atlanta Grid. It looks like a cleaner version of the city. But the sights come with an incredible exhilarating feeling I can’t quite describe. That would be Zoë’s hot-sim, I imagine. It’s something else. It makes me smile. I think. I’m not sure what is persona and what is meat me. It all feels intertwined. Wow.

  Zoë grabs my virtual hand to get me to pay attention, since I’m so distracted. We hop over to the Renraku grid. Of course, I’ve seen it before, but I never felt it in hot-sim. The lights are more intense, and I can feel their pulse in my blood. When we fly over the gaudy neon, air whooshes by my face, and a knot of dizziness clutches my stomach. It’s awesome. But Zoë doesn’t let me enjoy it, next thing I know we’ve found the North American office, the one in Manhattan, and we’re making our way through it. I supply Zoë with the access codes she needs. Sometimes I don’t have them, sometimes the ones I have are denied, but she makes it work anyway. I think whatever I have is enough for her to extrapolate and quickly generate new marks. Hell, let’s be honest: I have no idea what she’s doing. In any case, we work together. I know where we need to go. I know where the juicy files are. We slice and slip into the black heart of Renraku and get to the repositories Johnsons use for themselves.

  The construct we need to search is rendered as a huge, dark library full of old tomes. Zoë makes me a flashlight that allows me to read books from the shelves. Just outside the dim light I have I can see oily swirls of blackness, black against blackness, shimmering and dart around. I hear faint noises, like hissing, like whispering. I shoot Zoë a look. Her face is a mask of concentration. I know what’s out there is. Black IC
—and I’m running hot sim. Which means that shit can kill me. I flip through pages as fast as I can. Whatever looks remotely promising, I download. I go faster and faster, until really I read the title and if it looks interesting, I download it. I’ll read it offline later. You know, like when pure blackness isn’t circling around me looking for a brain to liquefy into burnt black goo.

  “Johnson, we really gotta go.”

  Zoë hasn’t shown any stress throughout our slicing and dicing on the way here, so her current tone of voice doesn’t make me remotely doubt her.

  “Okay, yup, let’s go” I say. The sea of shadows around us is getting agitated, like the North Sea in a storm. I feel a primal fear. I want out. Now. Now. Now. And that’s when it happens. Before I will myself to jack out, I feel a tug on my leg. I look down and see an oily black tentacle wrapping around my leg. It’s narrow at the end that’s coiled around my ankle, but its diameter gets exponentially fatter as you go down the length, though it quickly disappears in the shadowy darkness. I don’t know what to do. It’s slick, dripping with sticky black stuff, and oil is running down my leg. It gives me a violent lurch, and I fall. It drags me into the darkness, toward its mass. I yell. Zoë appears by my side, a gleaming white katana in hand. She hacks at the oily limb. The darkness screams. Hundreds of screams. All around us. I feel mass all around us, bearing down. Slick, oily limbs uncoil and slice at Zoë’s figure, cracking like whips. She dodges them. She hacks at the limb holding me as I drag along the floor. I claw at the ground, try to hold myself back. I notice a small 1940s Luger pistol in my hands—my attack program. I fire at the approximate center of mass of the darkness I’m being dragged into. The limb jerks. A hissing squeal comes from the darkness—sounds wet. Zoë dodges stabbing tentacles. And then there is a moment where she looks up toward where I’m being dragged. She looks into it for a second. Then she starts hacking franticly at the tentacle holding me. She roars and screams. The limb is severed. “Jack out now! Jack out now!” she screams.

  Right before I will myself out, I glimpse the owner of the tentacle. A mass so large it is inconceivable. A home for so many tentacles it makes no sense. Rows of teeth, tar for spit. But it’s the eyes that really get me. The mass, writhing, a horizon of horror, but the eyes are calm and calculating, and entirely aware of me.

  My eyes pop open and I gasp for air. The world spins. I don’t know where I am. There is the loss of sensation. Am I dead? Everything is so dull. My senses return to me at a fifth of what I had before. No, we jacked out. This is the dull world of reality, the hot sim gone.

  There is a white-painted geisha face in front of me. I blink. What? I blink. Oh, it’s Vanity. She eyes me with interest. I look past her and see Zoë, recovering from the sensorial gap between Matrix and real world much better, though she looks pale.

  “Got what you needed?” asks Vanity. She is asking Zoë.

  “Yeah, Mr. Johnson got some files. I think he needs to look through them. Damn, I ain’t going back there, guys.” We both look at her. She is standing akimbo, shaking her puffy mane of blond hair. “What the hell, that was the most bulked-up glacier I’ve even seen. Holy shit was that black. Glad we had your passcodes along for the ride.”

  I grunt. I know that in one sense what I went through wasn’t real. But it felt real. It inflicted pain. It could have killed me. So it was real enough. And it’s still got me shaken.

  “You all right?” Vanity asks me gently, as I try to regain a footing in reality.

  I nod, run my hand through my hair. “You got a spell to get rid of the cobwebs in my head?” I ask her jokingly.

  She gets a slightly mischievous look in her eyes, then I see her peer past my eyes to a spot inside my head. All of a sudden, I get quite the feeling. A rush of pleasure. I tingle all over. It’s like when I get girls to massage my scalp gently with the tip of their nails, stroking the roots of my hair. It sends jolts through my spine. It’s not quite like the pleasure of sex, but something related to it. And then it stops.

  I blink and, again, I’m catching my breath. “Whoa,” I say in a small voice. “What was that?”

  Vanity’s mischievous look turns into a playful one. “Maybe you’ll get more of that sometime,” she says coyly.

  I’m still recovering, from the dumpshock or the spell, I’m not sure which, when Vanity turns and takes her leave of me. She stops by Zoë and places a hand on her wrist. “But you got files for us, yes?”

  “Com certeza” answers Zoë, with a sly smile.

  Well. I guess that should have been predictable. I’ll label that as “cost of doing business.” Both girls turn to look at my reaction. I make it known I heard them but am not protesting. They both giggle. I still hope they didn’t get too many of our secret files. Then again, that only matters if I still work for Renraku, right?

  So, without further ado, I get to absorbing what I’ve downloaded.

  It takes some interpretation. It’s not like everything is spelled out, but being in the know, I can piece it together. What I find is that a guy I know, Nomura, is basically behind all of this. He’s a senior Johnson—that’s not his official title of course, but that’s what he is. Biggest uptight bastard I ever met. He’s a cold motherfucker, with a very “if you’re not Japanese, you’re nothing” attitude. I would hate him if he weren’t so scary. But, he doesn’t get his hands dirty much anymore, so it’s interesting he’s this close to the ground. He had also transferred back to Japan last I’d heard. Anyway, he used his influence to get the mission to change. He had me rubbed out, seemingly without much consideration. Just kind of like “Oh, and of course, kill the Johnson running this operation. Thanks.” That sort of explains the sloppy attempt with that Raven character. They hired an operative on the rush, didn’t check his full credentials, and so they got someone good but not good enough. That works for me, I guess, though it’s a little insulting to have someone decide to end your life as an afterthought

  Now, the real question is, what’s going on here? Why would Nomura even bother to do this? Let’s chase the product back up. The op is to steal new sensor-defeating technology. That’s a hot ticket. Anything in the aerospace industry, like sensors and counter-sensors, are grade-A shadowruns. Who are the players? Renraku and Boeing. Hmm. In the pile of files I grabbed from the archive, I have some interesting documents pertaining to this. Well, well, it looks like Fed-Boeing and Tetradyne Matrix Systems had a little joint R&D venture into new sensor-defeating technology. This is all kinds of interesting. Tetradyne is a Renraku Europe subsidiary. While it’s not unheard of that they would have struck a research agreement on American turf, it is odd Renraku America would have pulled any sort of shadow op against them.

  Unless this was one of our recruitment ops. Renraku likes to have its prime talent on retainer. But they only want the best, so to determine prime talent, we have to test them. Of course, the best way to test an unknown team is against an environment we control. By pitting teams against Renraku assets, it’s easier to assess how the team lives up to its reputation and thus if we want to make the investment of having them on retainer. Titanium Angel’s team is definitely top-notch, so maybe this was just a test run.

  All right, so then, where does Nomura fit in? He’s a guy from Asia, and he hijacks a training run to turn it into a real run. Stab Fed-Boeing in the back and blame it on Tetradyne. Meanwhile, Nomura acquires some juicy paydata for the Asian branch of the corp.

  This is really just another example of the notion that there is no single “Renraku.” No megacorporation is nearly as unified at you might think. At Renraku, this is actually kind of a culture problem. Different subsidiaries, especially from different regions, screw each other over all the time. If—and that’s a big if—Fed-Boeing ever figures out the team was Renraku, they’ll be pissed at all of Renraku, not just Tetradyne. But this is just business. Tetradyne will mend the relationship. Offer them off-the-books compensation, something like that. Maybe a Tetradyne boss will lose his job. If you think at a way-high
macro view, yeah, that’s bad for all of Renraku. But in the human-sized scope of things, the subsidiary Nomura is working for will gain a huge R&D boost, shares will go up, people will get promotions and fat bonuses. And really, that’s all that matters. Nobody cares about “Renraku” as a single concept. People only care about their immediate surroundings.

  Well, almost. Thing is, Renraku culture, it’s as backstabbing as I just said. But, behind closed doors only. The prevailing culture as Renraku is that noble bushido samurai thing. People must act honorably, or at least appear to. Managers caught doing dirty deeds, be it as simple as cheating on their wives with prostitutes, accepting bribes, or making wrong decisions and losing company money, fall on their swords. Literally. Seppuku. Even if it doesn’t go that far, you certainly lose your job. So, Nomura’s plan will work great, so long as nobody finds out about it.

  Now, it’s obvious he’s co-opted my division at Renraku America. Even if, as Matthew’s text message warning me proves, I still have friends there. But they won’t act against Nomura. I wouldn’t act against Nomura. Like I said, that guy is scary. But, as luck would have it, I happen to know who I can enlist. I know the boss of Renraku Europe, Karl Stadt. We met a couple of times, and we sort of hit it off. He thinks I’m competent. I always thought he wanted me to come over, but he didn’t want to poach a resource from America. Most importantly, he is one pig-headed angry little badger. You don’t mess with Stadt. He’s been fighting toe-to-toe for business in Lofwyr’s backyard for years. He has balls the size of golf fields. I can imagine just how pissed he’s going to be when he hears that Asia is trying to screw him over with Fed-Boeing.

  I’m smiling. Things were getting grim for me for a minute there. But now, now I got my mojo back. I got that little worm Nomura by the balls. The smile dies a little on my lips. Shit, what time is it? I check my retina clock. It’s 8 p.m. It’s late in Europe. I said I knew Stadt, but I don’t know him on a “wake him in the middle of the night” level. I won’t be able to speak to him till tomorrow. And Titanium Angel’s team won’t back out of the run, not even with what I’ve figured out. They’ll want to proceed. Arrrgh! So close, yet so far. All right. Okay. That’s not so bad. It’s not ideal, but we can do the run anyway. Just so long as Nomura doesn’t get the paydata; I’ll hand it over to Stadt, I think that will work out.