“I see you got my message,” I said, a tear nearly falling from its pool in my eyes. Her face twisted in a mixture of guilt and laughter.
“I didn’t know you’d cast a contingency spell. How’d you keep it from me?”
I smiled more honestly, letting the astral fade from my tired eyes. She was always amazing to behold without it, anyway. No heat signature, yet so alive.
“A man’s got to have his secrets,” I whispered. “I just felt you deserved a name, in case I…”
“But you didn’t,” she protested, a look of objection matching her tone perfectly. “You didn’t die. Why didn’t the spell recognize that?”
“You sound like you’d rather remain tied to me. I thought all spirits longed to become free.”
“I was always free, with you,” she whispered, looking away. For all the world, she seemed like a girl whose heart had been broken.
“I think I worded the spell poorly. I said, ‘If it seems I am to die, gift my ally with her name.’ I guess those circumstances qualifed.”
She laughed and sniffled, swatting me on the arm. “Well… it is a beautiful name.”
“I’m glad you like it, Menerytheria.”
Love and pain often look strange enough on a normal, human face.
Now imagine them on an elf made of water.
“My theory is that I was down there so long my connection with magic atrophied.”
I sat with Needles again, each of us on either side of a subway tunnel entrance. He was watching me quietly, listening.
“I didn’t burn out, thankfully. I can still cast. I just need to work out those magical muscles, as it were. But most of my spells will need to be relearned. Hell, I only remember the ones I designed myself.”
“That really slots, man,” Needles said.
“Mmmm,” I responded, already distracted.
“What’s on your mind, chummer?”
I turned to look at him, and he looked worried all over again. “How much has changed?”
“What?”
“It’s been twelve years, Needles. Twelve years. The twelve years before I drowned again saw the birth of AIs, the otaku, a dragon for president… A lot can happen in twelve years. So what did I miss?”
Needles might have looked uncomfortable again, but I smiled at him. “C’mon, man, this isn’t a reproach. I just want to be prepared for what’s out there.”
He smiled and shook his head. “All right, you asked for it.”
It took him two hours to explain the second Crash, the new, wireless Matrix, the rise of technomancers, the fall of Novatech and birth of NeoNET, and a hundred other things. The whole time I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I knew he wouldn’t lie to me, but it was still rough. Don’t get me wrong, I had more than average experience in adjusting to massive changes. This was hardly the strangest thing to have happened to me. But still, it was amazing how much could happen in so short a time. Every decade brought a whole new world. I had always avoided the idea of an inevitable future of change, and the haunting notion of immortality that promised it.
But it was good news, in some ways. I could be a part of the Matrix using ’trodes and keep up with people now. The shadow community was as alive as ever, and my talents would still be in demand as a result. But I needed to get to a data terminal or hot spot. I needed to check up on my affairs. The apartment. The company. My contacts and family and runner chummers. I was a dozen years dead, as far as anyone knew, so this might be a chance to write off some old enemies and renew old friendships.
I told Needles all this, and he said I definitely wasn’t “going into town” looking like I did.
Chapter 2
Brave New World
“Red, this is Pretty.”
I agreed, whether it was a street name or not. Sitting at a well-lit mirror with a table filled with cosmetics and every beauty appliance I could imagine, the girl before me held the kind of natural charisma some sim starlets try to get with training and chips. About 1.6 meters tall, she was curvy and pale, with long black hair cascading down a back that invited fingers to trail slowly along it. Her big eyes were a vibrant blue, too deliberate to be real. She turned them on me with a naturally vulnerable look, and suddenly I felt like I really had been in cold water for twelve years. She was slipping black gloves off, still wearing a short skirt and black top just this side of immodest.
A second look give way to a double take. There were things about her that stood out as… unnatural, at least to someone with my experience. Her cybereyes. Her natural nails, black yet unpainted. Her hair, too perfect not to be bioware. Her skin, almost a shade of gray instead of pale, and a little too smooth to be natural.
Pretty was a ghoul.
I don’t think she could tell if I was staring because of her looks, or because I knew what she was, despite appearances. To tell the truth, I’m not sure I could tell which was the case, either.
She turned to me, almost smiling, with a hint of something feral. She extended a manicured hand to me and shook. “A pleasure. One hears a lot about the famous Red in the warren.”
Her voice was ambrosia, throaty and vibrant. She knew her stuff. Even her perfume was perfect to offset the scent a cannibal inevitably exudes. Only my heightened sense of smell, especially for blood, gave me any hint of the taint beneath.
I turned the shake into a bow, lowering my lips to her hand with something resembling grace and kissing it lightly.
“The pleasure is mine.”
Needles snickered as Pretty flushed a faint blue, then shook it off with something like a scowl. I wasn’t sure where I’d hosed up, but then, some girls were just strange. An unbelievably hot ghoul only had that much more going in that direction.
Needles walked toward her, looking at me. “Pretty here is our girl for going into town. She was a looker before all the mods. I figured it was a worthwhile investment so the rest of the world could see it, too.”
Pretty turned from her mirror, taking out black spikes on hooks I assumed were fashionable earrings. She tossed them onto a table, her eyes never leaving my face. They searched over me, for what I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem like she found me attractive. I hadn’t looked in a mirror yet, so I could only imagine what a mess I was. So what was she looking for?
“Given that she’s the only one of us who can go out for supplies and contacts and the like,” Needles continued, “I figure she’s the one you’ll want to talk to before making the trip. Hell, while you’re sticking around, you might do a few runs for us yourself, if you’re feeling up to it.”
Pretty’s head snapped to glare at him. Ah, so that was it. I was competition for her role in the pack. Wow. I could already tell she was a ghoul by birth. At her age, I’d have seen her before twelve years ago. I wondered which one she was. She’d have been really young when I last was here, no more than nine or ten…
“Well, I’ll let you get to it.” And with that, Needles took his leave, leaving me with the glowering young ghoul.
She looked me up and down. “We’ve got some work to do, don’t we?”
A haircut and shave later, and I was feeling a world better. My red locks hung down near my chin, styled with some kind of nanogel that maintained it in spikes, my new goatee trimmed short. I thought I looked rakish, and loved it. It seemed my hair had decided to keep growing while I was sleeping. Another inexplicable mystery of infection. It was good to be rid of my Rip van Winkle, and I said so. Pretty didn’t get it at all. She supplied me with a synth-leather jacket and black tee, and some old, torn-up jeans. She plopped a commlink and glasses in my hand.
“Unless you use a skinlink out here, it’s awful coverage for AR. Mostly when we use them in the zones, it’s a small PAN disconnected from the main systems. When you get past the wall, onto the Corridor and the subsprawls…well, be ready.”
I could imagine what she was talking about, but I knew I was going to be in for a shock.
She pulled some thigh-high boots on and threw me a wi
thering look. I just smiled through it, unsure how to approach her, feeling like an idiot. How do you handle something so fragile when you don’t understand what it’s like to be a part of a pack mentality?
“Okay, Red, let’s get going.”
It took us thirty minutes to move through the side passages and air ducts in the warrens to an exit point. Pretty pushed a cloth ahead to keep dust off our clothes, but the path seemed well-traveled enough that it was mostly clean and clear. Her handbag was loaded with lint removers, perfumes, and colognes to mask the stench of sewer travel. There’d be pay showers on the other side, anyway. She was silent almost the whole trip, and it never seemed more deliberate than when I tried to engage her in conversation.
“Have we met before?”
“So...were you born a ghoul?”
“Tell me about yourself?”
“Do you do this often?”
Silence answered every question.
Finally we came to a metal door that led into an operations room. The dust told me it had been abandoned long ago.
“The Star and City Hall both think this door is welded and the room sealed. Thank our resident decker for that.”
We went up one last ladder into a shack, and from there, into the dusk. We both hesitated for a brief moment before stepping out. Vampires, despite the sims, rarely burst into flames in the sun, but we burn fast. Hell, UV-A hurts. Even with allergen resistance magics, you couldn’t take all the discomfort out exposure. Not a lot of vampires hanging around the blacklights at nightclubs. Ghouls are the same, to a lesser degree. In the dusk, it was more of a psychological reaction, painful but undamaging.
There was no direct sunlight. We were fine.
A few steps out the door, and she turned and started walking away.
“Wait!” I called, stopping her in her heeled tracks. She didn’t turn to look. “Are you just leaving me out here?”
Her voice betrayed exasperation. “We’ll meet here just before sunrise. You’re a big boy. You’ll find your way around.” And with that she clicked her way into the bustling Corridor of un-walled Chicago.
Since the Sears Tower bombing, the bug breakout, Cermak Blast, Bug City, and Operation: Extermination, Chicago has been irreversibly changed from its old glory. The core of the city’s downtown had become a rubble-strewn wasteland ruled over by Zone Lord gang kingpins. It was the picture of post-apocalyptic decay. The distant subsprawls, once the suburbs where I had grown up, had become the new centers for order. In between was the Corridor, an eclectic collective of communes mashed together in a state of freedom and hardship. In the post-sunset gloom, the clouds didn’t glow with the neon of a thousand late-nights like they did in other metroplexes. Here the stars were visible, and the markets still chattered with life, lit by gas and battery, snug in the repossessed ruins of better times. The squeal of pigs from a repurposed storefront competed with the tunes of a jukebox in an open-air bar across the street, mason jars of home-stilled moonshine poured in exchange for whatever someone could barter. If I wanted Matrix access, I’d have to make my way to a subsprawl.
I hitched a ride on a rickshaw with patched leather bucket seats from a luxury sports car and mismatched bicycle wheels and was on my way north, back to where the sky washed out and the lights never dimmed. The Northside was a Corridor that merged the freedom and ruin of Chicago’s gypsy lifestyle with the remnants of working tech to better do business with the corporate outliers and wageslave day-trippers, and my commlink pinged as it entered an area with wireless Matrix access.
There’s an old phrase: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Even in 2076, it still held true…
…once you were past the Augmented Reality.
The streets of the Saturday night were surprisingly quiet, despite plenty of glitterati sashaying to and fro, laughing at jokes unheard or jamming to music I couldn’t hear. It was unreal, how quiet it could be. Conversations were muted, the scrape of shoe soles louder than I could ever recall before. I remembered how to work the commlink, slid on the shades, hit the switch for my second-hand Renraku Sensei—
—and the world exploded.
Everywhere, people talking, listening, music, voices, ads, over twenty commercials vying for my attention while a half-dozen profiles popped up with various queries. I remembered how to activate the spam filter for the homemade programming, and things became more manageable, like the volume button for a stereo that’s been left on too loud when you first switch it on.
The world was awash in color and sound. Shops rarely used real neon signs anymore, just picked up an AR tag. Clubs and restaurants beckoned; even a triple-X joint joined the chorus of sound with moans that set my long-deprived brain afire. I imagined, with a simlink, I might have felt a moment of simulated ecstasy or the illusion of a caress, just enough of a taste to whet my appetite and lure me inside. Shops of all kinds, blinking on and off with full audio. I was hard pressed to imagine what a more expensive commlink, complete with bells, whistles, and a kitchen sink, might show me.
Another small window opened up, a news bulletin. The stereotypical newscaster held sheaves of paper as though she was actually reading from them. The FastFacts logo flashed across the screen before she started speaking.
“FastFacts News, I’m Bella Luchessi. Tonight’s top story: Lone Star Security has announced six new missing persons, all suspected of being the latest victims of the rash of kidnappings plaguing the city. This brings the total of reported disappearances in the past three months to 28, with inside sources revealing that Lone Star has no leads as to the identity of the kidnappers, nor the motivations behind them. No ransom demands have been made as of yet, and no apparent connection between the victims has been found. More on this story as it develops.”
A small link popped up with information on the identities of the kidnap victims, as well as contact information to report any leads.
Then the profiles started bleeping for my attention. A half-dozen little e-mail chat requests, each with a picture and link to a bio next to them. I saw the link to my own bio, which Needles had made up for me, and started laughing.
Rick Carmine, age N/A, income…
It went on and on, describing me as a freelance stock trader with an obscene income, as well as a picture of me right after Pretty had finished my haircut, touched up enough to keep me from being recognized. It actually looked really good. I started wondering if any of the people who were trying to chat me up had gotten a look at my ratty clothes.
An hour’s wanderings brought me back down from the initial fun of AR. Nice, but still just a tool. I doubted it would change my life all that much, when it got right down to things. At least you couldn’t pick my pocket for my credstick any more.
I finally pulled up next to a public data term. The Sensei was good for local interpretation of the Matrix, but for real searches in Chicago, I needed something more grounded.
I went back to my old sites, which, though updated, were still fundamentally the same, and entered my account info and passwords.
Password Denied
I frowned, frustrated. I punched them in again.
Password Denied
I sighed and tried some other sites. The results were always the same. Over and over, the red letters taunted me. My old identity, Kevin Tripp, was gone.
I started a Matrix search for my old holding company, Vryce Ltd. Only one smaller database had any info on them. I brought up the results.
Vryce Ltd. Est. 2061, closed 2065. CEO Kevin Tripp.
A private holding firm with at least one warehouse for engaging in import/export ventures, Vryce Ltd. took a major hit when its founder and CEO vanished in the winter of 2064. When the second Crash occurred, its sites were unprotected, and it was erased wholesale. The property was reclaimed in 2066 and resold.
Every runner who survives more than a year or two starts to think about retirement. They think of an out. A perfect escape plan to spend their hard-earned criminal cash. Most go the Ca
ribbean island route, with umbrella drinks and sandy beaches and real food and tanned company. Absolutely every one of those elements was anathema to me. Well, not the tanned company. But deep water, alcohol, and sunlight were no good for me.
Other runners try to set up their skills in legitimate enterprise, becoming security consultants, or Mr. Johnsons, or just opening up a bar. For me, it was to learn and learn some more. Saturday Jones, escape artist to the stars of shadows, had procured an actual PCC SIN for me, along with an apartment in L.A., an account that would slowly accrue interest, and everything I would need to live comfortably, self-sufficiently, ready to be a student at any university I liked with a complete, thorough background against checks. A seemingly-perfect retirement plan that even used my real name.
A way to step out of the shadows and into the world.
All gone…
I felt kind of empty inside. It might have been more of a shock to learn that all my money, all the things I had worked so hard for years to have…all of it was gone. But I’d been expecting this in some way. It wasn’t quite like starting all over. I had experience, even if I was physically out of practice. I knew how the biz was conducted. I still had my magic, weakened though it might be. And I could always fall back on the knowledge that I was nigh-immortal. Nothing puts a setback in a positive light like knowing you’ve got forever to make it up.
Still…3.5 million nuyen…all my savings…all my gear…
I wondered if any of my old emergency caches were still around. My prized vibro-katana weapon focus was at the bottom of the Chicago River, no doubt rusted away even with its magical sturdiness, but plenty of other goodies were scattered here and there. Hell, maybe one of my old chummers might have some of them, and some other swag, as well…
Shadowrun: Crimson Page 4