Shadowrun: Shaken: No Job Too Small

by Russell Zimmerman

  “On the roofs?”

  “On the roofs.” He nodded, and I wondered why I’d let this lunatic into my apartment.

  I just gave him a long, hard look while his eyes went a little out of focus behind his rain-wet goggles, and he tapped incessantly at the hardware strapped to his forearm. He was a human, probably a dozen years younger than me, and he was in the sort of shape I’d seen back before dropping out of college ball to focus on schoolwork. His body was dotted with electronics, from the datajacks behind a mildly pointed ear to the bracer-housed cyberdeck he wore on his left forearm, here and there he had wiring going to his bodysuit, what looked like a string of old commlinks daisy-chained together for processing power, and all sorts of other hardware strung all over him. I dragged my gaze away before my Sideways started trying to find patterns in the wiring. There was a gun on his hip, though, and even as I recognized a Colt America L36, my headware confirmed it.

  Well, at least he had that going for him.

  “When I’m not on a gig, I moonlight with Alley Cat Express,” he offered up into the silence I’d created. “It’s a decent side job, really. Reasonable rates, I’ve got solid headware to handle the best paying data runs, and—”

  “And you get to run on roofs like a maniac.”

  I knew about the ACE. They were all fruit-loops like this guy, tempting gravity for fun, a mixture of data geeks, cybered athletes, and physical adepts. They ran physical goods in-city, using bikes, skates, and boards for some jobs, sticking to their own two feet—cybered or otherwise—for most. They danced through traffic, cut corners by sticking to the roofs, and frustrated the cops with their periodic tagging. They were something between a gang without any turf, a legitimate courier company, and a gang with, in a way, all the turf in the city.

  And one of ’em was in my house. Goggles, bodysuit, goofy grin, and all. Great. I was trusting an Alley Cat to help me track Chris Minirth’s killer. Bang-up job, Jimmy Kincaid. Way to make good choices.

  “All right, listen.” I might as well get this over with. “I’ve got a datapad, an old Renraku model, and I need—”

  “A Renraku Dojo, right, there on your desk? The dinosaur precursor to the Sensei, which is already kind of a piece of crap? Yeah. I spotted its icon while you were eyeballing me, and figured it must’ve been what Hardpoint sent me here for, since the only other ’links here are the Avalon in your head and the one in your pocket, but that looks like a burner.”

  “Yeah, so listen, what I need you to—”

  “You owe me a hundred nuyen. Check your email,” he said, giving me a head tilt and an eyebrow arch that made me want to punch him in the throat.

  A second later, my Transys chirped about an incoming message, automatically unbundled the files, and a data packet fell into my head. The message was signed with an ornate G, animated in the flowing script Sperethiel-types liked, and Gentry’s smug little mouth turned up in an even smugger little grin.

  “Balls yeah, CHOCO-PUNCH protein shakes!” He’d seen the half-finished one on my desk. “Hook a celé up, bro?”

  My linguasoft—still slotted from the Ancients and Laésa meet that felt like years ago—helpfully let me know that a celé was a non-elf. If he kept peppering his language with elfy-talk, I might have to bust his jaw for him.

  I ignored it and let him rifle through my fridge—as long as he stuck to protein shakes and stayed away from my beer or the last of the Petrowski Farm-fresh eggs we’d traded for—while I rifled through files. I might not be able to hack ’em, but I sift through data just fine. My Sideways saw to that. The obsession with detail, the need to find patterns, the knack for noticing them emerge from nothing all helped with this sort of thing. My Transys was a pretty top-notch processor to boot, and I devoured his itinerary, his outbound and incoming messages, his notes, everything Gentry had peeled—effortlessly—from the datapad and sent my way.

  I didn’t find what I was after. I didn’t have any hastily scrawled threats, any desperate blackmail attempts, any frantic tries at negotiating with—and conveniently naming—some psychopath who’d figured out a way to quietly kill Minirth. I hadn’t found anyone with a grudge, hadn’t found any shady appointments in his book, hadn’t found any research worth killing anyone after. I found allusions to a project, I found notes about research with an unnamed subject, and I found holes. Holes with patterns. His logged office hours, RFID trackers that kept track of his location any time he was on campus, said he was in his office every Tuesday and Thursday night from 7:00 to 8:00. He didn’t have a single appointment scheduled for that time, didn’t have a single file he’d created, manipulated, or saved during that time, and didn’t have a single posted grade, correspondence sent to a coworker, or anything else. He’d been there at that time, twice a week, but hadn’t been doing anything—or rather, hadn’t been doing anything he’d recorded or logged anywhere, hadn’t been working on any projects anyone else knew about, hadn’t been talking to anyone through official electronic channels.

  They were just logged in his book under a single initial, N.

  N.

  I cross-checked it with today’s date—sue me, I use my cranially-mounted supercomputer to remind me of the day of the week, sometimes—and gritted my teeth. It lined up. N. N had been in his office the night before he died, N had been meeting with him after Jeannie and everyone else had left the office. N had very likely been the last person to see him alive, and most likely the person who had killed him.

  N.

  I searched farther back. Whoever N was, they were important. For years, that time slot had been when Minirth met with Dr. Reynolds, probably to bitch about me and my squandered potential. Then, all of a sudden, they were all ‘N’ meetings instead.

  “Son of a bitch, I’m hungry.” I was drawn from my tracking reverie to see Gentry sprawled in my guest chair, one leg up over the armrest, sucking down his fourth protein shake.

  “Suprathyroid gland, you know?” He gave me a look like we were buddies, frat boy best pals, and had been for years. “This thing’s got me super starving, raé. I mean, the doc said it’d be a thing, but I didn’t think it’d be a thing-thing, you feel me?”

  My Transys popped up a Sperethiel translation for raé; he’d just called me an elf. Then, even as I deleted that one, it offered me a standard datafile on the side effects of the popular fitness/combat implant, but I swept the infomatic away with an irritated mental gesture. Suprathyroids caused hyperactivity and abnormal dietary increases, particularly when the host-body was first acclimating to it. Every geek with a razorboy wannabe friend knew that.

  Not everyone knew that I had another eight cases of CHOCO-PUNCH protein shakes stashed in a closet, taken as payment for a routine spy-and-fry gig, hired to record the indiscretions of a CHOCO-PUNCH distributor’s boyfriend.

  “Gentry, I’ve got your hundred nuyen for the commlink gig. I’ll get you all the CHOCO-PUNCH you want if you can hit a system across town for me. I need some camera footage. I know exactly where and I know exactly when. You in?”

  “Sure thing, man. But if you want to walk me through what you’re after from a standard sec-feed, it’ll be easier if you piggyback and tell me what to look for.”

  “Piggyback?”

  “You know, ’trode net and stuff, if you haven’t got a d-jack. I can take you for a ride. You can look, but not touch, peeking over my shoulder like in a third-person shooter, right? We go in hot-sim, fast as fuck, full VR and sharp as can be. I scan the files, when we find what you’re after, you let me know. We’re in, we’re out, you get what you need, I get paid. We all win, raé.”

  I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t like the Matrix. I didn’t want to go there. I normally had Trace for that. I’d hired Gentry for that. I hadn’t ever been inside, hadn’t ever wanted to. I certainly wasn’t eager to now, not with some shadowrunner I’d just met, someone who ran with the Alley Cat Express nutjobs, someone who jumped across rooftops for the adrenaline rush. Someone who actually liked CHOCO-PUNCH shakes
.

  “Yeah.”

  But I had to catch N. Had to do right by Minirth. If this was the best way, so be it.

  “Yeah, I’m in.”

  CHAPTER 13

  It was dazzling. It was dizzying. It was terrible.

  I hadn’t been so assaulted by colors in years. Even in my dreams, even on the astral plane, things were muted compared to this.

  I was in a neon cityscape, all glowing, all crawling with light, all pulsing with data and energy. There wasn’t a filter for it, no dimming background-count from the dreary, hardscrabble existence of Puyallup, no filter option like the cyberoptics I so relied on to turn my life into a movie. It was all color and light and power, all straight lines and right angles, all alien and threatening.

  I was a floating pinpoint of nothing just over Gentry’s shoulder. Gentry, meanwhile, was an elven ranger straight out of a video game; hell, maybe literally, he could’ve gotten the code from there, for all I knew. His features were sharper, ears were drawn out and pointed more than any natural elf I’d ever known, his eyes were a bright green that matched his tunic, trousers, and whatever other t-words he was wearing. A black cloak—not just black, really, but like a shadow, a void, a swath of pitch darkness here amidst the neon glare of the Matrix—was slung over his shoulders.

  He looked ridiculous.

  Gentry moved like he knew what he was doing, though. The neon skyline swept by, certain landmarks looming, inescapable, but he didn’t seem bothered. His digital self—our digital selves?—moved like a fantasy elf in one of Ariana’s cartoons, feet pitter-pattering at absurd speed, icon swooping through the imagined reality as fast as his cyberdeck—a Shiawase Cyber-5, he’d said, like I was supposed to care—could process our navigation. Gentry’d spouted a lot of technobabble before we’d decided to try this, worries about noise, about signal coherence, about wireless latency and bandwidth, static and spam and all sorts of garbage I didn’t know or care about. I’d cut him off with a simple question.

  “Can you do it?” I’d asked, sitting in the driver’s seat of my Ford, windows tinted, Ariana on astral overwatch, parked across the street from the University of Washington main campus.

  “Oh. Yeah, it’s chill,” he’d said without a doubt in the world.

  We’d left Ari to magically manipulate anyone who got too close into leaving—hell if I was getting another parking ticket, much less anything worse—and then Gentry’d busted out slender cables from his deck, and that’d been that. The last thing I’d remembered before the dazzling neon world swept over me was plugging into my datajack and Gentry tapping his touch-screen.

  But here we were. He’d darted around lickety-split, dashing from icon to icon until we were snug inside the virtual representation of the U-Dub campus. The buildings were recognizable, icons crafted to remind logged-on users of the campus proper. Some icons were like that; I saw telephone boxes that were probably data terminals, I saw invitingly bright plaques that were basic information dumps, a few other users meandered by all in their own gaudy, ridiculous-looking avatars…it was like a digital dream of campus, college kids sauntering by in their just-barely-acceptably-rebellious icons, a few professors hidden among them, darting from datastore to datastore, all the foot traffic of the campus matched by eager Matrix users.

  Gentry’s cloak got drawn up a little tighter, some sort of masking protocol, I guess, and no one seemed to spot us. He didn’t dart from shadow to shadow, just walked boldly through the middle of the digitally pulsing faux-reality, same as I had when Ariana’s invisibility spell had protected me.

  The cloak stayed wrapped tight as he walked through the wall of the Grant Landrum building’s icon, just blinked right inside to a neon-bright hallway filled with doors, stretching out before us as far as my imaginary eyes could see.

  “We need the security terminal,” I said. The words came out slowly, like my mouth was full of cotton.

  “I remember that part,” Gentry said, voice higher pitched, fast-forwarded in comparison to mine.

  “What gives?”

  “Nothing to worry about, raé, it’s just that hosting and interacting with you is using processing power I normally have allocated elsewhere. The Cyber-5’s a beauty, but I customized her myself, with one-of-a-kind overclocking subroutines and efficiency protocols tailored to my user profile and programming techniques. She’s designed for a very specific set of processes, and your piggybacking is just a little out of sync.”

  I wasn’t sure just what to say, and with my sluggish communication times I was worried it’d take too long to curse in any sort of meaningful way. He glided down the hallway for a few more doors, then stopped and wedged into a doorframe, cloak falling shadow-silent and shadow-still.

  “You’re like, lagging,” he whispered, otherwise motionless. “Like you’re drunk.”

  Oh.

  A glowing security guard walked by, all shining U-Dub badge and friendly, recruitment-poster features. His face was unbelievably symmetrical, his hair flawless, his uniform razor-creased.

  “Ice?” It felt like it took me two or three seconds to ask.

  “Nice work, detective.”

  The security program didn’t seem to hear us communicating, didn’t seem to see or hear us at all, but Gentry gave it a few extra seconds before moving out of the doorway. Intrusion Countermeasures, they were called, or ‘ice’ for short. Subroutines designed to check for legit traffic, wrapped up in a socially-acceptable package, in this case, that let it blend in and not disturb users.

  Gentry ghosted past doorway after doorway, until we came to one with, naturally, a large lock in place.

  “Now what?”

  In the time it took me to ask, digi-Gentry had plucked a gracefully curving bow from out of his cloak, and as the wisp of digital shadow settled back into place from him drawing it, somehow a quiver of arrows appeared over his shoulder.

  “You look stupid,” I tried to say, but he was moving too quick for the barb to stick. He drew arrows—one, two, three—with smooth, sure, hands and in just a second all three little shafts were sticking in the chrome-shining lock. They vanished in a wave of pixels, and the door just clicked open.

  “You were saying?”

  Even without seeing his stupid, sculpted elven-cartoon face from my vantage point, I could tell he was smirking.

  He ducked into the security room and drifted over to a data terminal. Another security guard icon sat there, unmoving, unblinking, inhuman. Gentry ignored it, and it seemed totally oblivious to him. He reached out and stuck his hand—jeeze, he even had on a delicately filigreed bracer where his cyberdeck was in real life—right into the terminal, imaginary fingers wiggling.

  “Tell me when you see what you’re after,” he said, the nearby guard still unmoving, unnoticing, uncaring. A screen popped to life, and I saw the hallway in front of Dr. Minirth’s office. His room itself wasn’t monitored, but the labs were full of valuable reagents and imported focus items on loan for research, so the hallway was under high-tech scrutiny at all times.

  Lucky for us.

  My field of vision was consumed by the monitor, and time started playing tricks. Gentry was rewinding, dragging us backwards faster and faster, zipping back through the last few days. It was 11:59 the night of Minirth’s death, 10:59, 9:59. There was no one and nothing on the screen, hallways dark and empty, just the clock scrolling backwards and taking me with it.

  “Slow down,” I tried to say, and it worked.

  9:00, 8:45, 8:30, 8:15.

  “Easy…”

  Nothing. 8:00. Still nothing. 7:55, empty hallway. 7:50. I sat, I stared, Gentry worked the clock. 7:30. 7:15. 7:00. 6:45. 6:30.

  “Wait,” Gentry said, interrupting my staring. “Look, there.”

  6:52:17, there was the tiniest flicker.

  “There. That second, watch it again.” I did, and sure enough, there it was.

  “Someone set up a loop. Someone’s been here. Hacked in, and…

  Without warning, without
anything in the hallway changing even the tiniest bit, it was 7:43:54, in a flicker of thought, and then there was a little blinking sensation again.

  “There. They were in for almost an hour. Set things on a loop, to cover their tracks.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “For starters, I’ve copied that corrupted chunk of file. I can look for it later, check for a signature, see if I can figure out who did it. They were sloppy, and that’s a good sign. Then, though?”

  Without me asking, Gentry warped time again. His avatar’s arm twisted—did I imagine the blank-featured U-Dub guard, the IC, shifting his stance just a little?—and suddenly we were looking at camera footage with dozens, maybe hundreds, of people coming and going, walking backwards in a blur. Then empty hallways again, then bustling, then empty, then busy. I thought I might puke. It was a riot of colors, all blurring together, intertwining with one another and their after-images as Gentry rewound faster and faster, as my mind tried to correct for the lack of Sideways, the sharpness brought about by my perpetual WhiteBrite betel chew, as people kept moving the wrong way, zipping in the wrong direction…

  “Here we are.” Things slowed down again, moving at just double speed. I felt like I could catch my breath. We were at 8:00 most of a week earlier, scrolling through a Thursday evening. 7:55. 7:50. 7:45.

  “No sign of tampering,” Gentry said under his breath, and I worried that the IC might hear.

  Christopher Minirth walked across the screen all herky-jerk rewound, jacket on, old-style leather briefcase in his hand, checking his watch as he walked backwards in time to the side hallway his office nestled in.

  “Damn,” I said, not meaning to.

  Gentry paused it wordlessly, but with a big, gaudy cartoon question mark appearing over his head. I was left staring at Dr. Minirth, frozen in time, locked in mid-stride, but hale and hearty and looking much the same as he had the last time I’d seen him with my own eyes.

  “No, we’re good, kid. I just…that’s him. The vic. Caught me off guard a little, is all.”