SHADOWRUN: Spells and Chrome (shadowrun)

by Anthology

  Most of the floor looked like it held conference rooms, which made it pretty benign. If this floor had restricted areas, it would already be crawling with guards. Vitriol glanced in several rooms and saw they were all about the same-black, enameled tables surrounded by white, pod-like chairs. The walls of each room had half a dozen screens, and all of them were off. Any one of these rooms would be as good as another, so Vitriol picked one at random and walked in.

  He wouldn't have much time-as soon as the guards in the hallway had fallen unconscious, there had likely been an alert sent out to all the other guards, and they'd be converging here.

  Then he heard Lochinvar's voice in his ear. Vitriol hadn't changed the volume, so that meant Lochinvar was forcing his way through to get Vitriol's attention.

  "I can tell this is a room for executives," Lochinvar was saying. "You don't let the wageslaves sit on this kind of furniture. But what if you're here for a while? Do you just have to sit and wait?"

  Carruthers laughed, clearly pleased to be showing off. "Of course not! This room is fully equipped with everything we need to work. You don't think we'd spend any of our time not working, would you?"

  "I don't know," Lochinvar said. "These couches appear to be quite comfortable for things other than just sitting around."

  Vitriol could almost hear Carruthers blushing.

  "They're in," Vitriol said. "Once Lochinvar gets the jack ready, we'll be set."

  He hadn't even finished speaking when the node access point appeared before him. It was a black disk, maybe half a meter in diameter, with an ivory inlay that showed a mighty, muscled man chained to a cliff. He had manacles around his ankles and wrists, pulling him into a spread-eagled shape, and he had a terrible gaping wound in his abdomen that, since it was depicted in ivory, seemed clean and sanitary despite the visible intestines.

  This was the access point to the Prometheus Engineering executive LAN. It was a network entirely without wireless access-if you didn't plug into it, you couldn't access it, just like the primitive networks of the '60s. Lochinvar, though, had now plugged in a wireless transmitter into the LAN, and now it was up to Vitriol to make good use of it.

  The disk in front of him looked so hard, so unbreakable, that Vitriol wished he could take it head on, throw a bunch of agents and maybe a custom mook or two at it and shatter the sucker into a million little artsy-fartsy pieces. But he didn't have time to screw around, and he also had access codes Lochinvar had lifted from Carruthers. Too easy.

  He threw the codes at the disk, and it reacted immediately. The wound in Prometheus' abdomen healed, he stood straight and pulled the chains attached to his arms. The edges of the disk pulled in with the chains, then the whole black disk collapsed on itself and was gone. Behind it was a floating circle with a thousand smaller white circles, like little aspirin tablets, hovering in front of him. A thousand files with nothing to identify any of them. And if he was lucky, he had two minutes to find what he needed.

  Now it was time for the agents. He let them loose, a swarm of flies buzzing around the little pills, sticking their proboscides into the hard white surfaces, probing for anything that might tell them what was in the files. They left little bits of fly saliva on the pure white surfaces-an uncharacteristic programming flourish by Vitriol. He kind of hoped Harpy would glance over and notice.

  She didn't. She was too busy watching the hallway outside the room, waiting for the inevitable approach of the guards. She looked nervous, which reminded Vitriol that he should probably hurry.

  He looked back at the open disk with its thousand pills and saw that the opening was getting smaller. Something was wrong.

  "Lochinvar!" he said. "You didn't let Carruthers log in, did you?"

  Lochinvar didn't reply. He didn't hear any noise from Carruthers, either. Whatever was happening in the room the two of them had retired to, Vitriol was pretty sure it wasn't good. And now his access was collapsing.

  "Stupid corp bastard should just unplug the transmitter," Vitriol muttered, then focused on his flies. They were moving fast now, black blurs skittering over the pills, until all at once they faded away except for one, and that one had a white pill gripped in its six legs and it was flying toward Vitriol as the circle around it collapsed. It darted out just before the entire disk vanished and Vitriol's access was gone.

  "Got it, Harpy! Got it!" He turned toward the door. Harpy was down.

  "Oh," Vitriol said. Then he started running. • • •

  At least he hadn't been nabbed by contract cops. Places like Knight Errant and Lone Star were all about wrapping up as many cases as possible, and forced confessions were a great way to put a "CLOSED" stamp on a case file. They used torture like plumbers use a snake-they knew it was usually the fastest way to get the job done.

  Come to think of it, Vitriol was pretty sure that Knight Errant sometimes used actual plumber's snakes in their interrogations. He shuddered at the thought.

  But the people that had him were internal security, Prometheus Engineering's own people. While they wouldn't mind a confession (it would come in handy when they were justifying why they had to kill him), they were more concerned about the truth, a commodity Knight Errant officers tended to hold in low esteem. These guys needed to know what was actually going on, which meant that, if they were smart, torture would be off the table for a while. Torture was good for a lot of things, but getting an accurate story wasn't one of them.

  They'd overrun him soon after he noticed Harpy lying on the floor, and everything had been confusion for a while. They had jammed most of his equipment, and he had to go for a few harrowing moments looking at the world as it really was, without AR overlay. Drab and grey, dull and lifeless. He could have slept with his eyes open-the unaugmented world, as far as he was concerned, provided no interesting visual stimuli.

  His equipment was working now, but it wasn't doing much for him. There was only one available node here, and all it did was throw up some AR designed to weaken his resolve. The overhead lights got a little harsher, the table edges looked a little sharper, and there was a slow drip-drip-drip of water coming from an unidentifiable place. He thought about shutting off his AR perception, but he didn't want to give the Prometheus bastards the satisfaction.

  There were two big guys standing near the only door to the room, armed and cybered to the teeth. Vitriol briefly experimented with hacking into one of the guy's arms, but he was rejected with extreme prejudice. He was not on his home turf, he didn't have access to outside nodes where he had all sorts of tools and agents stored, plus these guys could probably take his head off with a single backhanded swipe, so he decided to leave their equipment alone for the time being.

  Then the door opened and the show started. The guy that walked in was a by-the-book corp security drone, down to the black tie, mirrored shades, and flat head.

  "Mr. Vitriol," the man said. "Fake politeness, banal courtesy, tough-guy posturing, blah blah blah. Now that that's out of the way, tell me what I want to know or I'll take it right out of your head."

  "Hi," Vitriol said.

  The man shook his head. "No, we're done with that bullshit. No banter, no time for you to be a smartass. Tell me what I want to know, etc."

  Vitriol leaned back in the wobbly metal chair, casually throwing his right arm over the back. "What do you want to know?"

  "Who are you working for?"

  Vitriol smiled. "Would you want any of the runners who work for you to give you up so easily? I didn't think so. So I can't tell you-I got professional standards to uphold."

  "Fine," the man said, then looked at no one in particular. "Bring it in."

  "Who are you talking to?" Vitriol said.

  The man focused back on Vitriol. "Not you."

  "Okay. And what are they bringing in?"

  The man smiled and looked oddly cheerful, even with his mirrored shades still in place. "The nice thing about your operation here, Mr. Vitriol, is that we already know what you were after. We caught you after you
r agents had pointed it out to you and started to retrieve it, all before Mr. Carruthers alertly terminated your connection." The man smirked. "Convenient, isn't it, that your connection stayed intact long enough for us to find out what you wanted, but not long enough for you to actually get away with it? One might even think we planned it that way."

  The interrogator was awfully self-satisfied, but in Vitriol's experience that was a pretty common trait in corp security officers. "Well, you're all very clever then," he said.

  "Yes, we are. You were attempting to get your hands on the plans for prototype NT67T/H7, codenamed Project Siren. I assume you weren't just grabbing it randomly, especially since you dedicated so many agents to finding it. So you know what we can do with Project Siren?"

  "No," Vitriol said. When you were expected to lie, he figured, why tell the truth?

  "We can use it-to be specific, our marketers can use it-to persuade. To insinuate our way into people's heads and make them think what we want them to think."

  "Sounds ominous."

  "Ah, yes, the deadpan reaction to the major, rather ominous technological advance. You play your role very well, Mr. Vitriol. Sadly, the truth is the project is not yet as powerful as we may desire. We can only nudge minds at the moment, perhaps hasten them to move in directions that they might otherwise have chosen for themselves, without our assistance. It may not be that momentous, but it is a start.

  "Okay."

  The man tilted his head down and started tracing random patterns on the metal table surface with his finger. "We had to perform a significant amount of brain research in order to develop this product, as you might imagine. Which means that we have a large supply of nanotechnology dedicated toward discovering what is happening in different parts of people's minds."

  His head jerked up quickly, and he reached his hand toward Vitriol's head, like he was going to press the tips of his fingers through his forehead and knead whatever he found in there.

  "We have the tools to reach in there, Mr. Vitriol. Into your brain. We can find what's in there." He leaned back. "So you can tell us what we want to know, Mr. Vitriol. Or I can send in the agents that can find it for me."

  "You can't do that," Vitriol said. "No one can do that."

  "But we think we can."

  "Who gives a shit? All that means is that you're delusional."

  The man gently shrugged. "That may be," he said. "But we're delusional enough to try it."

  "Fine," Vitriol said with a casual wave of his hand. "Waste as much time as you want. You don't have anything that can do what you're saying."

  "But we have nanotechnology research that interests you enough to break in and attempt to steal it. So you know we have nanites here that can affect your mind, and we're willing to use them. They are nanites that have some kind of effect-if they didn't, we would never have continued Project Siren long enough to catch the interest of whoever hired you. We have nanites that can affect the brain, and we're going to put them into your skull.

  "But maybe we don't know what we're doing. Maybe we have these nanites that can do things to your brain, but not the things we think they'll do. And we will put these things into your brain and let them run wild and we will see what they do to your mind. Are you willing to see what the results will be?"

  Vitriol wished his eyes hadn't grown wider, but he knew they had and there was nothing he could do about it. "You can't do that. You can't just take someone off the street and inject things into their brain!"

  "First of all, Mr. Vitriol, we didn't just pull you off the street. Second, while human testing is sometimes frowned upon by the more squeamish corporations, many of us know that the use of human subjects can provide great advances in learning. So when you are whatever you'll become after this, Mr. Vitriol, you'll know that you helped the cause of science."

  "I don't think this is necessary," Vitriol said, wishing there was something, anything interesting in the room to look at.

  "You're prepared to talk? About your conversation with Blood Sister, perhaps?"

  "About what? What do you-" He kept a nervous eye on the room's door. "Okay. I'll talk. Let's negotiate."

  "Not that kind of talking, Mr. Vitriol. The kind where you tell us what you want to know."

  "I can't-"

  The door to the room opened, and a man in a long white coat walked in holding a small metal box. The man with the sunglasses waved his hand abruptly in front of Vitriol's face.

  "It's too late. We'll do it my way."

  "But-"

  "We're done," the man said, and walked out of the room as the man in the white coat approached. • • •

  Vitriol didn't go out for a while after that. For a few days he simply didn't feel like it, and after that he stayed in because he thought it would be best to lie low. He didn't go home, either-his home was a dump, and he didn't want anyone to find him there. He stayed at a hotel, the type of place he could afford with the money he had earned, with a false identity that came as an additional form of compensation.

  When he finally went out again, he avoided his usual haunts, even staying away from a sphinx party he heard about. But there are some things in life that, like chronic headaches, cannot be avoided no matter how hard one tries, and one night Vitriol found himself in the same bar as Gemmel. He was not able to avoid the dwarf, and he was surprised to realize that he didn't want to. He should probably know what other people knew about the incident.

  Gemmel didn't make him wait. He plopped down net to him on a stool, easily climbing up on it even though it was almost as tall as he was. Vitriol glared at the bartender to let him know he should stay away for a time. The bartender, who did not seem anxious to move from his padded stool at the other end of the bar, looked away from Vitriol and Gemmel.

  "Hey, hey, Vitriol, did you hear?" Gemmel said, brown beard bobbing. "Did you hear about the nun?"

  "What?"

  "The nun, the nun. Blood Sister. Sold out. Went corporate."

  So that was their game, Vitriol thought. "What do you mean?"

  "What do you think I mean? She got a steady gig, shadow ops for Prometheus. They might even put her on the official payroll someday."

  "Wow. Never thought she was the type to go corporate."

  "So why do you think she did it?"

  "Don't know," Gemmel said, scratching his head. "How does anyone ever get anyone to do anything they don't want to do? They had something on her, I guess."

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "Maybe that's what was bothering her. She seemed like she was kind of in a bad mood, don't you think."

  "Yeah. For about the last five years."

  "No, I mean recently. Recently she was in an even worse mood. You saw it, didn't you? That night at the sphinx party? Didn't she seem like she was in a really bad mood that night?"

  "Yeah."

  "So what did you talk about?"

  "Nothing," Vitriol said. "Nothing at all." Then he smiled and walked out.

  The Manhattan streets were shiny in the night, almost like they were wet. The air was heavy, and the scent of rotting garbage never really went away on days like this.

  Vitriol wasn't paying much attention to the street, though. He was playing around with the twin images, twin memories in his mind. In each of them, he was talking to Blood Sister at the sphinx party. In one of the images, they had briefly exchanged hostile words while the nun's church collapsed on him, which is what really happened. In the other, they had a brief exchange that strongly indicated that Blood Sister was behind the Prometheus Engineering break-in.

  It was a ludicrous image. Anyone who really knew Blood Sister would know she wouldn't ever work with Vitriol, and she wasn't the type to organize a run on her own. But the people at Prometheus didn't know that. Vitriol had talked to Blood Sister so he could put a memory in his head, and then he played with the memory so it would give out the information he wanted it to provide. When the Prometheus people had found the custom-designed memory in Vitriol's head, they had beli
eved it. Especially since they had heard about the conversation and wanted to know what it was about.

  So they had brought Blood Sister in, and they had apparently gotten what they wanted from her. And Vitriol was quietly let go-the people who hired him apparently saw to that, and although Vitriol couldn't know for sure how that happened, he believed they could order around his former captors because they were their superiors.

  It was a shame about Harpy. She was the sacrifice the run needed to look right. Lochinvar hadn't been seen for a while, and possibly only Carruthers knew of his fate.

  Prometheus would move forward, thinking they had gotten what they wanted-not only did they have Blood Sister's identity, but they seemingly had proof that their memory retrieval nanites worked. Never mind that Vitriol had forced them to work, pretty much waving his fake memory in front of them as hard as he could, so they didn't have a choice but to find it.

  Vitriol's employers had lied to him about who they were, he had lied about what Blood Sister had said, then his employers had lied to the rest of the Prometheus Engineering corporation about the capabilities of their nanotech program. And the world continued spinning 'round. Vitriol knew that there was only one secret to survival in this world-stay at least one lie ahead of everyone else.

  Bloody Fingers

  Jason Schmetzer

  2070… somewhere south of London

  They'd gone to ground in the Barrens.

  Deke blinked his cybereye's overlay off and inhaled slowly. His eyes-normal vision now, no AR-tracked slowly right-to-left, mostly unfocused. He was watching for movement, for telltales, for things that might not be tagged with an RFID or broadcasting a mesh signal. The sun was nearly down, anyway. If one of the 'nappers was stupid enough to light a stick, he'd see it. Or smell it. The doxy buggers.

  "Deke," a bud in his ear whispered. "No signs."

  Deke twisted his head. Lincoln was nestled in a gully a hundred meters to his left, rifle presented but protected by a ghillie suit. A blink brought his AR back up, scattering icons across his vision, but Lincoln wasn't broadcasting. The subvocal they were using was burst-transmit-if one of the 'nappers caught the signal, they'd think it was background noise. Unless they were good.