Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome

by John Helfers

  • • •

  “Look, I know it doesn’t have teeth, but when it bites you it hurts! It fucking hurts, okay?”

  Vitriol knew he was speaking louder than he should, so he shut up. He sat against the wall next to the roof door and huddled against the cold wind.

  He could tell Harpy was still curious, but also that she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking him anything more about it. But they had been on the roof for an hour already, there was no telling how much longer they’d have to be up there, and something had to pass the time.

  “So how does it hurt?” Harpy finally asked.

  Vitriol knew exactly what she was talking about, but it might be a long night and he needed to take his fun where he could get it.

  “How does what hurt?”

  “How does a goddamn crocodile hurt, you asshole? You know, the thing you were just talking about?”

  “Ah, right, the crocodile,” Vitriol said, lightly slapping his knee. “Well, here’s the thing. It’s a program, right? Software. So it can interact with anything wired into the Matrix. You take your average Hiroki, someone without anything hardwired into their brain, maybe without any implants at all, and it’s not going to hurt them much. No access points. But someone like me, I got all sorts of points of entry for it. So when it bites, it’s trying to short out anything electronic in me. It didn’t permanently fry anything, but it gave me a weird sort of sharp tingling in my brain and throat, like someone was trying to dig a dozen slivers out of the middle of my head with a dozen needles.”

  “That’s still not as bad as an actual crocodile bite,” Harpy said.

  “Yeah. But it ain’t good.”

  They were quiet again, and Vitriol watched the Manhattan city lights calmly blink and flicker in front of him. It was soothing, which was all wrong, so Vitriol looked at Harpy instead. Her round face, her folded arms, and her eternally arched eyebrow were enough to keep him irritated and on edge.

  “Don’t you want to know how I finally got away?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “Oh come on! It was a virtual crocodile trying to fry my neurons! That’s kind of cool, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “And obviously I got away from it, or I wouldn’t be here. So how did I do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Harpy said. “Some sort of hacker crap. You got out your program and it fought the demon guy’s program and yours either won or it distracted this crocodile thing long enough for you to get away. Who gives a shit?”

  “It’s more complicated than that!” Vitriol said. “It’s not like you just launch a program and sit back and wait for it to do its thing! There’s all sorts of adjustments you need to make on the fly, moves and counter-moves, it’s like swordfighting!”

  “It’s like playing video games—just a bunch of button-pushing.”

  “Yeah, but really cool button pushing!”

  “Shut up,” Harpy said.

  “No, hold on, let me explain—“

  “Shut up.” Harpy grabbed her dark sunglasses and threw them on, watching the images that appeared on the insides of the lenses. “They’re here,” she said. “You’re on.”

  The dark rooftop in front of Vitriol faded as he focused on the image inside his head, a feed from a security camera in the building below. Lochinvar was in the lobby, dressed in his usual black with clips and creases in all the right places. Next to him was the pigeon, a man whose newly implanted scalp hairs did not yet conceal the fact that he was balding.

  “No, no, I think it will grow in fine,” Lochinvar was saying. “But it’s unnecessary, really. Your eyes are—well, forgive me for this, but your eyes are simply extraordinary. I’m not sure anyone could look beyond those eyes and notice anything about your scalp.”

  The pigeon—his name was Carruthers, if Vitriol remembered correctly—was walking beneath one of the cameras, giving Vitriol a good look at the stubble on top of his head. The skin underneath was turning red.

  “Okay, let’s move,” Vitriol said. He took his focus away from the security footage but made sure he still paid attention to the audio link from below.

  Harpy stood, picked up the crowbar she had tucked behind her, and wrenched the rooftop door open with a screech.

  Alarms went off throughout the building, but there wasn’t any sound. Prometheus Engineering apparently did not feel any need to let any of its neighbors know about break-ins on its property. The people who needed to know about it, though, now knew.

  “Oh dear,” Vitriol heard Carruthers say through the security feed. “I’m afraid we have to leave.”

  “Why?” Lochinvar said. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s—I can’t really say,” Carruthers said. “But we need to leave.”

  “How disappointing.”

  Harpy and Vitriol were plunging ahead, going in and out of range of several security cameras and being captured by all of them. Thanks to Harpy’s spell, though, the only thing they’d show is two dark, ghostly, faceless images drifting past.

  They found the entrance to one of the building’s corner staircases and ran into it. The walls here were plain and gray, and while the AR overlay wasn’t much prettier, it sure was interesting. Security access points were all over the place, glowing bright red so they couldn’t be missed. And security personnel were in the staircase too, a few floors lower, chasing the ghosts their cameras had seen.

  “Oh—oh dear,” Carruthers said inside Vitriol’s head. “The doors are sealed now. I’m afraid we can’t leave.”

  “That’s entirely my fault, I’m afraid. Emergencies and crises and such things just aren’t my forte. I find I want to talk about what’s going on instead of doing anything about it, and that leads to a sort of paralysis that is not helpful in this kind of situation. Which I suppose it’s what happening now, as I’m blathering on and not helping the situation.”

  “It’s all right,” Carruthers said. “There’s somewhere we can go.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Follow me.”

  Lochinvar’s part was proceeding smoothly, so Vitriol decided to watch his own ass for a bit. Since the staircase was becoming a bit crowded for his tastes, Vitriol pushed a door open and ran into a hallway on the building’s fourteenth floor. It was freeing to be able to intrude into a corp building without worrying about setting off an alarm. It’s quite possible that he set of three or four additional alarms as he ran across the burgundy-and-green carpeting in the long hallway, but the thing was, none of them after the first one mattered.

  Ahead of him, doors opened and guards came out, weapons lowered and ready. There were two of them, and they’d be shooting to kill.

  Harpy was ready, though, and she was faster than them. Vitriol didn’t see what got them, he didn’t feel it, but he saw what happened. One of the guards went down immediately, falling like his spinal cord had been abruptly severed. The other staggered, wobbling and weaving on rubbery legs, his gun firing but not until he had dropped his arm so that all the rounds went into the floor in front of him.

  Vitriol was on him quickly, laying the small blackjack he always kept with him alongside the guard’s jaw, dropping him like a punch-drunk boxer.

  He waved to Harpy, who was lagging a little after casting her spell.

  “Come on,” he said. “We can stay on this floor for a little bit. There’s plenty of room to wander.”

  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 g
uards, 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 your 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 ex
perience 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.”