Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome

by John Helfers

  “Let me get this straight,” I said after a moment. “Nakamura has hired this Arab magician or technomage to open some sort of a gateway to … what did you call it? An alternate reality?”

  “Or a parallel dimension, if you like.”

  “And this Zayid character is supposed to find an actual, physical copy of the Necronomicon and bring it back.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you want us to hijack the book before Zayid passes it on to his boss.”

  “Just so. Can you do it?”

  “Not if the book doesn’t exist!”

  “Ah, but it does exist. It must. Don’t you see? For 150 years, millions of readers, the fans, the devotees of H.P. Lovecraft, have read those stories, and they have believed. Believed! Did you know that fifty years after Lovecraft’s death, libraries at places like Harvard and Oxford were deluged with search requests for that book? Perhaps a dozen works were actually published under that title, adding to the confusion.”

  “You … you’re saying that because a bunch of losers believed the Necronomicon was real, it is?” I looked him up and down. “That’s just whacked! You been doing too much BTL, man?” I was serious. Folks jazzed on better-than-life sims could pick up some weird delusions, sometimes.

  “I assure you I’m completely rational,” Mr. Johnson said. “And in earnest. Belief is everything. So, will you take the job?”

  Belief? Was that all it took to create reality from fiction? Belief?

  Nah… .

  But we did need the nuyen.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll take it. But half up front. And it’s nonrefundable if this turns out to be a goose chase.”

  “Uh-uh,” Mr. Johnson said. “Fifty-K up front. And you wear nannies.”

  “Shit. Why?”

  “So my people can peek over your shoulders, as it were. What you see and hear, they’ll see and hear. And they’ll know you’re not ripping them.”

  “Hey! You’ve hired us before! When did we ever scam you or your clients, huh?”

  “Never. And you won’t.” He shoved a plastic bag across the table at me, with a tangle of equipment inside. “Besides, there’s one thing more.”

  “What?”

  “If you can’t get the … merchandise, my clients want to be sure Nakamura can’t get it either. These will help verify that.”

  “Makes it more complicated, man,” I told him. “Seventy-five kay up front.”

  He hesitated, then nodded. “Done.”

  An hour later I was on the streets of Pittsburgh, my collar and hood up against the thin drizzle of acid rain, shouldering through the muggliemasses beneath the neon wink-blink of come-hither signs in twenty different languages, beneath the five-story buildingboards with their smiling, naked women and sleek cars and mindless MadAv babble. Megacorp massage, direct to you from the nuyen necromancers. An alien world, Slick, a billion klicks from the streets.

  In my belt was the bag of nannies, plus a credstick worth 75,000 nuyen. Not bad for a morning’s work.

  I didn’t know who our Mr. Johnson worked for, of course. Shadowrunners generally don’t. But the guy had the fashion sense and street-cred trust-me feel of a Fed, and I was pretty sure our employers were the good old UCAS.

  Nakamura, of course, we knew. Roger Nakamura was Pittsburgh’s grand high Pooh-Bah of Mellon-Mitsubishi, itself a branch of Renraku Megacorp.

  The team was waiting for me at the Eat ’n’ Meet at Fifth and Forbes, almost in the shadow of the M&M Tower. Boy, they were just gonna love this… .

  • • •

  I’d been working with them for maybe three years, and loved ’em all like siblings. Better, maybe, in Cammy’s case. I never banged my sister.

  Her name was Camilla Gonzales, but we all called her Cammy. The name fit. She was a weapons specialist who had this way of blending into the background so perfectly you’d never know she was there. And Thud’s name fit too. I never knew what he called himself, but he was eight powerfully muscled feet of rather dim attitude, and those curved ram’s horns growing from the sides of his skull gave him a certain in-your-face presence, you cop? Then there was Scooter, our pimple-faced magician, our very own wizardry whiz. And Dee-Dee wasn’t just a hacker. She made computers speak, roll over, and sit up and beg.

  And me? Well, never mind what my birth name was. Cam, Thud, Scoot, and Dee all just called me Fixer. I was the team’s face, the one who talked nice to the Mr. Johnsons and brought in the gigs.

  “We’re supposed to do what?” Cammie said after I’d laid out the deal.

  “I know,” I told her. “Sounds a little over-the-top …”

  “Over the top? It’s not even in this galaxy! Hey! Earth to Fixer! Comm-check!”

  “Did you tell this clown the difference between fiction and reality?” Dee-Dee asked, grinning.

  “Of course. He told me belief is everything.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Scooter said. “Belief is what makes the world we know.”

  Scoot was using The Voice, and that made us all take notice. Normally, he’s got this adenoidal whine that makes him sound like an annoying teen fanboy, but every now and again the adenoids vanish and his tone drops about two octaves. It’s what he calls his magical voice, and when he talks that way, you know he knows what he’s talking about. Cammie calls it speaking ex cathedra, which sounds like she thinks he used to be a church.

  “Scoot,” See said, shaking her head. She reached out and rapped the tabletop with her knuckles. “This is real.” She tapped the side of her head. “This is imagination… .”

  He cocked his head to one side. “So … when you run the Matrix, it’s not real?”

  She scowled. “Of course it’s real.”

  “But it’s all in your head.”

  “No it’s not!” She waved vaguely in front of her face. “It’s … it’s out there… .”

  “What you keep forgetting, Dee-Dee, is that according to the well-known laws of quantum mechanics, we create reality. In effect, there is no ‘out there’ out there.”

  I’d heard this argument before. It was popular with some hermetic magicians, I knew, though it wasn’t at all mainstream. Not yet.

  “You’re talking about the Awakening, right?” I asked.

  He nodded. “And a lot else. But we brought the Awakening on ourselves.”

  “Nonsense,” Cammie said, but she was frowning. “That was just … just magic.”

  “What do you think magic is, but the use of belief to change reality?”

  I glanced at Dee, at her delicately pointed ears, then at Thud, who was sitting there sharpening the tips of his horns, apparently not even listening, massive as a mountain, with fangs protruding two centimeters up from behind his lower lip.

  An elf, a troll, and two humans. A hundred years ago, it would have been four humans. So where did the metahumanity come from?

  Oh, yeah. We did it to ourselves. At least Scoot and a few like him thought so, and I had to admit the theory made as much sense as anything I’d ever heard. Seems that back at the end of the 20th century, and through the first decade of the 21st, we had all kinds of belief in the Big Changes coming. Cop it. The fundy Christians were so certain that Armageddon was right around the corner, with all the hosts of Satan ready to rise up and follow the Antichrist. And the fundy Muslims, the Shiites, anyway, were invested in the coming of the Mahdi and the creation of Allah’s New Order on Earth. Even the New Agers got into the act, focusing on channeled messages of coming Earth Changes, and the ancient Mayan prophecies that the Fifth Sun was coming to an end in 2012.

  With that much pure, raw belief gnawing at the foundations of Reality, man, something had to give.

  And it did. It’s tough to remember sometimes, sixty years later, that the Old World Order was all human. No trolls. No orks. No elves. No dwarves. And no magic. None that worked reliably, at any rate.

  We called it the Awakening when the Old Order fell. Hidden away within the human genome were all of the meta
human racial types, it turned out, and suddenly Black and White and Latino and Asian didn’t matter anymore. We were all humans, and we were sharing the planet with the stuff of myth and legend. Magic worked and dragons were real and Civilization itself was crumbling around our ears.

  So, what the hell? Maybe old H.P. Lovecraft’s little nightmares could have something to them after all. The potential of becoming real, if enough people closed their eyes and thought about it real hard.

  “What do you think about all of this, Thud?” I asked.

  “Don’t think,” the troll rumbled. He sounded like a good-natured earthquake. “Just do. Long as the nuyen’re there.”

  Thud could be remarkably down-to-earth about things.

  “We got our advance,” I told them. “Look, at the very least we clear better’n eighteen-K apiece, right? We go in, show ’em it can’t be done, and get out. Simple.”

  “Yeah? What if it can be done?” Scooter asked. The Voice had gone, and the annoying fanboy was back.

  I shrugged. “Then we get fifty-freakin’-K apiece. How hard can it be?”

  “Don’t say that, Fix,” Cam told me. “Don’t ever say that. Somebody might be listening.”

  “They will be.” I chuckled, and held up the bag of nannies. “Count on it.”

  “We really need to wear those things?” Dee said. “I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither. But it’s just for the op. They won’t be watching you shower.”

  “It’s just upgraded RFID,” Dee said. “No big deal.”

  She used the streetslang pronunciation, “ar-fid.” Radio frequency identification devices are everywhere—those little tags that control shoplifting and inventory, keep track of the kids, and let you dial in to the local net to get the name and number of the pretty girl you’re chatting up on the street. They work by broadcasting a limited chunk of data that you can read on your commlink from like thirty or forty meters away.

  Nannies are the same, but with more bandwidth, and with audio and vid channels. You wear the little flesh-colored dot on your forehead. It sees everything you see through an ultra-small nanocamera, and hears what you hear through a microphone the size of a large protein molecule. The range varies, depending on whether it’s a government or a corporate model, but it’s a lot farther than forty meters … and it can get through almost any of the usual RF barriers. Mr. Johnson’s people really would be watching.

  • • •

  It took Dee three days to hack the system, but we got what we needed to make the strike. Mitsubishi-Mellon had all kinds of defenses up, of course, but there are always cracks in the walls. We’d snuck into tougher places.

  The biggest problem was that we were operating under deadline. Our Mr. Johnson had provided us with a few details. Seems he had a pipeline into this Zayid character’s inner sanctum—a circle of twelve that was doing the heavy lifting for Zayid’s major working. A street shaman named Shifter hadn’t liked what he’d seen, and he’d made contact with our Mr. Johnson’s people, whoever they were.

  So, courtesy of Shifter, we knew Zayid was doing a series of incantations every night of the waning Moon, and that it was all coming to a head at midnight on the night of the new Moon—the 5th. And that was three days from my meeting with the Johnson.

  But Dee found us a way in that ought to bypass the defenses at the front entrance, at least. We’d need to jimmy a lock to get us into an infrastructure service tunnel two blocks from the M&M building, then follow the fiber-optics and water pipes into the tower’s basement. At that point, Dee would have to hack the building OS to take down certain surveillance cameras and the pressure sensors in the floor, and there would be guards outside the staff elevator.

  From there it was up sixty-eight floors to where Zayid was doing his thing.

  Simple. What could possibly go wrong?

  • • •

  What indeed?

  How about the extra SWAT-rigged security facing us as soon as we stepped out of the service tunnel?

  I still don’t know what the hell went wrong. Maybe Dee missed a security line when she hacked in. Maybe the whole op was compromised from the start. Hell, maybe we were set up. But Cammie stepped through that door, muttered a heartfelt oscar-sierra over her comm, and rolled for it as the bullets started slamming into the wall.

  Scoot spat something under his breath, and a guard three meters away snapped backward, arms pinwheeling as he slammed into a wall. Thud reached out with two hands the size of large turkeys and grabbed a couple of other guards by the throats, hoisting them off the floor and giving them a hard shake as a pacifier. I stepped out from behind him with my Predator IV in both hands, squeezing off one shot after another into the mob of black-suits in front of us.

  I don’t know if it was Scoot’s stunbolt, the sight of the Predator, or Thud’s enthusiasm, but the rent-a-cops still standing bolted for the cover of a bend in the hallway. I pulled out a bouncy-boom, squeezing hard to arm it. I tossed it hard, aiming to bounce off the floor, hit the back corridor wall, and ricochet behind the corner. On the third bounce, it detonated with a serious ear-ringing wham, and corp-cops were spilling back out into the opening, hands clutched to bleeding ears.

  “Put ’em to sleep, Thud-boy!” I called. I didn’t like killing the local security, even if a second ago they’d been trying to kill me. After all, their only crime was trying to earn an honest credstick … unlike yours truly.

  They’d have headaches when they woke up, after Thud finished with them, but probably no broken bones. Probably.

  The elevator required an electronic passkey. Dee could have finagled it … but one of the guards was nice enough to furnish us with one. We crowded inside—it’s always a crowd with Thud present—and told it we wanted the 68th floor.

  Of course, we weren’t born yesterday. Thud had the maintenance hatch in the car’s ceiling open with one, heavy-fisted bam, and we were already scrambling up through the opening and on top the roof when the car came to an abrupt and unscheduled halt between floors 64 and 65. When the gas came hissing into the car beneath us, we were already on the maintenance access ladder and climbing.

  Cammie paused long enough to drop an RFID gas sensor down the open hatch in the elevator and check the result on her commlink.

  “Shit!” she said, pocketing the comm and starting to climb. “Neurotox! One-whiff deadly! Climb!”

  Hell, that just sucked big slimy ork toes. The corp-bastards could have used sleepy-gas. These guys were trying to kill us!

  At the sixty-sixth level we let ourselves in through a maintenance hatch, and quietly slipped into a nearby stairwell. We were two floors from our goal and well ahead of sched. We didn’t have the luxury of much time, though. It would take them maybe ten minutes to ventilate the elevator, and then they’d know we’d stepped out. And up.

  Scoot used another of his bolts to slam an armed and armored guard in the stairway senseless, and Dee tripped the maglock on the door to the 68th floor. We were in.

  But I scowled at my watch and signaled for the others to wait. The toughest part about this op was the timing. We knew from our informant that Zayid expected to get the “merchandise” at midnight tonight … and we were running about four minutes fast. If we burst in on the chanters now, we might interrupt the circle, keep them from opening the gate … which, of course, meant we couldn’t get the merchandise either.

  Assuming there was any merchandise to get. I still couldn’t make myself believe that we were going to find the storied Necronomicon when we broke up Zayid’s little party.

  But we waited, waited as sweat prickled at our necks and backs, waited as Scooter psychically scanned for approaching trouble.

  The nanny on my forehead itched. The thing drew power for the cam and mike set from my skin. The larger transmitter on my belt had a built-in power unit all its own. I hoped our unseen employers were getting an eyeful; we were counting on them to airlift us off the roof after we’d completed the hit. It was better than trying to fig
ht our way all the way back down the M&M Tower to the street.

  Time.

  I looked back at Thud, who crouched behind me with his usual patient mountain-presence. His forehead sloped back so sharply between his massive horns that we’d placed his nanny on his throat. Otherwise, our peeping Toms would’ve seen nothing but the ceiling through his minicam. “Get to the roof,” I told him. “Clear it and wait for us. Got it?”

  “Got it,” he rumbled. He unslung the autocannon he’d been wearing over his shoulder and gave it a friendly pat. “I wait for you.”

  So now it was just the three of us, stepping through the stairwell door and moving along the passageway looking for Conference Room 68-4. That was where our informant had said Zayid was casting his circles. It ought to be just ahead.

  And we could hear it now … an eerie, droning harmony of male voices. We couldn’t make out the words, but we could hear the tones easily enough, moaning and buzzing and humming from the next doorway down the hall. There was another guard standing there, but Scooter was muttering under his breath again, throwing up a stealth spell around us as we closed in on him. He saw us … but too late. He went down as Dee burst-fired three silenced rounds into him from her Ingram Smartgun.

  The door beside the body was locked, and the passkey on the body didn’t work.

  By now, the building’s defenses must be fully alerted to our presence. We had minutes now, at most, before a small corporate army converged on the 68th floor.

  Midnight. Now the only question was whether Zayid’s people were on time inside that conference room. I considered waiting another minute … but a minute is forever on a run, and I didn’t much care to hang around in a corporate hallway waiting for the M&M goons to show. I nodded at Dee, and she went to work on the lock with a sequencer.

  I could hear the chanting much more clearly now. Funny words … incomprehensible, like people trying to gargle and cough at the same time.

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn… .”

  The maglock hummed and opened and the door slid aside. A cloud of pungently sour incense wafted out as we plunged into darkness.