Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  Henrik Gould was nobody.

  Literally nobody.

  His SIN was fake.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Zipfile muttered. She stood in the kitchen, looked at the data displayed on her AR while her microwave ran. On the counter across from her was the empty can from whatever noxious crap Emu had swigged down before taking off with the others.

  While she waited, Zipfile queued up a search agent and sent it into the public Matrix, looking for anything else fake Henrik Gould might have bought. It was a long shot, but every once in a while long shots paid off.

  She’d lost money on one half-court shot before realizing the truth of that statement.

  In the meantime, she decided to come at it from another angle.

  “Rip Current Sea Lanes,” she muttered.

  The company she’d found that owned the warehouse Yu had wanted hit, the job that had started all of this, might be a good place to start. It was a Renraku shell company according to Yu, but Zipfile wanted to test if that story held water.

  Earlier she’d assumed it because it made thinking about the whole thing easier, but what if it wasn’t true. And if it wasn’t true, how would she prove it? She knew from checking security scans the office was already empty, as if it had been unoccupied the whole time.

  Her microwave dinged done, but she ignored it. Instead, she stepped out of the small kitchen and looked at the chipreader still sitting on the couch. Jobber had put her onto who might have bought the chip, but that road was cold.

  She still had the code.

  When Yu had first shown her the drive, she hadn’t looked any deeper than the installer. It hadn’t seemed prudent, and having seen the effect it’d had on the Telestrian servers, she wasn’t sure she wanted it open anywhere near her own network. There could be all kinds of viruses on that little chip.

  Eish.

  But she had to find out.

  And it wasn’t getting near her network.

  Which meant she was going to have read code.

  Eish.

  Anything was simpler.

  Zipfile knew she was a good hacker. She knew it. Her peers knew it. She could run the Matrix and come back with the paydata every day of the week. It was her against the system on those runs, and the system got to go.

  So she won.

  But she hated reading other peoples’ code.

  Hated. It.

  Forgetting her food, she went into her bedroom, under the bed, and got out an old flatscreen ’puter.

  Reading code.

  In the real.

  With her eyes.

  “Eish.”

  A couple hours later, she knew two things.

  First, whoever wrote this code needed to go back to school.

  It was sloppy drek.

  And second, she’d just wasted a couple of hours.

  The code was stupid.

  Eyes burning, Zipfile learned forward and ran her stubby finger down the screen, muttering the code logic out loud as she went.

  “Load, check, send notification, destruct.”

  It was a glorified ping.

  This file, once you got past the encryption, sent a notification to another file that basically announced “Hey bru, I’m here now. Do your thing.”

  Zip swiped the flatscreen closed and leaned back in her chair.

  None of what had happened to Yu inside Telestrian had been driven directly by this file. All the lights, all the noise, it had come from something else. Whatever Dennis had paid them to plant hadn’t been the real target.

  The whole run had been one of those things: a distraction, or else the final piece of something else.

  “Eish.”

  She scrolled through the code again and looked at the destination file. It was just a hash, not even a real location. The code didn’t even give an identifier. Dunkelzahn’s balls, she’d have to crawl the whole Matrix to find another bit of code like it.

  She sighed. Hard.

  Not she, herself.

  She leaned back and jacked in, dipping into the Matrix. She came up on her local network, above and separate from the flat unreal plane of PubGrid. It was a virtual recreation of her apartment, here in the unreal.

  Zipfile whistled. A small dog appeared—a search agent—and she fed it the hash code from the Telestrian file. It sniffed, yipped twice, and vanished. Just like the agent out looking for signs of Henrik Gould, this one would sniff around for that hash code.

  It wasn’t a long shot.

  Not by a mile.

  It was a light-year shot.

  Which meant it wasn’t enough.

  Zipfile stepped out the door to her apartment. A blink later she was on the PubGrid. She looked around, her mind considering and discarding options, before she settled on one. A sign for the place she was thinking of appeared in front of her.

  Joe’s.

  Freaking Joe’s.

  She hadn’t been back to Joe’s since her first week in Seattle. The guide download she’d skimmed told it was the center of Seattle’s Matrix life, so she wanted to see what that was like. Even in Pretoria she’d heard of Seattle. She’d walked through the doors, on a meta-link with her own actual SIN running, spent four minutes there—virtual, not real—and never gone back.

  The whole freaking newb world came to Joe’s.

  The. Whole. World.

  Every kid on the Matrix for the first time showed up at Joe’s. Every day. It was a Matrix bar, so it would hold as many people as would log in, but the virtual bar’s actual bar disappeared into the horizon as if it extended the entire length of PubGrid.

  For the next month after her first visit to Joe’s, Zipfile had spent almost every moment removing unwanted spam from her AR. It got into every part of her PAN. At one point her dishwasher was trying to sell her a luxury vacation to Singapore.

  This time, she went in ready.

  This time her commlink was a Renraku. Felt like poetic justice. She knew, if she asked to look, that her persona would be a kimono-clad samurai. Even before she closed the door to Joe’s behind her, she whispered a single word.

  “Mute.”

  Then she grinned.

  Joe’s was coded to announce you when you entered, as if everyone in the bar turned and shouted your name. The first time she’d visited, what felt like a million people had shouted “ZIPFILE!”

  This time, there was only blessed silence.

  Her network was smart enough to block all the shouts. There was no real sound on the Matrix, after all. The shouts carried the spam.

  Instead, she sauntered up to a clear spot at the bar—there was always a clear spot, right by where you entered—and tapped a terminal. In the old days this would have been a chat room, and there’d have been a bar to type text. Flatscreen visitors to Joe’s saw the same thing today.

  she sent.

  Within a second, there were 47,323 hands raised.

  she added. In a real shadowrunner den that would cut the pool by 99%. Only newbs wanted agent work. But this wasn’t a den.

  This was Joe’s.

  54,983 hands raised.

  Zipfile put the hash code and a throwaway commlink code into the terminal.

  Then she stood up and walked out of Joe’s. A moment later, she was back inside her virtual apartment.

  She opened a window to look at that commlink code. There were already 68,295 messages.

  “Delete all,” she said, and called up two more agents.

  The first was a Doberman as tall as she was in the real world. This one she showed the original hash to, and then pointed to the open commlink window. “Bite anyone who doesn’t match.” The Doberman growled and disappeared.

  Zipfile chuckled.

  It was the Matrix. The agent wasn’t a real dog, and it couldn’t really bite people, but she’d given it enough teeth that if someone was jacked in full VR, they’d get a jolt of feedback. The second one, a Bernese
Mountain Dog, sat patiently. Zipfile showed it the same hash, then waved a finger under its nose. “When he lets someone through, you check,” she told it. Then she toggled back out to the real.

  Back on the couch, Zipfile chuckled. She loved using dogs for agents in the Matrix. She’d never had a pet, but in the Matrix she had as many as she wanted, and they were all trained.

  The flatscreen with the chip’s code was still sitting open. Zipfile regarded it for a moment, then realized she never finished her snack. She left it there, with alerts ready and waiting on her AR if any of her agents found anything, and went back to the kitchen.

  Zipfile had zoned out with a forkful of fried rice halfway to her mouth when her AR barked at her. She started. The food fell off the fork and onto her shirt. She cursed and set the fork down, then wiped the rice off her shirt and onto the floor.

  Then she stared at the rice on the floor.

  “Now I gotta clean that up…”

  The AR barked again.

  “Fine,” she said, stepping over the mess and going back to the living room. “I’ll do it later.”

  In the Matrix, she found the Bernese Mountain Dog waiting for her, a stick in its mouth, tail wagging. She took the stick—it was a data packet, obviously—and gave the dog a treat. It wagged a little more and vanished, back to watching.

  Zipfile regarded the stick.

  First, it changed into a data readout—in this case, an old-style book, because her PAN knew that’s how she preferred to read her text in the Matrix. She sat down on her couch—the same couch that was in her apartment, except cleaner—and flipped through the pages.

  She stopped when she saw something familiar.

  “Eish,” she muttered.

  She opened a comm window.

  she sent to Yu

  It was only a couple seconds.

 

 

  Yu had tracked her down just after the safehouse had been burned, but come away confident she didn’t know anything. She was pretty, but so was furniture, was what he had told Zipfile.

  Yu sounded peeved.

  she sent back, and closed the window.

  Melanie. She was beautiful, but all those elf bitches were. Zipfile felt her lip curl, and didn’t try to fight it. The only difference between this Melanie and any of the Zulu harridans who’d made her childhood such a nightmare was skin color.

  Zipfile turned another page. It was an address.

  “She can’t be that stupid,” she muttered.

  Getting up, Zipfile put the book down on her virtual coffee table and stepped out onto the PubGrid. The Shiawase sun was right there, and a moment later she was. This wasn’t even going to take a serious run. She thought for a second, and sent herself toward Seattle utilities.

  In a blink, she stood in front of a modern building whose roof stretched toward the black Matrix sky. Icons for electricity and water and sewer glowed on the walls. She thought herself toward the electricity.

  “How can I help you?” a bland agent asked.

  “New service,” Zipfile said.

  “Commercial or residential?”

  “Residential?”

  “Hold please,” the agent said. There was a flicker, and the walls and agent were different.

  “Are you a new customer or do you need to transfer service?”

  “Transfer.”

  “Please provide the address,” the agent said, and motioned to a slot in the desk. Zipfile looked at a neatly stacked collection of chits on the desktop, imprinted Melanie’s supposed address on it, and deposited it in the slot. The agent smiled.

  “Thank you,” it said, “but there is already a tenant at that location.”

  “Interesting,” Zipfile said. She put her hands on the desktop and leaned over it.

  It was the Matrix. She could do that here.

  Security in a utilities desk was pretty minimal. Zipfile had that code down pat. Once she had caused the sewers of a whole district to back up by leaving a virtual sandwich on the supervisor’s desk. Sneaking a basic query in was nothing.

  A window popped up behind the agent, though invisible to it. It was a mirror. It showed the back of the faceless agent’s bald head, and data on a screen as if it appeared to the agent behind the desk.

  Zipfile winked, sealing a copy into her memory, and lifted her hands. The mirror disappeared.

  “I must have the wrong address,” she told the agent. “I’ll return when I’m sure.”

  The agent blinked out.

  Zipfile grinned and jacked out.

  Back on the couch in the real, she grinned the same grin.

  “Eish. What a moron.”

  She actually lived there. Or at least paid the bill.

  she sent, and appended an address.

  It was time to try a different tack with Melanie.

  Melanie the elf lived in a right-on-the-edge of affluent clutch of condos just outside the city. Despite having to come from the other direction, Zipfile found herself still waiting on Rude.

 

  Rude sent back.

  If I didn’t need him, Zip thought. She sat down on a bench, opened an ARO, and pinged Rude’s commlink. It appeared on a map display, just a couple minutes away. She considered hacking into whatever service he was using and screwing with his bill just to mess with him, but it wasn’t worth the effort.

  Instead, she used the time examining Melanie’s building, slicing in security exemptions for she and Rude so they could get where they were going with a minimal amount of alarms. The systems weren’t overly complex; good enough to keep the riffraff out, in Zipfile’s expert opinion.

  Rude finally appeared in some kind of private ride service, driven by a teenage ork with a shocking purple reverse-mohawk. He climbed out of the back of the small van, where normal-sized people would put their luggage. He walked up to the driver’s door and high-fived the ork, then ambled over to where Zipfile sat.

  “What’m I doin’ here, small one?”

  Zipfile looked up at him, closing down her commlink. “You’re the muscle.”

  “Always,” Rude said with a toothy grin. He belched, and looked up at the building. “Who lives here?”

  “Simon Dennis’ former assistant,” Zipfile said.

  Rude whistled. “That cute bit Elfy-pants tried ta get together with?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Thought he said she didn’t know anything.”

  Zipfile wriggled until she could slide forward off the too-high bench. It was a lifetime habit; she didn’t even realize she did it anymore, except when she had the mountainous bulk of Rude standing in front of her.

  She came up to mid-thigh on him.

  She sighed.

  “Maybe she doesn’t,” Zipfile told him. “But she’s still spending on the same account that bought the chip Yu carried into Telestrian the other day. So either she’s embezzling from her former boss, or they’re still connected.”

  Rude’s eyes narrowed. He looked down at her with a hungry look. “So she might know a way ta get to him.”

  “I hope so.”

  The troll smiled again, this time hungrily. “Me, too.”

  Zipfile led him toward the building. The low-slung line of two-story condos was behind a two-meter wall with razor wire across the stop. The gate was actually pretty sturdy. Rude eyed it as they walked up and laughed.

  “Watch this,” he said, raising a foot.

  Zip held up a hand. “Hang on.” She activated her AR, pinged a preset, and the gate unlatched with a metallic ping.

  Rude frowned. “That’s no fun.”

  “I had extra time,” she told him. “Next time be here when I say, and you can kick the gate clean off its hinges.”

&nbs
p; Rude grunted, but followed her into the tiny courtyard.

  Zipfile pointed to her left. “That’s her unit.”

  Rude looked down at her. “Do I get ta do this door, or do ya have more little AR magic to do?”

  Zipfile gestured ahead of herself. “All yours.”

  Rude grinned. “And once we get inside?”

  “Secure the place, secure the girl, and wait for me.” Zip raised a stubby finger. “Don’t kill her, Rude. I need her talking.”

  “Uh-huh,” the troll said. “Anyone in there with her?”

  “Not that I could see,” Zipfile told him.

  A moment later Rude grunted, kicked, and the thick security door flew off its hinges.

  “Knight Errant!” he shouted, and charged inside.

  Zipfile snort-laughed and followed him inside.

  Zipfile hadn’t been hands-on in too many breaking-and-enterings for more years than she wanted to think about. It had been way back in the day, before she left the old country. Since coming to Seattle she had focused on hacking. There were other, larger people to deal with the difficult things like kicking in doors and subduing screaming elf scrags.

  Other, larger people like Rude.

  Before the door had even hit the ground Rude was through it and still shouting his stupid Knight Errant call. Zipfile had to admit it made a little bit of sense; KE broke into a lot of homes every day, and if there were any recording devices she had missed, they’d get the shouting.

  As she stepped over the broken door, Zip shook her head.

  Rude probably also got a kick out of pretending to be the assholes who’d hit them up the other night.

  Inside the condo, a woman started shouting.

  Rude was already around the corner of the entryway and into the main room. Zip followed, her smaller steps giving her the natural patience to wait and see what happened. If the elf produced a gun and started shooting, after all, better for Rude to deal with that too.

  Trolls were good at sponging up punishment.

  Still… Zipfile brought up her AR. There were precautions to take.

  The elf’s home was as smart as any other, but she was ready for that. An agent that pretended to the building’s own zipped around Melanie’s system, locking out Matrix access and other communications. It automatically quashed the in-home security alarm which—Zip grinned as she read the code—would have called Knight Errant on her behalf.