Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

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fnord
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Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

This is a SR4 fic incorporating elements of the ongoing SR4 game I'm playing in, and decided to post and get some feedback on.



Denver, Front Range Free Zone, Confederate American States, 2:35 am, June 22, 2072

Rain hammered against the windows, its drumbeat broken occasionally by rolling booms of thunder.

Water sluiced down in sheets, even, after some hours, starting to wash the worst of the afternoon smog out of the air.

On a bed, propping up the wall, sat a human man, his features occasionally brought out of shadow by lightning, uncaring green eyes ignoring the storm outside.

Having already been twice brought to abrupt wakefulness by identical nightmare, it was apparently dead set on being a cunt of a night.

Giving up on a third attempt, and having no wish to revisit THAT period of imprisonment, he cursed in Lakota as a drone slithered over, presenting a medkit.

He reached into it, and, in the darkness between lightning flashes, extracted an IV line. The drone slithered up the bedpost while he inserted the line, finally letting himself open up to the omnipresent data flowing through the air. Air rushed into his lungs as the background hum came into focus with a click, echoing between his ears, as he fitted a catheter, shifting slightly.

Like hundreds of thousands, worldwide, Bish committed computer crimes for fun and profit. Unlike the vast bulk of that horde, he didn’t need anything but his own body to do so – he was a child of the renewed Matrix, a technomancer.

A small tornado of code whirled into view, coalescing into an android form as Bish directed it into the medkit. Inhabit this machine and maintain my body, while I take a little stroll. The android sank into the medkit’s node, Bish giving it no further thought.

Another thought sent an explanation to Bish’s housemate, Nails, the latter’s commlink confirming receipt with a synthesised “doink-doink” sound. Couldn’t sleep, so fucked off and did something useful.

Of course, polite society didn’t know them by those names – Bish was John Featherly, Nails, Gil Hamilton, a very skilled pair of private eyes. Both had other identities, lives nearly as full as the ones they actually lived, in the shadows cast by the uneasy intermix of megacorporate and government power. After all, it wasn’t paranoia if there was some bastard out to get you – Bish had a beef with another technomancer that predated the Crash 2.0, eight years earlier, and Nails had really pissed off some black ops manager even earlier.

Perhaps the container load of ork porn delivered to his mistress’ place might have been overdoing it… nah. Fuck him, his bigotry and the high horse he rode in on, sideways.

The Matrix could be accessed in one of two main ways – augmented reality, overlaid on the user’s normal sensorium, or virtual reality, which replaced it. AR was slower, but rendered the user invulnerable to lethal intrusion countermeasures, while VR rocketed through the Matrix at the speed of thought. The minor downside was being vulnerable to actual physical damage from intrusion countermeasures. VR itself was subdivided – legal, boring, cold-sim access could leave you knocked out, while hot-sim was right out on the razor’s edge, the extra raw speed left you vulnerable to random line noise suddenly turned heart-stoppingly lethal as you flatlined. Hot-sim VR was also one of the more addictive drugs known.

As hot-sim VR was their natural environment, technomancers found it as addictive as a mundane person found seeing through their eyes. To run cold-sim, they needed a peak limiter, to put a lid on the brain-kicking levels of simsense flooding them.

Bish had tried cold-sim, through a borrowed commlink, but had found it as empty and cold as political campaign promises. The signals from his sensory nerves no longer reached his brain as he dived into VR, the universe now infinite around him. He was home.

<< Serial Experiments Lain – Cyberia Mix: K.I.D.S. >>

Slipping instantly into a meditative state, speed honed by decades of practice, Bish began seeking the currents of Resonance that underlay the Matrix, his awareness of time slipping away as he travelled further and further from the mundane regions of the Matrix, backtracking those currents to their source.

Eventually, he found it. One of the doorways he sought. An accretion disk orbiting a singularity, deluged with colour as if by an exploding sequin factory, code swirling in torrents around it. If this was the real world, the noise would have long since deafened him.

With an electric thrill coursing through him, Bish’s icon, the quintessential gray man, bomb-dived into the singularity’s core.

The singularity turned him inside out, spitting him out into a plain, dull white cubic prison. As he expected, Bish was now himself, not his gray-man icon, and was not alone.

Every computer system has its firewalls, and the Resonance Realms were no exception – this time, taking the form of a silicon-haired angel, towering above Bish, gleaming wings sharpened in the fires of the first Crash, a massive lochaber negligently held in one hand.

Mirage?...It can’t be… you … you… were in the ECSE host… you went down with Deus and Megaera…this is impossible…

Mirage was the first true AI, arising out of the Psychotrope project, hastily thrown together under Echo Mirage’s aegis to combat the first Crash as the Internet dropped into the toilet in the late 2020s. The Crash Virus had lethal biofeedback-inducing psychotropic side effects, spurring Psychotrope’s development. The program stayed online with them, repaired the damage and, where possible, hardened the Echo Mirage deckers against the worst of the virus’ effects.

The constant exposure to damaged and shattered psyches, coupled with the program’s complexity and the sheer horsepower it ran on, provided the impetus, the fabled x-factor, which caused Mirage to wake up.

The nascent AI had reached out, among the Internet’s death throes, to touch the minds of especially flexible young children around the world, opening them to the new underpinnings of the global network, the Resonance. Bish was one of the first Mirage touched, back in the days when the USA was an independent country.

Bish wasn’t really surprised to find himself dropping to his knees, weeping freely. Apart from nightmare, he hadn’t seen Mirage in any way, shape or form since Crash 2.0.

This felt right. Mirage’s latent intensity, broiling below a calm surface, suffused with the Resonance he had helped create – it was there. The two younger AIs, Megaera and Deus, while they followed the path Mirage had blazed, lacked their elder sibling’s connection.

“You know I can’t let you past unchallenged.”

“…M…M…Mi…Mirage?”

The angel sadly shook its head. “At the moment, all that’s left of me resides in the minds of my former colleagues. The otaku Bish needed me, he was, indeed, created by me. The technomancer Bish, reborn at ground zero, does not.”

Bish’s heart dropped into his boots.

“But… but… I can feel you, fuckit…”

The angel reached out, put a hand on his shoulder…
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
fnord
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

90 views and not a single comment? Not even a lobbed tomato or rotten egg?


6:05 am

Nails’ eyes snapped open, noting absently that last night’s storm still hammered at the windows as his fingers found his commlink. His skinlink allowed him access the ‘link via direct neural interface merely by touching it, authenticating him without noticeable pause.

When Bish says he’s going to tighten up a comm’s security… he isn’t kidding…

As he slid into contact, the Renraku logo flashed up briefly before Nails subconsciously shoved it aside.

There were five messages waiting, one from Bish, two that had managed to run the gauntlet of the commlink’s spam filters, another from the Draco Foundation about some leads he was chasing down, and one from one of Denver’s lower-end fixers, referred via Largo, a fixer Bish knew back in Seattle.

How the hell did Bish manage to bullshit the chief of police to the extent we’re called on semi-regularly?

Denver posed problems unique in the history of corporate police forces. As a result of the Treaty of Denver, Denver had four segments, under differing jurisdiction – United Canadian and American States, Confederate American States, Pueblo Corporate Council and Sioux Nation. And, of course, the laws varied between those segments – the local shadow community quick to take advantage of the regulatory arbitrage.

Knight Errant had held the policing contract since the rise of corporate police forces, back in the early 2020s, adapting with speed and a certain panache to the difficulties involved in its quadripartite, and extremely lucrative, contract. Their job had actually become easier when the great dragon Ghostwalker, clutchmate of the late UCAS President Dunkelzahn, turned up and took control, over the surrounding governments’ objections.

Taking advantage of its megacorporate parent’s sovereignty, KE police had artfully worked up de facto derogations of some of the more onerous legal mismatches, while avoiding becoming wyrmfood.

Denver was never considered a plum assignment for the police chief, despite the extra pay and benefits – having a great dragon breathing down your neck was never considered a good thing, reflected in the shadowrunner saying, “watch your back, shoot straight, conserve ammo, and never deal with a dragon.” The other megacorporate police provider, Lone Star, had never even attempted to snatch the contract from Knight Errant, judging the headaches not worth the benefits.

The current “lucky” incumbent of that position was a tallish, blonde, Caucasian human woman named Marina Collette – a former pursuit rigger promoted off the streets she loved tearing up. She had learned her trade driving assault landing craft in the UCAS Marines, and from what Bish had told Nails, even in middle age, she was still an adrenaline junkie – some of the stunts she pulled, such as taking a low altitude vehicle though a three metre gap under a bridge in hot pursuit, inverted, while avoiding being splattered across a couple of miles of street, were still legendary a decade later, not least because LAVs were bricks with jet engines attached. One or two wannabes killed themselves every year, in and around Denver, trying to replicate her feat.

Chief Collette had about as much tolerance for bigotry, of any kind, as she did for being stuck behind a semi-trailer driven by an old woman on a winding, mountain road. This had not endeared her to the various hate groups, such as Humanis, who had tried to assassinate her on at least two separate occasions.

Nails grinned; she had hired them, on the side, to backtrack the attempts in parallel with the “official” investigation, not particularly surprised when the anti-meta hate group came up. Knight Errant had turned the screws up on the policlub, members of several Humanis cells being shot while violently resisting arrest. Somehow, the members killed were the ones they could least afford to lose.

The elf didn’t mind the results – the sustained Knight Errant assault had almost crippled Humanis across the Front Range Free Zone.

Then again, this is coming from the guy who, up until a little while ago, thought his silver statue of Dunkelzahn talked to him.

Word had blazed around the shadow and criminal communities fast – the triads, Yakuza and the Korean gangs wouldn’t touch her. Not that they would lift a finger to warn her if they learned of another such attempt, but they wouldn’t try themselves.

Mr Featherly and Mr Hamilton’s alter egos formed the core of their shadowrunning team. The next oldest addition, joining the two in Denver after they relocated from Seattle, was a sociopath known as Locust. Infamous in the Denver underworld, his very presence had caused Yakuza soldiers to back off. The triad soldiers that had been after a document they had been transporting, had backed off after Locust had stared them down, promising to put three bullets into their mage’s face next time he saw it. When the trio next encountered him, Locust duly followed through on his promise as their Bish-controlled van careened away.

Bish had done some digging, relying on technomantic arcana, and found out that Locust had used to work for Fuchi, in one of the former megacorp’s black operations. He’d been in so deep that when Fuchi dissolved itself in 2060, he had been forgotten about, his handler falling victim to the megacorporate infighting over Fuchi’s remains.

Although Nails was quite handy when things dropped into the toilet, and Bish could take care of himself, Locust was quite literally greased lightning. Locust’s move by wire cyberware put his body into a state of controlled seizure, his muscles wanting to move in all directions at once. The implanted expert system countered the seizures until he wanted to move a particular way, similar to aerospace use of fly by wire. There were a few downsides – it was quite difficult to acquire, induced slight but constant muscle tremors, was expensive, and depended on the expert system always working properly.

One such crapper-drop occurred when a Mafia goon squad came knocking at another apartment Bish and Nails shared in the CAS sector, intending to kill the three of them in retaliation for Bish breaking into one of their computer systems, nearly getting fried by black intrusion countermeasures.

Still reeling from dumpshock, Bish had noticed something on the external cameras, namely, the goons. Out of eight goons, Locust killed four of them by the simple expedient of booting the door open, waltzing out in front of them, and, aiming each shot, shooting them right between the eyes before any of them could react. Nails chimed in, dropping another one with a rifle he had stashed in the apartment before any of them could fire.

Only one goon escaped that confrontation with his life, Bish having to later bullshit Chief Collette about being on the trail of an ex-Fuchi black operative skilled and capable enough to survive 12 years on his own. Things had apparently dropped into the toilet when the black op made them, deciding to remove his tails. As, by then, the pair of them had shown an uncanny ability to survive confrontations with numerous violent, skilled people, Collette bought their story.

The fourth member of their crew was the newest, being young enough for any of the first three to be his father, or grandfather in Nails’ case, a cocky, brash, androgynous young elf known as Sparky. The other three put up with the young elf’s peccadilloes for a simple reason – Sparky was Awakened, able to blow up a petrol station or bring the house down with a single, well-aimed spell.

Magic had returned to the world on Christmas Eve, 2011, becoming one of the major forces involved in rewriting the world map, incidentally signing the USA’s death warrant. Sparky was among the one percent of the population able to actively manipulate mana flows. He was still mildly drunk on the power he possessed, which landed the four of them into the odd tight spot, usually when intruding into or breaking out of a secure corporate facility.

Locust didn’t mind – Sparky drew fire, being the biggest threat, leaving him free to take down bullet and knife sponges – the others preferred terms like “guards”, “gangers”, or “opposition”.

Couldn’t sleep, so fucked off and did something useful.

Nails nuked the spam without mercy, replying, Does that involve stopping these fucking annoying wastes of my time?

He had been expecting the Draco Foundation’s reply, filing it away.

He didn’t bother reading all of the fixer’s message, replying, I don’t even get out of bed for that pittance. Pay up for wasting my time.

As the one with the best looks and social skills, Bish and police chiefs aside, Nails was the face, negotiating on the team’s behalf. He wasn’t sure about Locust or Sparky, but the two of them had very few bills to actually pay – Bish tap dancing through billing computers, redirecting automated payments, etc saw to that.

Headkicker/scaremonger. Bullshit artist/gumshoe. Mage. Matrix magician/rigger.

Pretty much the stereotypical runner team, because it worked. Each rocked out with their cock out in one area, covered another area, could handle themselves in a fight, and knew when to shut the hell up. Nails had had to pull Locust off Sparky more than once, Locust retaining enough presence of mind not to shiv the wizkid too badly while expressing his displeasure. It had been amazing how fast Sparky had learned with that sort of encouragement.

Nails dug around his comm’s phonebook, looking for Largo’s commcode, not really caring about the time difference between Denver and Seattle.

The redheaded fixer answered on the ninth ring. “Hoi chummer.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Try not to, gets in way of biz.”

“Why did you send that weenie my way?”

“Things have gone south here. Star, since they didn’t put lid on tempo, lost ‘plex policing contract…”

“You’re shitting me!”

“’Fraid not, chummer. Knight Errant are now running things, and of course have no fucking idea what crack down on and what leave simmering. Got organised crime really bent out of joint. Everything’s up in air, disgruntled Star cops keeping pot stirred, anything to make KE look bad. It’s gotten so Tir actually looks inviting.”

While Largo had been talking, Nails’ comm had chimed again, indicating receipt of 500 nuyen. Tempo was a magical drug out of the jungles of South America that had come from nowhere to take Seattle by storm.

“Sorry about mixup, that should cover it. Where’s… your partner?”

“Off chasing leads for another client.”

Knowing that’s as much as he would be able to get out of Nails, Largo let the matter drop.

“Largo, do you know if the Draco boys have paid up on that bit in the will about the Renraku Arcology?”

“Project Tits Up? Not sure, I’ll have to ask around – don’t normally deal with that end of town. Looking for slow, painful way to kill self?”

“Change’s as good as a holiday.”

“Dead’s sucky sort of change.”
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
fnord
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

220+ views, and no feedback of any kind?

Did I invent a new kind of suckage?

Sorry for the delay, had to fish the doc out of the computer it was on.

1:30 pm, PST

<< Serial Experiments Lain – Cyberia Mix: Speed >>

Time very rarely matched up between the outside world and the Resonance Realms – if he had to answer, Bish would guess roughly a week had passed since he ran into Mirage’s echo.

One of their previous runs had ultimately lead to Bish’s current jaunt through the Realms. Denver counted two major Mafia families, the Casquilho and Chavez, among its organised criminal elements, who had nearly as much use for shadowrunners as corporations did. They had done various jobs for both families, earning a reputation for speed, discretion and moxie – the document transport run had been for the Chavez.

The Casquilho don had hired them to exonerate one of his grandsons – a mundane, lightly-enhanced hacker, nowhere near Bish’s league, who had been framed. The old man wanted him cleared, by whatever discovered or planted evidence necessary, paying a fat bonus for quietly finding out who had so maliciously impugned his grandson’s good name.

The real culprits were a recently-Emerged technomancer, and a free sprite of a decidedly anti-corporate bent, running what amounted to a metahuman botnet. Nails had managed to subdue the technomancer, saving their bonus from Locust, while Bish tackled the free sprite, Taske, in the Matrix.

Bish barely escaped from that one with his life, Taske nearly frying him with biofeedback during cybercombat. Nails piled on further injury when he jammed the technomancer’s signal, dumping Bish yet again from hot sim but saving his life. Taske was noticeably unamused at their presumption.

As the best defense was a good, solid offense, Bish was here, searching the Realms for the sprite’s source code, with which he could finally decompile the little turd for good. Merely clobbering a sprite, without the source code, only disrupted it temporarily. A technomancer needed the source code to either bind the free sprite to their will or permanently tear it to shreds – and Bish wasn’t going to let the little bastard have the remotest chance of breaking free. He was looking for specific, numbered, grains of sand in the Sahara that had to be collected in numerical order.


East Coast Stock Exchange, Manhattan Island, Manhattan Inc, 2:42 pm PST

Four large Roman characters floated serene and obstinate above the virtual trading floor. They were bright green, flashing, and six very annoying stories tall.

A trader’s time on the floor could be roughly estimated by their reaction. Those who had been here three or more years paid them no mind; they were part of the furniture. Trading firms generally wrote off one day a week in aggregate for new traders in their first six months on-floor. Traders’ fascination with them fell off linearly in between.

Three days after Crash 2.0, when the ECSE struggled back online, they were there.

After the ECSE vacated their Boston premises and rebuilt the old NYSE building, spending billions of nuyen on completely new hardware and software, they were waiting when the first sysadmin jacked in.

His reaction eerily mirrored the characters themselves.

WTF?

The duty technomancer’s “official” handle was The Grim Squeaker. That had lasted all of thirty seconds before being corrupted to Squeakers, usually in a mockingly affectionate tone of voice.

Squeakers, known in civilian life as Dan Ofer, shared the prize job of keeping a lid on, as it was called, the WTF sprite. No one envied him. Occasionally referred to him as “ye twat”, normally “fix it, ye twat!” after some sprite-induced shenanigans, but never envied him.

A mundane hack would not have survived the relocation, and the ECSE’s technomancer staff agreed that the WTF? was, indeed, humming with Resonance. Thus, by default, it qualified as a sprite.

The more foolhardy among their number, such as Squeakers’ ex-boss, had tried to decompile it.

Her vegetative body was still on life support. Her biological node had followed her mind to wherever it had gone, and even the submersed technomancer on the ECSE’s staff couldn’t find it.

What did work, to an extent, was carefully persuading the sprite to shrink a bit (down to one storey, but you pays your money, you takes your choice) and not stand out so much. That required constant effort by Squeakers and his team of four, working rotating shifts. Somewhat unusually for the gated extraterritorial community, Squeakers’ team was all-metahuman, and recently-awakened technomancer - two dwarfs – himself and the new guy – and two orks who had transferred from the London Stock Exchange the year before last. The new guy, a hyperactive Filipino, had a real name, but it had lain unused since his arrival in universal favour of Shroom.

Thankfully, Squeakers didn’t have to deal with Shroom today. Via some method apparently unknown to the rest of metahumankind, Shroom had managed to clobber himself with some sort of lethal IC a couple of days ago, laying himself out for a week.

Squeakers hadn’t been the only one to wet himself laughing when informed of Shroom’s misadventure. The news had gone around the Matrix staff beyond the speed of light, and the new guy was not going to live this one down. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to dock the little rat bastard’s pay, though – Shroom had done it to himself.

He winced – his sides still hurt from laughing so hard, which was going to make today’s shift not fun.

Squeakers had been keeping some secrets from his employer – he had become technomancer during the Crash, only letting his virtuakinetic abilities show in 2071. Blowing the gaff hadn’t helped his violent, recurring nightmares of the Crash, viewed in sick fascination from his ringside seat.

IhavenomouthbutImustscreamIhavenomouthbutImustscreamIhavenomouthbutImustscreamIHAVENOMOUTHBUTIMUSTSCREAM…

At the back of his mind was a stubborn, irrational fear, dogging him the past eight years. Enough fragments of Deus remained in the ECSE’s host, so The Grim Squeaker feared, to enable the psychopathic AI to return from beyond oblivion.

Every second or third night, the nightmares returned from the bleeding edge of reality. Forcing him to relive those horrifying minutes when Deus’ recompilation had hijacked the immense computing power assembled for the Novatech IPO, taking the node ultraviolet, spawning the Jormungand worm.

theycannottheyWILLNOTseethedangertheyareinthatbastardlurksjustbeneaththesurface...

Worse, he hadn’t just relived his own horrifying experience. He’d lost count of the number of times he had relived death – daytrader, security decker, rubbernecker, battling otaku, he had lived their deaths, excruciatingly slain by lethal biofeedback.

Squeakers was far too scared to seek any sort of professional help – even the most discreet therapist would talk to save their own skin, and his fears reassured him that the ECSE’s parent, the Corporate Court, above any mere national laws, the megacorporations beholden to it, would find out, boding ill for the ex-Grim Squeaker.

wejudgethatwinternightpossessatleasttwentyfivenucleardevicesaswellasnanotechwmd…

youtakegreatriskscomingtovalhalla,deliveringyourselftousunprotectedandunguarded,lokichild
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by LadyTevar »

I'm still trying to figure out which version of ShadowRun this is based upon.
Image
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

I thought I said 4th ed in the first line of my opening post, but I may have been spending too much time on dumpshock, which uses SRn for the nth edition of Shadowrun.

As for the WTF? sprite, thank my GM - she wet herself laughing at an idle comment I made and ran with it.
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
fnord
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

It's been a few months delayed, due to real life issues, but here we are


Denver, CAS Sector, 7:15 pm PST

Bish returned to his body, eyes seeing but not registering the light flickering above, immediately feeling the light beads of sweat on his forehead. He didn't have Taske's source code yet, but he now had a much better idea of where to look. It had felt like two weeks had passed during his search, but he felt a little ... disappointed? ... that, according to the icy blue-grey, block numerals overlaid on his field of view, it had taken only eighteen hours.

Unhooking the IV, he rolled off the bed, not feeling particularly tired despite the lack of sleep and eighteen hours of concentrated effort. He passed Nails as he wandered into the kitchen and fished around in one of the cupboards along the room's longest edge, extracting a NukIt burger and rather casually slinging it, still-wrapped, into the microwave just after the latter's door had opened. Before the burger came to a stop, the door closed and the microwave's whirr permeated the background, a sickly orange glow escaping the closed door, illuminating the scuffed lino and dinged counter.

Next, Bish opened the fridge and dug out a three-quarter full bottle of Pepsi, shaking it vigourously. He cracked the lid long enough for the off-white foam to bubble out of solution and shoot up the bottle's neck, then wrenched the lid closed again, the foam descending, almost disappointed. Counting to seven, the technomancer ripped the lid off as he raised the bottle to his lips, drinking the surging foam off the top.

“Any luck?”

Slurp. “Know where not to look.”

“Like that's fucking helpful.”

Slurp. “It is, actually.”

“Can you be any less illuminating?”

Slurp. Nails heard his commlink chime.

“Fuck...”

“That is the Cliff's notes.”

The microwave squealed, a tinny, shrill sound as its door opened. Bish extracted the too-hot NukIt and, cursing that the microwave was playing up yet again, dropped it with a wet splat onto the counter, wrapping and all. He didn't need Nails' sardonic grin as he extracted a plate from the cupboard next door to the NukIt burger's former residence. After recovering and unwrapping the burger, he fixed the microwave with a suspicious glare.

“Ferfuxsake...”

Nails' grin turned from sardonic to malicious. “Whatja screw up?”

“Think I found out why the microwave's been glitchy. Got a visitor.”

“Huh?”

“Sprite.” Hefting the now half-full Pepsi bottle in one hand, Bish slurped from it while his abilities reached out to the microwave.

“Not Pepsi?”

“Put a cork in it, weedeater.”

Yup, the microwave wasn't vacant – a sprite of some sort had taken up residence. Must have been very recently – the house electronics were clean when Bish checked them the previous week. How did the little bastard get past the firewalls, both in the apartment's central node and in the microwave itself?

Aaaand... yes, he was going to have to break into his own microwave, in the kitchen that the landlord thought someone else rented.

As he connected to the microwave, its AR outline snapped and fuzzed, further betraying its new resident, who met him in the microwave's node.

Bish got a good look at the sprite rezzing in – an amorphous silicon-grey blob'o'code, not too much smaller than a dwarf, faced the grey man in the node's limited, sterile iconography.

The management requires the termination of your continuing presence forthwith. We regret any inconvenience.

wh4t d4 f00k r j00?

That's one.

Just because 1337 now counted as a dialect of English, didn't mean Bish had to like it. He blipped a request to Nails, asking for one of the latter's advances in electronic warfare gadgetry. The elf slipped past him without a word.

d00d, j00 n33d 2 ch1ll

That's two.


Nails returned rather shortly, with something roughly the size, and twice the depth, of a 20th century walkie-talkie.

c4nt j00 c0\/\/n7 p4s7 7\/\/0?

That's three.


Bish touched the microwave and nodded, signalling Nails to trigger the close-area jammer.

Polyphonic feedback squeals assailed his senses as he gritted his teeth, the squealing, screeching electronic curtain shutting off the sprite's escape.

With the jamming blast temporarily incapacitating the sprite, Bish took the opportunity to attack - three generic Buick-like utilities rezzed in, engines roaring, careening towards the stunned sprite and detonating.

Before the last of the debris cleared, Bish shifted his concentration to weaving the stray bits of code in front of him into a bulwark, finishing just in time to splash the wounded sprite's counterattack. The resulting headache would have to wait.

Whatever it was, the intruder was Not Happy.

Pressing his advantage, Bish faked out a repeat of the Civil Defense Truck Bomb Corps trick while maintaining the shield. Occupied as it was with the phantom truck bombs, the interloper didn't notice what Bish's icon was doing until the grey man tackled it.

It definitely noticed the hands digging into its icon as Bish started trying to decompile it – the outstretched hand forming from the blob chock full of nasty. Namely, black IC – intrusion countermeasures with damaging, if not lethal, effects on their victim.

He felt the hand sizzle past his face, almost connecting despite the shield he still maintained. Pressing his advantage – he had wounded the sprite with his opening volley, and had kept it off balance since – he reefed his hands apart, tearing a path open to the sprite's core code.

Ignoring the pleas, Bish dug deeper, tearing code chunks out of the sprite wholesale, exposing its core. A final scream died aborning as the technomancer shredded the mortally wounded sprite.
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
LionElJonson
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by LionElJonson »

Wait, is the technomancer really hacking without a commlink? It's been a while since I've been active in the SR4 community, but isn't that a pretty stupid thing to do? Much better to have a good commlink and every single Rating 6 program than to spend a bucketload more points on Complex Forms, since you can then have a Machine Sprite sit in your commlink and give you a bunch of dice to every roll, on top of being a better hacker to start off with.
fnord
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

Possibly true, but we came to an agreement - we lay off the rules-borkage WMD, so does the GM.

Commlink use is quite thematically inappropriate for Bish, and I'm quite attached to him - I did something like what you mentioned, the character sheet would get burned. In addition, my GM has played it that CFs are uncrashable by non-Resonant entities (ie, anything but technomancers and sprites), so I've carried that over to the fic.

Edit: Also, to use a commlink like that, a TM would have to learn the non-TM version of the Cracking skill group - the technomantic version only works with complex forms.
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
MatSci
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by MatSci »

Every second or third night, the nightmares returned from the bleeding edge of reality. Forcing him to relive those horrifying minutes when Deus’ recompilation had hijacked the immense computing power assembled for the Novatech IPO, taking the node ultraviolet, spawning the Jormungand worm.
Wait, it's been awhile since I read System failure , but wasn't the Jormungand worm a Dissonance worm created by Pax and her Otaku, and used to kill Deus, along with the rest of the matrix?
fnord
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

And the Grim Squeaker remembered the scene perfectly and is a completely reliable narrator. :mrgreen:
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
MatSci
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by MatSci »

fnord wrote:And the Grim Squeaker remembered the scene perfectly and is a completely reliable narrator. :mrgreen:

Well, when you start tossing around things like Ghostwalker being Dunkie's Brother...
fnord
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Re: Professed Intentions and Real Intentions

Post by fnord »

And after a break due to lifestyle and other factors, this thing plods onwards. Not quite happy about the infodump, but not sure what to do with it.

---

Pausing to shake his head, Bish called up one of the sprites he had registered and thus technically “answered” to him, Rex, a tracker sprite apparently able to chase a trail to the ends of the Matrix. Perhaps inevitably, Rex took the Matrix form of the front half of a German Shepard, the back half swirling grey-brown code, with a slightly over-prominent nose.

Technomancers, like magicians, followed different paths, different worldviews – magicians called them “traditions” while technos preferred “streams”, for consistency of metaphor. As Bish was fond of remarking, "magicians and nuclear devices initiate, technomancers and submarines submerse".

“Sic 'em, Rex!”

“ROWF!”

“Got it, boy?”

“ROWF! ROWF!”

Rex sniffed around the codic remains of the sprite Bish had recently bested in cybercombat, and made to tear off to parts unknown, Nails' jammer bringing him up short. Progress thus impeded, he cocked his head at Bish while piddling on the other sprite's remains.

“Sorry, boy.”

Bish dropped out of VR and back to the real world, his headache returning with a vengeance. “Kill the jammer.”

A “ROWF!” only Bish could hear echoed as Rex, his path now free, set to work.

Surviving from before Crash 2.0, the two most popular streams were cyberadepts and technoshamans, differing mainly in how they dealt with sprites. Technoshamans treated sprites more as equals, bargaining with them, while seeing the Matrix as a vast, spritual, living, ecosystem. Cyberadepts, by contrast, tended to treat sprites as tools – complex, intelligent, but tools – while viewing the Matrix as simply an emergent phenomenon to be understood and bent to their will.

As one of the very first otaku, and similarly for technomancers, reborn as he was at Ground Zero of the ECSE, Bish didn't neatly follow any one stream. If pushed, he and others would describe him as a very loose cyberadept but with strong technoshamanic tendencies – tendencies that tended to drive tribemates up the wall.

As at November 2064, Bish had been ancient for an otaku at 35 – retaining a child's mental flexibility long past the age when otaku powers normally faded. His bright lord, Mirage, had called on him one last time, to lead Mirage's surviving otaku in a suicidal do-or-die counterattack against Deus' hijacking of the ECSE.

It was a measure of the elder AI's desperation that he was willing to expend his oldest, most trusted and most experienced otaku – anything to stop his psychotic younger brother's recompilation and escape into the wider Matrix. Bish had no problem – suicide mission it might have been, but Mirage called. His duty was not to hesitate or question, but to go, to risk and almost certainly lose his life.

No one had counted on the perfect storm that resulted – Deus' recompilation, the younger AI's existential battle against Mirage and Megaera, combining with Winternight's strikes against key Matrix nodes worldwide, all happening during the Novatech IPO. Pushing the local Matrix to, and beyond, its very design limits, all that attention and brute computational power, it... broke. The system failure rapidly cascaded around the world, leaving something new in its wake.
A mad person thinks there's a gateway to hell in his basement. A mad genius builds one and turns it on. - CaptainChewbacca
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