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Title: Runner
Posts: 54
Joined: 22 Nov 2006
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Date Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 3:18 am
Subject: The Source
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During my hiatus, I missed RP. This was a new character introduction that turned into a short story or something. Genre, of course, is cyberpunk fiction.
It was unusually hot, even for New Orleans. Sweat was dripping off my brow onto my already damp seersucker suit, and I was seriously considering going inside. I checked my state-of-the-art chronograph, admiring the sweeping movement and inlaid jewels. Thirty thousand dollars bought this masterwork of titanium and.. well, whatever else. I guess that makes each gear in there worth a few hundred. Frag, I must be getting old - I still think about everything in dollars. I quickly converted that figure into nuyen. Three thousand ninety six nuyen per gear. Anyway, it was two thirty seven PM; I had to wait just a few more minutes to go inside. I'm not letting my associate inside my house. I just didn't trust him.
I was sitting at a wrought iron table on my patio in the back yard of my factory-built antebellum-style mansion. It was always a good time for a whiskey sour, and I had enough booze left in the bottle for another half dozen. This was a far cry of the high rise living of the major metroplexes, and I enjoy the slow pace. I'm taking mental notes on what I needed my gardener to do. Most of the plants were relics of a past area - before genetic engineering and before the Awakening itself. The azaleas bushes had a couple of purple blooms, withered from too much sun. I probably could order the biotech ones from some catalog and have full blooms year round. But something just seemed odd about that. I've chased perfection enough in my life. My recent biosculpting cost over half a million, and that will only buy me another 5 years to appear like a 25 year old.
I didn't want to focus on these things - I'd rather drink my whiskey and contemplate the frail azalea blooms. But I heard a noisy, most likely antique engine approaching in my front driveway. That's him. He acquired a fondness for the biggest junkheaps of vehicles, at sharp contrast to the ultra modern sports cars he preferred as a millionaire bachelor. And it wasn't about money – he's earned plenty in his business. I slid the 45 out from my jacket pocket and placed it on the chair next to my right hand. He's easy to distract, so I unbuttoned my blouse far enough that it would be impossible for him not to take a peek. 25,000 nuyen of perfectly symmetrical vat-grown breast tissue.
The rumbling of the engine stopped. It's time. Here he comes. I finished my whiskey, barely noticing the burn as he approached. The lump in my throat was threatening to gag me at any moment. My heart nearly skipped a beat as he lumbered around the corner.
The man was an apparition - no, that's not the word. What little familiarity I had with him was gone. I looked at his eyes, which was about the only thing I could recognize. They were the same steel gray with a piercing stare that I had come to know when we were younger and taking the world by storm. I'm pretty sure of it - those are his natural eyes. He lost his hair with the first round of cyberware, so he wore a black wig on most occasions to prevent people from seeing what I did today.
His skull was ringed with sub-dermal implants, not unlike many people in this modern world. But his skin was only about half alive over top of them, creating ashy pale splotches. Under these areas sat the bumps that were the microprocessors, wires, power supplies. Insertion points which had external plugins. The square CB1440 and 936 connectors, fiber optic ports for programming the machines that were the man. The datajack composed the single output, used to control all sorts of vehicles. I traced the wires (actually artificial nerve bundles) under his skin to the back of his neck. I shuddered when I thought of what his spine looked like. Extensive modification. That's all. Under his thin white muscle shirt very little was recognizable as a human. I saw the surgeries myself and threw up the first time I saw him.
Then there were the bulging vat muscles of his arms. Grown in a lab somewhere in Japan, the muscles were as foreign of an organism as you could think of. They didn't use human muscle as a basis for the vat muscle - they just created a mishmosh of the strongest and quickest reacting animal muscles and made them somewhat compatible with the human body. You literally were able to be as strong as a bear. Or stronger. There was practically no limit to how strong someone could be, other than the limitations of the connection to the bone itself. For the first few people that received this surgery, recovery time was in the years range. Those that didnt' have strong enough frame found themselves wadded in a ball, wishing to die.
"You had enough of checking me out?" He spoke in a clear, vaguely southern accented voice. This was not his original voice. It was an approximation, created by a microIC. The first generation cyberware was 350% the size of the cyberware of today, so a common practice was to replace some biological functions with smaller electronic ones.
"Yes. I guess so. You look , uh. Great." I had to respond. His eyes were fixed on mine, seeming to seethe hatred.
"Cut the bullshit, Liv. Got any booze? "
I was careful not to reveal the hiding place of my . 45 as I gingerly reached over the table to the awaiting bottle of 2036 whiskey. I doubt he'd get the subtle hint given by the year on that bottle. In fact, knowing him, I knew not to pour it. Instead, I made a sweeping gesture with my hand to signal that he should sit down. I slid the bottle noisily to the other side of the table where his iron trap of a hand awaited. He took it and started drinking. No. That's not the right word. He started - desecrating - the hundred and forty six dollars an ounce whiskey. Some was dribbling down his long black moustache onto his plated chest. I had no idea whether he could even taste it, either. He sat the now empty bottle down onto the table, the other glasses rattling.
He kept staring at me, unblinking. His eyes were steel gray floating in a hazy reddish white. And his brow was devoid of sweat. I knew all the sweat glands were probably replaced by paper thin exchanger units for the boosted reflexes. Usually covered up by that goofy wig of his. I was beginning to have my doubts - did he get new eyes? The staring continued. I tried to disarm him by gently leaning forward and showing him more. He didn't budge his stare away from my eyes. You could tell he was ready to speak.
"You know, you shouldn't have come back. To New Orleans. After the lab incident?" I started the questioning, and I was baiting him. I wanted to get him riled up. He was famous for his temper, wires or no wires. This might give me time.
"It took me a long fucking time to find you. I heard you are back to the corps again... What are you doing with them now? Didn't pull in enough last time? " His face was turning the slightest shade of red as he said this, in that same hollow voice which I loathed so much. I saw humanity return to his face, but then guessed I was overestimating his reaction.
"I have a job, much like you used to have. " I replied, mimicking his monotone. I couldn't help but smirk slightly at my impression.
"Yeah, my job wasn't ripping people off. My job was being a human guinea pig... " More red, expanding to fill his face. I liked it.
"Quit with your martyr shit, Bill. There were others involved in the testing. The QTX isn't the only piece of cyberware to.." I replied, but I had to interrupt myself. "Fail field testing on a large scale". I looked away, back to my flower garden. I had to conceal my grin.
He leaned back in his chair, the iron creaking underneath him as the front two legs lifted off the ground. He closed his eyes, and took a couple of deep breaths. There was a surprising amount of raggedness there. He opened his eyes again and returned to his usual stare.
"Liv. That piece of shit QTX is killing me. It's getting worse. I spoke with a doctor from Little Chiba... it's going to cost me over a million to get it fixed. I need your help. " He frowned, his handlebar moustache making him look like a sort of a clown.
I smiled at him. Fucking idiot. The QTX did kill a couple of people, like most new cyberware technologies. Wired reflexes did too, and the death toll from that barely broke five hundred. But for a genius like him, he sure didn't know we were hiding things from him. And he's never found out. I was proud to be a part of one of the greatest scams in the 21st century.
He wasn't dying from technology. He was dying because he has spent 30 years trying to destroy his body before it destroyed him. And it was working.
I took a sip from my whiskey glass, hoping there would be a little more than melting ice left. I tried to put on a face of empathy. I said, as slowly and clearly as I could. "Well Bill. I'll arrange for three quarters of a million nuyen to be deposited to your account... on one condition. You never, ever come and see me again." This was a pittance compared to the millions I stole from him 25 years ago.
He seemed to consider the offer. I hoped, like the last three times I've made this offer in 25 years, that I could buy more time. It seemed my life revolved around buying more time.
The old man moved like a gunshot. He was on his feet and lunging towards me before I could even get my hand on the grip of my gun. I watched the chair he was sitting in fly backwards towards the patio doors. Both his hands were around my throat within an instant, and I was being held high in the air. I couldn't breathe, and I knew there was no chance. If I had any strength whatsoever, I would have smiled then. Have the pieces finally came together in that mechanical skull of his?
-----signature-----
The cells I am at the moment, soon die ... but I will be here. -The Servent, Cells
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Title: Runner
Posts: 54
Joined: 22 Nov 2006
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Date Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2007 2:10 am
Subject:
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Chapter 2
Timothy was an idiot. His new persona, the laughable "Bill Grevan", suits him very well. He was well educated and very successful before I met him, but he suffered from too many gaping flaws to continue his meteoric rise. And I have profited off nearly every single one of them. Whereas he has lived the life of a mercenary for many years, I have lived the life of a despot.
When Eidoss was formed, the business was a joke. Some twinkle in the eye of many nameless millionares fronting a whole lot of cash for a crackpot idea. I was hired on as an accountant, and joined the massive workforce of twenty five. Timothy was hired on as a scientist. Neither of us held our positions for very long, as we both made it into management quickly. He was smooth and confident, and I was ruthless in search of dollars. I was in competition with him the whole time, and resented the fact that he became the public face of the company while I received the role of an overglorified bookkeeper.
Time passed. The small garage operation now had a thousand employees and the big five multinationals announced billion dollar R&D budgets specifically for cyberware. We had secured hundreds of millions of dollars just by selling off useless patents. I bought my mansion in New Orleans. Timothy drove a half million dollar car and spent his weekends with wannabe actresses - elvish women with more breasts than brains. I spent my weekends trying to get a manufacturing plant online in another state. I loathed him.
His vice caught up with him. He had been funneling money through his R&D division to support his lavish lifestyle - he took literally a hundred million over a two year period, of which fifty went to his wife-to-be for startup of her hair color company. What a joke. What was with him, and her, and their hair? It was an obsession for those two. Her hair was grown in two years in a lab, the brightest shade of scarlet imaginable. His hair was now long and underwent biological treatments on a regular basis to make the strands even thicker. It was sickening, his vanity. I was the CFO of Eidoss, so I was the first and only to know about his theft. I made him an offer.
The offer was to sign over his allotment of stock over the next several years, which at the time was only worth twenty five million or so. Within 2 years, it grew to a sum of a hundred and fifty million. I endevoured to return the money to the company, to cover up for him. But I saw a golden opportunity.
Our main product, the QTX-0001 was a vehicle control rig. It took nearly two billion dollars to develop, of which a billion was from the Aztechnology corp. The first production run - the five hundred or so initial units had a failure rate of 93%. Worse yet, they had a projected fatality rate of 35%. A recall would have bankrupted us, and we'd all be imprisoned. At the time, we had thousands more units out in the field, and had no idea whether they would fail at a similar rate.
I was one of the three major stockholders of the corporation at this point, the largest being Aztechnology. The other was a man named Horatio Ellis, my boyfriend at the time who just happened to be the chief counsel for Eidoss. We saw the writing on the wall, and we found a way out of the failing company. We hatched the scheme for one of the largest scale hoaxes in history just to fool one man.
Timothy had unit #13. His unit was faulty and he was suffering from one of the first documented cases of cyberware psychosis. He was a man on the brink already, as his marriage was breaking apart over a stillborn child. At his most vulnerable, he was his most brilliant. At our request, he fed the media lies to buy us time, to keep the stock prices high. Meanwhile he was working the R&D department into the ground finding a fix for the QTX.
Horatio and I took short positions on all of our stock through proxies and started a campaign against our own company. We released document after document to the media through "anonymous informers" within Eidoss. The media and government agencies across the world were now investigating while Timothy was playing damage control. The public face of the demon. His marriage ended after he demolished his house with his bare fists and nearly killed his wife one night after work.
Horatio and I instructed employees to create numerous false reports regarding the extensiveness of the QTX failures and bombard Timothy with them. We hired actors to pose as government agents threatening to arrest him. Day after day it got worse, his stress increased. Under "threat of execution" by numerous countries, he cracked. Timothy was the force of nature we predicted - he destroyed the R&D lab and the corporate headquarters in one night of destruction. I had made several hints to him that destroying the lab was "the only way to keep us out of jail for the rest of our lives".
Eidoss collapsed that quickly. The only real things they had of value was research data, all of which was gone. Timothy went into hiding. Everything in our plan worked.
Within a month, Horatio and I had earned five hundred million dollars off our shorted shares and were living in Germany. We had good records, now that we had demonized Arceneaux. Aztechnology started rounding up lead scientists and hiding them from prosecution, effectively buying their freedom with a lifetime of low wages. We monitored the QTX crises, just to ease our guilty consciences. It turns out, only our initial batch was bad, and fatality rates were actually as predicted. We actually could have easily afforded a secret recall. But hindsight is 20/20.
The histories were already written based on the false documents we released. Government investigations were closed out on our company. A few scientists were not shielded by Aztechnology, and were jailed for a logn period of time. Timothy Arceneaux was a wanted man for a few years, but that was near the time of the great ghost dance, and everyone had a whole lot more worries to come.
Something always bothered me about Arceneaux. His QTX unit was tested shortly after we found out about the problems.All our scientists and technicians agreed it was not faulty. His misery was caused only by an overabundance of cyberware, and he refused to acknowledge it. With his change of identity, we expected him to destroy himself quickly in the unfamiliar world of shadowrunners. He thrived in his new role as an instrument of destruction. We put distance between ourselves and him, as we had no desire to kill one who has given us so much. But I've come to regret this.
Twenty five years. A hundred and fourteen cyberware scientists and technicians were struck lifeless by the machine. Bill Grevan or Timothy Arceneaux, take your pick. Genius or idiot, man or machine, but predator by no other name. We thought his rage was directed only towards his immediate coworkers in R&D. But a half dozen executives working in Seattle ended up dead last month. There are two names left on that list.
-----signature-----
The cells I am at the moment, soon die ... but I will be here. -The Servent, Cells
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Title: Runner
Posts: 54
Joined: 22 Nov 2006
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Date Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 12:01 am
Subject:
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Chapter 3
I'd made my move. She didn't have cyberware, it definitely wasn't a fair fight. Hell, it wasn't even a fight. It was time to finish things. I threw her backwards across the patio. As good measure, I picked up the table and sent it flying after her. It made a hell of a racket and she didn't seem to be so happy about me breaking her finest sipping glasses.
You know, there was probably alot I needed to tell her. How I hated Liv, how I hated being Eidoss' fall guy. Tell her about every night that I woke up to a destroyed hotel room from my vat muscles not shutting off during REM sleep. The three years total I've spent in a bed at some shadowrun, getting rebuilt after a botched run. I wanted my money back, I wanted my wife back, and I wanted to forget about the past twenty five years. I wanted to get back, maybe start another company and work on neural reaction damping systems for vehicle control rigs. But maybe it didn't matter, because all I could spout out was "Liv."
I pulled out the revolver from my shoulder holster. It's a relic, the Super Warhawk. It's a simple double action revolver, six large-caliber shots. Cylinder swings out to the side when it comes time to reload. There is nothing remotely sophisticated about this gun. The basic design was nearly a hundred and twenty years old, and even then it was fifty years from being state of the art.
In fact, it's damn near useless for almost anything. It kicks like a bear, fires slow, and is loud enough that every Lone Star in the state will know exactly where you are. It's also big. It's ten inch barrel makes it impossible to conceal, and requires a holster that is custom made. It really had only one use, and that was large game hunting. Too bad there aren't any trolls around.
The gun itself was worn out, firing too many overpowered shells and not getting enough maintenance. The barrel was starting to rust and the scope mounts were gouged from hitting the ground one too many times. The cylinder had three chambers cracked and unusuable. I had marked the cracked chambers with my pocket knife so I knew not to load them. So no more speedloaders. Every round I shot from this thing was hand loaded by a fixer from Detroit, 125% of normal powder load at the tune of fifty nuyen apiece. It's a miracle he hasn't blown one of the bullets up in his face while loading them.
I swung out the cylinder out of the revolver and reached in my pockets for the bullets. They were huge, immaculate brass shells with a depleted uranium bullet. I slid three into the still-intact chambers. I smoothly spun the cylinder, making sure nothing has bound up as I haven't fired it in going on three years now. I never kept this gun loaded - it was only for intimidation purposes. Sometimes you never had to shoot to get your point across. Over the years, I've found that's always a better plan.But even if you did have to shoot, there were always much better guns. But not this time. This time, I was going to make my point. I snapped the cylinder back into place and cocked the hammer.
-----signature-----
The cells I am at the moment, soon die ... but I will be here. -The Servent, Cells
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Title: Runner
Posts: 54
Joined: 22 Nov 2006
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Date Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2008 4:07 am
Subject:
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Chapter 4
My head was closing in on me like a Bison driving through a carwash, and I could hear only my phone ringing. I opened my eyes, and immediately squinted from the sunlight filtering through the tiny,plexiglass window. There's about four empty bottles of whiskey next to my bed in this tiny dive apartment in... god knows where. The racket from the cell phone seemed to disappear and the void was filled by the roar of an interstate... was it right outside the window?
Where the frag am I? I walk up to the window. It's inside is covered with a pale grayish grime, and the outside is covered with an awful shade of rust brown from the heavy pollution. This place probably hasn't seen the outside cleaned since 2040. I switch my cybereyes to a high contrast low-light mode and look at an interstate sign outside. Redmond. Drek. Why do I always crash here?
It doesn't matter. I gingerly sat down on the bed , trying to keep my stomach from turning itself over from a lack of booze and food. It's time to locate my gear. Let's see. Radio. Check. Backpack.. check. I start patting down the outer pockets of the backpack in futile attempt to find another bottle of booze. I look up and notice the trideo set is scattered about the majority of the room, and there's a new window for the bathroom where I apparently knocked a hole in the plaster with an empty bottle.
Frag em. They need to upgrade the joint anyway. I've got get moving again.
I stood up and immediately spy the Ruger laying on the floor. I pick it up and inspect it. I swing the cylinder out and see three shells in the chambers, so I empty the shells onto the floor.
There's one unfired bullet. The list had dwindled down to almost nothing, so I could pick it out. I wouldn't have loaded it otherwise. First off... there was Liv. Good riddance. How many months ago was that? It seems like it has been years since I've seen her. I don't even remember seeing Horatio.
I'm starting to sweat. I need another bottle of booze. I’m beginning to wonder… Did anything ever happen? Did I pay someone for a BTL of that? If I did, who was the actors? Was it real? Bullshit. I’ve been watching too much trid again. And drinking too much. Big fraggin’ surprise, there.
The phone started ringing again.
I picked it up and gave my usual greeting.
"Yeah?"
A completely monotone synthesized voice wasted no time in beginning.
"Mr. Grevan, you've woke up. You've been in a recovery for a while now, and after you destroyed our monitoring devices we were worried. We almost gave up. It's good you answered. The surgery was a success. "
“Yeah?” It was too fragging early to talk.
The voice continued in its flat tone. “The QTX is gone. You were in in our facility for sixty three days. You have been returned to Seattle and have been convalescing for sixteen days now. I won‘t go into the details of the surgery, but I assure you this will be one that textbooks will be written about”
It was probably an automated call from some secretive streetdoc in Chiba, patching it through fifteen different switchboards across the globe. This wouldn‘t be the first of such calls I‘ve received. They’re kind of pointless. Mostly just self congratulatory bullshit after they’ve taken tens of thousands of nuyen from me. Anyway, I figured this might be a good day if that thing finally was gone and I’m still alive…
The voice continued to drone on, unhindered by needing to breathe between sentences.
“Mr. Grevan. At your sponsors request, you now have a cortex bomb.”
Well, there went my day.
Frag.
-----signature-----
The cells I am at the moment, soon die ... but I will be here. -The Servent, Cells
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Title: Runner
Posts: 54
Joined: 22 Nov 2006
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Date Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 3:56 am
Subject:
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Chapter 5
I'm really fraggin' good at waking up in the most miserable places possible. This time, I woke up with my cheek pressed against some of coldest damn ground I've ever felt. I'm laying on a patch of broken concrete with frost-encrusted grass sticking out of every fissure.
It's morning. Real early. Sun is barely breaking through the clouds, and the world is bathed in a very pale orange. I can feel the throb of rush hour traffic as I roll over to look at the support columns of an interstate overhead. Snow is falling at a leisurely pace, and my clothes are starting to get damp. Yeah, it's morning alright. First morning I've returned to Seattle.
I stand up. I don't see my usual territory markings. No booze bottles, no bullet holes, no blood. Nah. Yesterday had a purpose, it was real easy to sleep. I think. I'd been driving around an old cargo van, but hell, it was gone. What did I do that was so important?
I went over to a frozen puddle of muddy water and looked at the opaque blob that was my reflection. I was hoping for something, anything to jog my memory.. I felt like I had been on a month long booze and BTL binge and I had just started to come down. After staring my blob down for a while, it was time to do something productive.
I pulled out a pack of cigarettes from my jacket pocket, and found it to be empty. I threw it down on the concrete, and guess fraggin' what? There was a piece of paper inside the pack which flew out when the box bounced. I picked it up. It's a flat cigarette paper , and of course it's got my handwriting all over it. People who can't remember shit write stuff down, pretty simple. Let's see what was so damn important that I threw out a perfectly good cigarette to write on it.
I was getting tired of listening to the interstate noises, so I read the paper out loud.
"Horatio - Aztec Public Library - 20:00 11/07/2065"
I shrugged. I know I was around town to see Horatio, but I really didn't give a shit right now. I needed a bottle of whiskey and a few dirty simsense tapes before I could start going around playing badass. I started to lay back down, but I had the sense to check my watch first. The digital readout said "7:03 07/07/2065".
I cursed loudly and kicked the cigarette box as hard as I could. My memory had a real damn funny way of coming back to remind me how much I screwed up. It started coming back in waves, but it boiled down to this.
After giving the venerable Miss Liv the retirement she so rightly deserved, I spent about thirty grand nuyen paying a shit-for-brains decker to track down Horatio. He dicked around for a month and the cost went up to about fifty. I about strangled him , but he found the info. I packed up a van full of about a hundred grand of gear and I had a plan... but now I don't know where the son of a bitch is. You're a real piece of work, Bill. As usual.
So last night, I guess I drove into town and sat myself down in a simsense hall and got screwed up off some BTLs. Fried what's left of my neurons on some stupid combat biker experience and passed out to get my stuff stolen by some dumbass punk kids. I wandered out of the joint looking for my van.
It's 7:45 now. I'm trudging down the street, pushing my way through a legion of wageslaves headed to their jobs at supermegacorps or whatever the hell they do. I'm hoping I can find a place to stop soon, get out of the snow, collect my thoughts. Bars aren't open for a while. Frag.
Nine o‘clock rolls by and I'm on a bus headed to Tacoma. I'm in between two wageslaves talking about their favorite trid shows, some bullshit that's not combat biker so I don't give a shit. The damn interstate is moving at a crawl, I won't be getting to Tacoma until at least 11:00. I'm putting together lists in my head in order to pass the time. I have roughly three hundred nuyen to my name right now. My van, and all the drek in it, is gone. There's my revolver... which has two bullets and it sure as hell isn't going to fire any more than that. Got a pack of matches and I'm wearing a form fitting bulletproof vest.
It was pretty fraggin’ simple at this point. I had to get my van back, and the only way of doing it was getting someone with some decent radio equipment and a hell of a frequency analyzer to search down the ID signals from my rig. How the hell am I going to find a decker on this short of notice? The bus stopped and I started trudging towards the Wyvern.
-----signature-----
The cells I am at the moment, soon die ... but I will be here. -The Servent, Cells
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