Summer Storm
[Wednesday August 17th, 2072; Silk's Apartment, University District, Seattle]
Silk reengaged the maglock and ensured that the trembler switch was active against the apartment door. The house node spoke in its reassuringly deep tones as the AR wall feeds lit up in a display of the Seattle skyline at dusk, the sun dipping behind the looming bulk of the Arc.
“Welcome home Ana. There have been no security alerts. You have no new messages. You have twelve news items flagged for your attention.”
“Thank you”
She could still smell the coffee in her nostrils, at least the coffee house used the good stuff rather than the bitter soy substitutes. It had been a good shift but she was glad to be back home so that she could get on with some of the important things she had scheduled for the evening. She threw her jacket down onto the futon and slipped the taser out of her purse and put it down on the kitchen counter where she could reach it easily.
The apartment was small and spartan, two rooms and a cubby hole bathroom unit, and it was only the AR feeds beamed directly to her visual cortex that prevented the place feeling claustrophobic. A faint waft of scent drifted from the air con unit that kept the stale city air at bay.
Leaving her uniform strewn across the bed she slipped into the shower and let the tepid water wash away her day self and bring out Silk, ready to face the night and the tasks ahead. With a gesture she brought up a representation of her call log and with the water cascading through the rippling imagery marvelled at how common place such beautiful things had become.
Once finished her ablutions she dressed herself in a loose tee shirt and jeans and then reverently slipped her newest acquisition from its hiding place in her bedroom wall. A custom Caliban, worth more than a year’s rent on this place and far more than she should be able to afford as a student, the casing seemed to absorb the dim led lighting without a reflection.
The skinlink interfaced more smoothly than anything she had ever used before and she was already browsing the ‘trix feeds as she slid down onto the futon. Dimly she wondered about eating something but then dismissed the thought...that could wait.
The matrix unfurled before her virtual vision...a wild landscape that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the heath lands of Brittany or Cornwall. Outcroppings of weather-beaten granite dotted the steep grass strewn hillsides, windblown trees outlined against an unnatural silvery sky.
After the last few weeks it was a relief to have a moment to rest. Balefire’s fortunes had taken a dip recently and all the runs they had performed had had unforeseen complications. Whilst that should be expected, they were runners after all and unforeseen was their stock in trade, Silk had a niggling feeling that there was more to it than that. It didn’t help that Requiem had been off doing his own thing in Chicago, she had missed his stoic presence and the reassurance of his lethal skill.
She made her way down towards the dell, her silken dress flowing out behind her making an audible swish against the grass. The pool is calm and still, at first reflecting back only the sky and the engraved standing stone portal on its shore. Silk knelt, gestured, and the pool changed to show the tagged news articles in its deep waters. Mercenary movements, AI rumours, the latest gadgets, an eclectic mix of data for her to peruse.
At last, satisfied that there was nothing here related to her real search, she stood and moved to the portal: a representation of the Caliban’s access to the net. Tracing the Celtic knot work she watched as it unravelled under her fingers and flowed outwards as far as her eye could see. Satisfied that any trace programs would have a hard time tracking her back here she stepped into the centre of the maze and flew out into the matrix proper.
She was standing on an outcropping overlooking a violent sea, her skirts snapping in the sudden gusts. She sent out a siren call that she knew her friend would hear...
<<@Aria: Do you want to come and play?>>
She came flashing out of the digital sea like a comet. Resolving into a little girl with impossibly long bright hair spinning before her gaze.
"I have a spare moment or two, where would you like to go? Not on your quest though, you need to rest for a bit..."
"So you say" Silk couldn’t keep the smile out of her voice "Let’s explore the Puyallup periphery, see how far the web extends today? The wild lands on the edge are always interesting!"
So saying she dove from the cliff top towards the churning waves...
Silk and Aria spent fifteen to twenty minutes skirting the edges of the wifi mesh in Puyallup, an eternity in the speed of thought rates of the VR world. Silk leading, they dipped into the poorly protected systems to scope the system architectures...never stopping for paydata, that wasn’t the purpose; although the systems were sparse there was an element of free expression here in the sculpting that the corps often couldn’t match.
One group in particular drew their attention, the hacker gang that Silk and Balefire had helped earlier in the year, fre∑dom...who seemed to be keen to establish their influence on this part of the grid. Given the lack of tech in this part of the barrens it was obvious that they had several ‘mancers with them to create such high level iconography. Their intuitive manipulation of the ‘trix rendered the deck heads like Silk obsolete in many ways...thankfully she had her other Gifts to offset their mastery of the digital world.
Silk briefly considered heading out to the Stillwater grid, their node was intoxicating, but the thought of running a satellite didn’t appeal at the moment. Perhaps she would head out there in person in a few days, braving the dangers of the other barrens for a taste of that pure UV and to reinforce her connections with the Wolf Pack. It had been too long since she had seen her initiatory group and she didn’t want them to think that she was neglecting them.
Sensing that Aria had other concerns for this night’s exploits Silk waved goodbye to her friend...
“Thanks! I needed to get out of the house for a while. I’m going to head down to FL and check on that back door while my Fetch continues its scans”
Aria smiled at her, her grin mischievous but her words of caution anything but
“Be careful, they may not have found it yet but it won’t last forever!”
“I’m always careful but something is telling me I need to be there tonight...there’s always a chance that the data will float to the surface eventually...I need to know who hired those bastards...it’s a long shot after so much time but if it’s anywhere surely it’ll be in there?”
Engaging her reality filter once more Silk stepped back onto the wind blasted heath. At the cost of some additional speed she routed her signal through an additional anonymizer server...the back door facilitated ease of access and she would have to rely on stealth to avoid detection, but this was an extra precaution that seemed prudent given the number of times she had penetrated this particular node. She didn’t class herself among the great hackers of this world but with a little help there was much she could achieve...
A gleaming white horse came at her beckon and, hair streaming behind her, she raced the wind towards the Fort Lewis grid and the Deep Watch servers. Hopefully the hidden access that Aria had installed for her was intact...
***
The node was a bleak and soulless place…to be expected of a merc company that was prepared to attack the Stillwater community and carry out assassinations of civilians, even if they had been shadowrunners. Corporate greed and ‘just following order sir’ did not absolve the individual soldiers of their responsibilities but Silk knew that chasing them down would be futile. She needed to find out why the hell they had attacked and who had sent them!
There was a stutter as she began to search for their hidden client databases and she briefly regretted the extra route through the Cairo grid. Her reality filter was holding up to the servers own sculpting but the edge that it gave her was wearing thin. The winter woodland whipped snow and frozen leaves around representing the system searching for her presence and she pulled the fur lined cloak of the stealth program further around her to ward off the drizzle.
She looked up from the reflective pool that she was searching for answers as a grinding crash echoed through the otherwise still woods. Perhaps there was a reason why the node was so empty of other users. Rising from her knees she walked deeper into the wood, cresting a small mound she looked out over the forest. She could see trees whipping wildly and then crashing to the ground…it was almost as if something was taking the node apart from within.
Calling Herne to her she leapt onto the back of the gleaming white stallion and raced down the hill as dissected leaves and branches flashed past her. She detected fragments of paydata in this maelstrom and she frantically set her link to record what it could, there was simply too much information here for her to hope to get it all…perhaps she could glean enough.
There was something shredding the node architecture, a something that her reality filter was translating as a wyrm of gargantuan size. It looked like the place was being taken apart at the seams...Ares were obviously coming in to clean the house! She had been here several times in the last few months and sifted through the archives until it was dangerous to stay but this shakeup perhaps represented her best chance of finally getting some solid intel.
The wyrm came up against a dryad type figure, an archivist program by the looks of it, and it shredded her without slowing. Silk shuddered at the bloody scene before her...the drawbacks of running hot were that everything was more visceral and intense and when sculptors were determined to shock then it could be unsettling.
Ensuring that her cloaking program was intact she set her browse routine to search for Stillwater, Mother or Balefire and cast the net out into the rapidly deforested plain.
Silk also made a mental note to scan any data she stirred from the depths for viruses or data bombs; just because Ares were throwing it out, didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be protection on the sensitive data that they had acquired...
There was a pattern here, something in the way the algorithms were targeting the data and she could feel her magic struggling to analyse it in ways that her link wasn’t able to. She forcibly shunted the thoughts away for now, the node was too unstable for her to get lost in the details and she needed to focus, there would be time later…hopefully. The destruction was efficient, data being overwritten with alarming speed leaving fragmentary clues about the original files…
… there’s no time left! Silk knew she’d have to take some risks to get the intel now, risks should would normally never have considered…she briefly cursed the fact that she had slowed her response times so much by routing through the proxies – it didn’t look like this node was going to be online for long enough for anyone to run a trace – the wonders of hind sight…
<<Herne: Attack protocol, intercept the wyrm agent>> and her glowing stallion lowered its head and morphed into a stupendous stag with a rack of antlers that glittered with lethal attack code. He wouldn’t last that long against an agent of the power that this one had but it would buy Silk precious seconds to chase down the data before this node collapsed under the weight of fragmented code.
As he dashed forwards to engage she slipped along the wyrm’s flank and began to probe the structure of the beast. There had to be some telltale in its programming, something that could tell her what its targeting priorities were. That data had to mean something.
Silk felt the powerful flanks beneath her heave as the agent pursued some once valuable piece of data. Damn it, she hated feeling rushed, not in control...the patterns were spiralling crazily and she longed for a moment to just contemplate them...
...there was too little time! She needed to glean as much paydata from the behemoth before it finally decided it didn't like its new limpet addition...
...reaching to the beast, her browse utility, a gossamer thread of a gold celtic broach, unwove itself, burying microfibre fine strands of metal into the whirling agent...to find a log, a list of the data it had corrupted perhaps? Surely whoever set this thing off would want to know that the job was being completed?
There…wait, no, nooo… the world went into a dizzying spiral as the node shutdooooown…
***
She woke from a bad dream in a cold sweat, her body aching from where she had slumped over the pillows on her futon. Her mind was full of images of the junior techie that she had shot in the Sintec facility when Balefire went in to rescue the technos. She was haunted by the look in his eyes as the bullets struck home and not for the first time she regretted giving up the pacifist principals she had tried to adhere to before her mother was killed.
Groaning she sat up and her link dropped from her lap…she hadn’t been asleep, groggily she rubbed her eyes. She’d not really experienced dumpshock before and it wasn’t something she wanted to repeat in a hurry, particularly if it was always this severe. Riptide had been right about the risks, but it was hard to give up the intoxicating lure of the virtual.
The techie’s face flashed up again and this time she recognised it as her brain’s attempt to grab her attention. So if it wasn’t a dream why was she seeing it again? After a quick diagnostics run on her link she powered it back up and began to sift through the bytes of data…there, there it was…!