Lisa Smedman - Psychotrope

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SHADOWRUN
PSYCHOTROPE
Lisa Smedman
A ROC BOOK
ROC
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd,
Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published by Roc, an imprint of Dutton NAL, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
First Printing, October, 1998
10 987654321
Copyright © FASA Corporation, 1998 All rights reserved
Series Editor: Donna Ippolito
REGISTERED TRADEMARK ------ MARCA REGISTRADA
SHADOWRUN, FASA, and the distinctive SHADOWRUN and FASA logos are registered trademarks of the FASA Corporation, 1100
W. Cermak, Suite B305, Chicago, IL 60608.
Printed in the United States of America
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publica-tion may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
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MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and nei-ther the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
March 19,2060
The day it ended ... And began ...
09:45:05 PST
Seattle, United Canadian and American States
They'd come for Pip in the middle of the night. Sneaked in the door of the squat, past the bars and locks and
the mean old dog that slept in the hallway and that would'a chewed the arm off anyone but Pip and Deni.
Skulked their way past all of the magical wards Deni had set up to keep his little sister safe, past the howler
sensors that he'd rewired to run off a power cell taken from the abandoned car out back. Stolen Pip right
off the mattress she shared with Deni, right out of Deni's arms.
Nothing about it made sense. Deni and Pip were nobodies—just a teenage kid and his eight-year-old
sister trying to scrape by in one of the roughest neighborhoods of the Puyallup Barrens. They got by as best
they could and stayed clean. Mostly. Deni hired out his shamanistic talents, running astral recons for the
scavengers who raided the nearby Black Junk Yards. Pip stayed safe in-side the squat, playing with the
MatrixPal learning com-puter that Deni had given her to try and jazz her into talking, to break through the
silence she'd blanketed her-self in since their dad died.
Pip and Deni didn't bother anybody, and nobody both-ered them.
Until now.
Now Deni was racing after Pip, pumping his mana to the max to follow her trail. His meat body was still back at
the squat, curled in a ball, nose to knee. But his astral body was loping like Dog, nose to the ground, tracking
Pip's as-tral spoor.
The snatchers had taken Pip out across Hell's Kitchen, the wasteland of ash dunes and crusted lava that
was left behind after Mount Rainier blew its lid. Pits of hot mud that would'a boiled the skin off your bones
bubbled like open sores, and sulfurous wizz-yellow steam rose into the
air. It all passed by in a blur below him as Deni zipped along at maglev speeds.
He passed a nature spirit, its astral form a beastlike cloud of swirling ash. The thing glanced at Deni with lava-red
eyes, but Deni was past it before the spirit could attack. He was moving at nova speed, burning up his body's essence
at a furious clip. Bit of a brainwipe thing to do, but he had no choice. Pip's life was at stake.
He could see where they'd taken her now. Her scent led to an abandoned power plant. He slowed a tick and took in
the sprawling complex of gray concrete walls, massive black pipes that disappeared into the ground, and skeletal
towers whose dead high-tension lines lay sprawled on the lava fields like limp snakes. Then he circled the complex
once, giving it a quick sniff in about the time it took for one wag of a tail. Satisfied that no nasties were guarding the
site, he loped in through the graffiti-smeared wall near-est to the spot where Pip was, moving at a more cautious pace
than before.
He was expecting cold gray walls and rusted turbines, dark stairways and garbage on the floor.
Instead he found a toy store.
The rooms were lit like day, the floors clean. The walls were covered in, holopics of simsense stars and the floors
were knee-deep in toys, all of them new and expensive. Huggable, mood-inducing "feeling foam" dolls sat propped
against walls, and miniature maglev trains raced along tracks that wound from room to room. A model space sta-tion
bobbed gently in mid-air in a darkened office, a holo-graphic spread of twinkling stars surrounding it, and a
floor-to-ceiling doll house filled another room. One area held a knee-high table set with toy plates that projected a
three-dimensional display of grub, and under it two Battle-bots tussled back and forth across the floor, their metal fists
making tiny clanking noises as they traded punches.
Deni saw all of this in a heartbeat as his astral body flashed through the abandoned geothermal plant, bearing down
in a laser-straight line through walls toward Pip. It confused him. He'd figured the goons who snatched his sister to be
body boosters or pimps. If so, they made their captives pretty drekkin' cozy.
He was close now. Pip's astral scent was strong. Deni flashed through a heavy door of metal-sheathed plastic, then
jerked to a halt at what he saw.
There was Pip sitting on an overstuffed couch in a room filled not with toys but with computers. And not kiddie
decks like the one Deni had boosted for her, but mega-yen models with squeaky-gleam cases so new they still smelled
of plastic. Pip was playing a game on one of the decks, her hands a blur as they flicked the toggle sticks back and
forth. She wore her favorite blue dress and her "circuit sox"—black nylon shot with brilliant yellow glofiber. Her curly
blonde hair was uncombed—as usual— and her pale skin was unbruised. Deni was glad to see that whoever had
taken her hadn't messed her up any. Her aura was bright, clean.
As if sensing his presence, she looked up with a puzzled frown at the spot where Deni hovered in astral space,
pant-ing from his run across the wasteland, his tongue lolling. Then she looked back at the screen of the cyberdeck in
her lap and she laughed. Out loud. And then she spoke, her eyes still darting as they tracked the game.
"I like it here," she said. "This is fun."
What the . . . ? Pip was happy here? Pip was talking?
No, frag it. She had to be on some kind of mood-altering mind benders. That was what had loosened up the
emo-tional knot that had kept his sister silent all these years.
Pip must've been tricked into coming here. And it didn't take a technowiz to figure out how. She'd probably
met her new "friends" over the Matrix. They'd talked her into leaving the squat by promising her everything Deni
couldn't give her: shiny new toys, the latest computer games, an entire playhouse to roam in.
She'd slipped out of bed, tiptoed past the dog, and un-bolted the locks on the front door of the squat herself.
Somehow she'd gotten through Hell's Kitchen—Deni didn't even want to think how dangerous that had been— and
come here.
And gotten her reward. But Deni knew in his gut that there had to be something nasty waiting at the end of it all.
Deni growled. The fraggers who'd lured Pip here would
pay but good. But why hadn't he seen anyone yet? Pip had said "friends," And that meant more than one . .,
She glanced up from her game as a boy walked into the room and greeted her. He was native, with wide
cheek-bones and dusky skin. Maybe fifteen—about Deni's age, but not runty like Deni. He was healthy, well fed. And
clean. His clothes looked new, and trend-smart, except for the knitted red and white scarf around his neck. But his eyes
had the wary look of someone who'd grown up in the Barrens, hungry and on edge.
When the kid turned, the gleam of a datajack flashed from his temple. Deni's astral vision showed the wires that fed
the jack as veins of silver, webbing their way through the kid's brain. He frowned. A datajack was some expen-sive
drek. Where'd a kid get the nuyen for that?
Deni growled as the kid sat down beside Pip on the couch. But the kid didn't make a move on her and Pip didn't
seem to mind him sitting there. And what the frag could Deni do about it, anyhow? This recon had taken only a few
seconds, but by the time Deni returned to his meat bod and slogged it across the wasteland of Hell's
Kitchen—assuming he didn't boil his brains by falling into a mudhole—an hour or more would have gone by. Better to
keep an eye on Pip, for now, and see what went down next.
The kid was talking.
"You'll like being otaku," he told Pip. "Playing in the Matrix is even more fun than playing with toys."
Pip stared at him a moment, then nodded gravely. "I know."
"There's a special place there. A place that makes you feel happy. When you get your datajack you'll be able to go
there as often as you like."
Deni bristled. What was this fragger trying to talk his sister into? Was he trying to get her hooked on BTL? But that
was chips. You needed a chipjack for that. Not a data-jack. Datajacks were for computers . . .
"We're going to take a lot of people to the special place today," the kid told Pip. He glanced at the watch on his
wrist. "In just a few seconds. Would you like to come too?"
Pip nodded. A smile lit her tiny face.
The kid handed her an electrode net and smiled as she strapped the array of sensors onto her head and plugged its
fiber-optic cable into the deck on her lap.
No! Deni raged. Don't trust him, Pip! He flailed for-ward, but his astral body bounced back as it encountered Pip's
aura. He whirled, reached out* tried to claw the thing off her head. But it was no fraggin' use. The hands of his astral
body were thin as mist.
Pip closed her eyes. Her body relaxed into a slump.
Deni stared at the kid on the couch beside Pip, wanting to take the silly scarf around his throat and choke him with
it. The kid stood up and walked over to a telecom outlet. Seeing him pull a fiber-optic computer connection cable from
it, Deni figured he was going to attach it to a cyberdeck. But instead the kid slotted the cable directly into the datajack
in his skull. Carefully paying out the ca-ble, the kid sat back down on the couch beside Pip. Then he too leaned back
and closed his eyes.
A strange thing happened. The kid's aura went totally weird.
The weirdness began just above the kid's scalp. His aura turned a bright silver color over a point on his datajack,
and then lines of energy suddenly sprayed out from this point. Tiny bolts of light, maybe as long as a monowhip
stretched out straight, spiked out like roving spotlights, growing thinner and thinner the farther out from the kid's head
they got, until they just disappeared. They smelled hot somehow, like electricity.
"I'm in the Matrix," the kid told Pip. "Can you see me?"
"Yes," Pip whispered. "It's beautiful here."
"Just wait," the kid said. "It'll get better."
Even through his rage, Deni knew this had to be a scam. There was no way that kid was in the Matrix. Deni knew
enough tech to realize that you had to have a cyberdeck to jack into the virtual reality of the Matrix. You couldn't just
slot a cable from a telecom outlet into your datajack. No deck, no dice.
But there was that weird aura . . .
Deni glanced at the kid's wristwatch and saw that it was
blank—then remembered that abstract data like numbers couldn't be seen in astral space. Still, the time had to be
somewhere just before ten a.m. He tried to figure where his chummer Alfie would be at this hour. If he could get her to
buzz him out here on her bike they might arrive in time to save . . .
Pip let out a soft sigh. Then her body suddenly tensed, and her thin chest stopped moving. Was she still
breath-ing? Oh frag. Was she alive?
Pip's chest rose . . . and slowly fell. She looked like a coma patient. Except that her limbs were rigid as death.
Drek. Deni had to do something. Fast.
He booted it on back to his meat bod, loping across Hell's Kitchen as fast as his dog legs would take him.
09:46:12 PST
(18:46:12 WET)
Jackpoint: Amsterdam, Holland
Red Wraith dove for cover as the rumbling tank bore down on him. A nearby I/O port formed a perfect foxhole: a
triangular-shaped "hole" in the military-green corrugated metal floor. The tank clattered closer, a monstrosity that
dwarfed Red Wraith, towering over him like a mobile of-fice block. Its matte-black treads were studded with chromed
spikes, its body warted with rivets. Neon-red lasers beamed out from sensors on all sides of the metal beast, and its
barrel and turret swung back and forth, seek-ing a target. In seconds it would find where Red Wraith had gone to
ground, would crush him into a bloody pulp with its treads or blow him to pieces with its cannon ...
The tank was just a Matrix construct—a metaphor for a computer program. Just as Red Wraith's persona icon, with
its ghostlike body that ended in dripping red mist where the lower legs would normally be, was a virtual
represen-tation of the decker named Daniel Bogdanovich. But Red Wraith used the adrenaline rush the tank image
gave him,
let it spike his consciousness into hyper-awareness. He'd come so far to reach these personnel records .. .
He wasn't going to give up without a fight, even if it cost him his deck. Not when he was this close.
He used his cyberdeck's masking program to change the appearance of his on-line persona into a shimmering cloud
of glittering silver confetti. With luck, the tank-shaped in-trusion countermeasures program that was bearing down on
him would mistake him for a stream of data, one of dozens that flowed back and forth across the inside of the
octagonal box that represented the sub-processing unit he'd decked into. The false datastream created by the masking
program would glitch up the actual data that was flowing into Red Wraith's "foxhole"—in the real world, the hardcopy
printer that was connected to the port would hiccup and spew out a page or two of jumbled graphics. But with luck,
the admin clerks at UCAS Seattle Com-mand would lay the blame on a hardware glitch.
Red Wraith crouched lower in his foxhole as the tank rumbled closer. Crashing the IC wasn't an option. A stunt like
that would trigger too many system alerts, and then he'd have hostile UCAS deckers to tangle with. Instead he had to
find some way to subtly defeat the program.
As the tank loomed over his foxhole, Red Wraith could feel the walls and floor of the I/O port rumbling. Then the
tank's tread sealed off the hole, plunging him into dark-ness, and Red Wraith was engulfed in the stench of hot
exhaust and oil. Part of his mind acknowledged and appre-ciated the detail of the programming, noted the
effective-ness of psyching out the target by overwhelming his senses with such oppressive detail. Another part of
him responded with the fear the tank's designers had intended to induce. But the logical, methodical part of Red
Wraith's mind— the part that had given him the steady hands and cool head to perform assassinations—was in
control. Almost instinc-tively, he tucked away his fear and activated an analyze utility.
The utility appeared next to him in the customized iconography he'd given it: a trode-patch electrocardio-graph
monitor like those used in hospitals. Programming on the fly, Red Wraith modified its outer casing, shaping it
into a gleaming chrome spike like those on the treads of the tank. Then he reached up and jammed it home. The trode
patch on the wide end of the spike sampled the graphic imaging of the IC, then adhered firmly as it was incorporated
into the tank's programming.
A series of pulsing red lines appeared in the darkness in front of Red Wraith as the utility began its analysis. He
scanned them quickly as the tank rumbled clear of the I/O port, noting the oscillation of the sine wave and the
fre-quency of the peaks on the baseline below it. The readouts told him not only what type of IC he was up against—
blaster, an attack program that could send his cyberdeck's MPCP chips into meltdown on a successful hit—but also
how tough the program would be to crack.
Diagnosis: tough. But not mega. And that puzzled Red Wraith. He'd decked into a military computer system
con-taining confidential personnel datafiles; the IC here should have had ratings that were off the scale. Sure, the
datafiles were merely the records of personnel who had "retired" from active service. They hardly contained anything
that would be considered damaging to UCAS national security. Just addresses, medical records, next-of-kin forms. No
ac-tive service records. But they should have been guarded more closely, just the same.
Hmm. . .
A sudden shift in perspective took Red Wraith by sur-prise. Suddenly he was lying on the "floor" of the system
construct, looking across an expanse of corrugated metal at the glowing rectangular block of the datastore he'd been
trying to access before the tank materialized. The I/O port he'd been hunkering down in was nowhere in sight.
He processed the shift in the visual landscape and in-stantly realized what had happened. The I/O port had gone
off-line, ejecting him back into the octagonal box that rep-resented the sub-processing unit as its icon disappeared.
The UCAS SEACOM's sysops must have noted the glitch in the printer and taken the port off-line. Now he was fully
exposed. . .
Light flared explosively around Red Wraith as an IC at-tack hit home. The resolution of the images that sur-rounded
him shimmered and blurred. When they came
back into focus a moment later, the colors were muted, the resolution grainy. And it was getting worse. The walls and
floor of the sub-processing unit were losing their solidity, just the peaks of the corrugations showing in a barlike
pat-tern that revealed gaping, empty, non-space beyond . . .
Drek! The system was also protected by jammer IC! It was messing with his deck's sensor program, messing up his
ability to distinguish the iconography of the Matrix. It had already partially wiped his ability to process the visual
component of the tank. But he could hear the bone-jarring clatter of its spiked treads and could feel the subsonic
rum-ble of its engines, even though he couldn't locate the di-rection from which these sensory signals were coming.
He was equally blind to the jammer IC that had put him in this fix. But his tactile sensations hadn't been glitched yet.
He felt around him, patting his hands gently over the corrugated floor. There! A round device with a button on top: a
land mine. The IC was a nasty little piece of pro-gramming. Its first, undetectable attack had been when Red Wraith
first logged onto this system, rendering the jammer IC invisible to him. Now he knew what he was "looking" for. But
unless he wanted to move at a crawl, feeling his way blindly along, he'd be hit with attack after attack until all five of
his virtual senses were down.
And now the tank was almost upon him. The floor was vibrating wildly under his feet
There was only one thing to do—hunker down and pray his utilities would protect him.
He activated his deck's shield utility. A rubberized black body bag appeared around him. The zipper closed, sealing
him inside, and for nearly a full second Red Wraith saw nothing but darkness. He initiated a medic utility, rerouting
functionality to the backup chips in his deck's MPCP. And then he waited while the medic utility did its work. He heard
a rumbling, felt a heavy weight pass over him. But the spikes on the treads of the tank did not penetrate the thick
rubber shielding of the cocoonlike bag.
He waited until the medic utility had finished its work. Then he opened the body bag's zipper—and was relieved to
see that his graphics-recognition capacity had been re-stored. Peeling the body bag away from his body, he
stepped back into the iconography of the sub-processing unit and surveyed the field of battle. Now he could see the
previously invisible land mines that were the jammer IC. This time, he would be able to avoid them.
The tank was visible again, and was rattling away from him. But it took only an instant for it to pinpoint its prey.
One of its rear-mounted targeting lasers found Red Wraith and locked its ruby-red cross hairs on his chest. The turret
whipped around one-eighty degrees in a motion so fast the barrel of the cannon ghosted, and Red Wraith was looking
down into the cold, dark muzzle of the cannon.
Just the way he wanted it...
Red Wraith reached up with his ghostly hands, yanked his head from his body, and hurled it into the gaping maw of
the cannon. Darkness engulfed him. He had a sensation of sliding, spiraling along the cannon's rifled interior . . .
Then his head exploded. He was a swirl of numbers, characters, symbols—strings of programming that wormed their
way into the metal of the tank, penetrating its algo-rithmic armor and seeking out its core programming. One of those
datastrings found the sub-routine that the IC used to analyze its sensory input in order to coordinate its tar-geting and
damage-assessment systems. The datastring spiraled around that sub-routine, creating a tiny loop that connected it
with another. Then Red Wraith shifted his perspective back to the new head that had materialized on his persona.
The cannon belched flame and smoke. A projectile com-posed of tightly knitted code emerged from the muzzle,
flashed toward Red Wraith in a streak of light—and passed harmlessly through his ghostly body. Then it arced up,
over—and slammed into the tank itself, exploding with a bright flash.
The tank fired another projectile. And another.
Red Wraith didn't even flinch. A total of six explosions rocked the tank, and then the cannon fell silent and the
projectiles stopped. The cannon barrel turned left, right, then the laser targeting sights suddenly blinked out.
As the tank rumbled forward across the corrugated metal floor, Red Wraith neatly sidestepped it. The tank
continued until it struck one of the solid rectangular blocks
that represented datastores within the sub-processing unit, drew back, changed its orientation slightly, then butted
against it a second time. Only after a number of jarring impacts did the tank lumber away—only to get caught against
another datastore.
Red Wraith nodded in satisfaction. His customized at-tack utility had done its work. The link it had created between
the two sub-programs had caused the data corre-sponding to the location of Red Wraith's persona to be skipped.
Instead it was replaced with the data that repre-sented the tank's own position within the sub-processing unit. Unable
to lock onto its intended target, the tank's at-tack bypassed Red Wraith's persona, leaving the decker's MPCP
undamaged. Instead it attacked the programming of the blaster IC itself, rendering the IC blind to the icons around it.
Although it had been defeated, the blaster IC was still up and running. It would give the appearance of being fully
functional to any sysop who ran a diagnostics check on this sub-processing unit.
One thing was still bothering Red Wraith, however. When he'd run his analyze utility, it had identified the tank as
gray IC, an intrusion countermeasures program that at-tacked the deck, rather than the decker. But what if that had
been just a mask? Military computer systems usually were protected with black IC. "Killer" IC, deckers called it, since
the biofeedback it induced could flatline you.
And Red Wraith, of all people, should know you can't judge a killer by his cover.
He did not experience any of the warning signs usually associated with lethal biofeedback. That was because the
cranial bomb that had nearly taken his life seven years ago had done extensive damage to the mesencephalic central
gray matter in his brain. As a result, he was no longer able to feel physical pain.
The bomb also severed his spinal cord at the second cer-vical vertebrae. In the bad old days of the twentieth
cen-tury, this would have left him a quadriplegic, immobile from the neck down, dependent upon a breather machine
and moving about in the world in a wheelchair equipped
with an archaic sip and puff computer interface. But mod-ern medicine had allowed the docs to revive him, even
though he was clinically dead when the trauma team found him. Cybersurgeons had rebuilt the fragmented vertebrae
with plastic bone lacing and replaced the transected axions of his spinal cord with a modified move-by-wire system.
Occasionally, his limbs spasmed out, but at least he was mobile. Most of the time.
Red Wraith initiated a customized medical diagnostics utility that was programmed to do a quick scan of his meat
bod. A series of condition monitors appeared in front of him. Heart rate, blood pressure, blood-oxygenation levels, and
respiratory rates were all normal. His cybereyes and ears were still functional, as were his blood and air filters, his toxin
exhaler, and his adrenal pump.
All that cyberware—as well as the fingertip needle with its compartment of deadly toxin in his right forefinger and
the subdermal induction datajack in his left palm that he used to access the Matrix—had been installed courtesy of the
UCAS military. His handlers had made him into the perfect killing machine, used him to assassinate key politi-cal
figures during the decade of political unrest that fol-lowed the Euro-Wars, then slagged him with the cranial bomb
they'd hidden at the base of his skull when his ser-vices were no longer required.
Or tried to slag him.
The cranial bomb had been defective. It had taken Red Wraith to the brink of death. For more than a minute, he had
been clinically dead. But fortunately, he'd been in Amsterdam when the bomb was activated. And fortu-nately, he'd
secretly purchased a platinum-class contract with the Hoogovens Groep Clinic. The Daf TraumaVaggon had gotten
him to the clinic in time.
The doctors hadn't known who their patient was—all records of the human named Daniel Bogdanovich had been
erased long ago from public databases, and, given the cybereyes, retinal scans were not an option anyway. But their
patient's credit had been good. And so the cyberdocs did what had to be done to save his life.
Daniel settled in Amsterdam afterward. It was as good a place as any to call home, and the houseboats on the
canals
provided accommodation that was cheap and private. He didn't venture out much; suffering a spasmodic episode in
public was not his idea of a fun time. Instead he spent most of his time in the world of the Matrix, a world in which the
icon that was his "body" never failed him. A world in which the encephalon implants they'd used to repair his
damaged brain gave him a distinct edge.
He had chosen Red Wraith as his on-line handle and constructed his persona in the image of a particular form of
ghost known as a wraith. According to superstition, a wraith was an apparition that took the form of the person whose
death it portended. And that pretty much summed up Red Wraith's previous career.
In his role as cyberassassin, his most important asset had been his ability to infiltrate his target's home,
head-quarters, or place of work. He did this by "becoming" the target through a combination of disguise and
technological mimicry. All assassins prepare by acquiring as much infor-mation on the target as possible, and Daniel
had taken this to the bleeding edge. Into the datasoft link in his skull he slotted not only chips containing the target's
personal data, but also chips comparable in function to an activesoft. These contained programs that overrode
Daniel's own emotional responses and motor skills, allowing him to pre-cisely duplicate the target's behavioral quirks,
speech pat-terns, and emotional reactions. Like the wraith for which his on-line persona was named, Daniel became a
mirror image of his target—an apparition whose arrival portended the target's death.
Part of the function of the headware memory system that accommodated the data from the skillsofts had been to
suppress Daniel's own long-term memories, so that he could not give information on his past hits, if apprehended and
magically mind-probed. He remembered his current mission—who he was to assassinate, where, and when— but
remembered nothing prior to the start of that mission. As for his memories previous to becoming a UCAS assas-sin,
only flashes and fragments remained. He knew that he had been based out of UCAS SEACOM and that he had once
lived in Seattle. As for his personality . .. well, all he had left was the chip he'd slotted on his last job. His own,
original personality was like an erased chip, wiped clean by the installation of the datasoft link in his skull.
But fragmentary memories occasionally surfaced. And one of those fragments—the memory of a woman—was what
had gotten Daniel through, had given him the will to come back from the brink of death after the cranial bomb nearly
killed him.
When the Daf TraumaVaggon team had found him, Daniel was clutching a holopic of her. His mind held equally
tightly to the memory fragments of her that re-mained in his wetware. The memory of her face: high cheekbones and
sparkling green eyes framed by auburn hair. Her name: Lydia. Her relationship to him: lover, friend, wife.
But the rest was missing. Daniel had no idea where the pair of them had lived, no idea where Lydia might be to-day.
He desperately wanted to touch the smooth skin of her cheek once more, to stare into the eyes that had once burned
with such intense love.
But the only way he was going to do that was if he ac-cessed his old personnel records, found out where she had
been living on the day that he'd "died." Seven years had elapsed since then, but there was still a good chance that
Lydia was alive, that her current address could be traced once he had her SIN. It wouldn't even matter if she were in a
relationship with someone else; if she had forgotten all about him. Red Wraith just wanted to see her one last time.. .
He'd been preparing for this datarun for seven long years, honing his skills as a decker. Now he was one of the
best. And he had reached his goal. Or nearly ...
Red Wraith turned his attention to the datastore. It was shaped like a metal ammo box with a large hasp on one side.
A marquee of stenciled block letters flowed around the ammo box: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The analyze
utility he'd used on this datastore earlier had trig-gered the attack by the blaster IC. But it had also alerted Red Wraith
to some white IC that he now would be able to deal with.
He clenched his hand in a particular motion and a scalpel appeared in it. Studying the hasp that sealed the
ammo box, he slid the blood-lubed blade of the surgical knife into it and turned it slowly, feeling the resistance. The
action triggered his cyberdeck's defuse utility, neu-tralizing the data bomb that was attached to this datafile. The hasp
broke apart into pixels that shimmered and dis-appeared, and the ammo box swung open.
A cyclone of swirling alphanumeric characters rose from the box. Red Wraith triggered his browse program, sought
out the file that bore his name. Names spiraled past his eyes, too quickly to read. The As, the Bs ...
The cyclone stopped, frozen in place. Paydata! Bogdanovich, Daniel. Red Wraith reached out and seized the name,
felt raw data stream through him as the personnel file downloaded into his cyberdeck. Then he released the cyclone. It
spiraled downward, neatly compressing itself back into the ammo box. He closed the lid, and the hasp reappeared.
He glanced at the tiny red numbers that logged the amount of time he'd spent on this run: forty-seven sec-onds;
local time 09:46:59. It was time to jack out of here and scan the data he had so painstakingly acquired, to solve the
mystery of his past life . ..
09:46:15 PST
(02:46:15 JST) Jackpoint: Osaka, Japan
Lady Death smiled as she put the finishing touches on her virtual sculpture. The icon that hung in front of her was a
perfect duplicate of her own Matrix persona: long, dark hair drawn up in a bun at the back of the head, skin a pure,
dead white as if drained of blood, face with red accents on the lips and cheeks. It was dressed in a flowing white
kimono—the color of mourning—patterned with glowing red dracoforms.
The image was drawn from kabuki—the overly formal, traditional style of Japanese theater whose feudal tragedies
played so well as simsense. Lady Death's icon was that of a woman who had committed shinju—double-lover sui-cide.
Which was both appropriate and ironic ...
Satisfied with her high-resolution double, Lady Death sent the icon out into the Matrix. While it dutifully logged
onto AS/NIPO-TOK-5673, the telecommunications grid that was home to one of Tokyo's many cramming schools,
Lady Death would be elsewhere. The icon was merely part of a mirrors utility that would fool her guardians into
thinking she was logged onto the juku. She even had an ex-cuse to explain why she had awakened at the unusual hour
of just before three a.m. to study. This was university en-trance exams week, and the Osaka telecommunications grid
was jammed from five a.m. on. She was just getting an early start to her cramming.
The icon disappeared into a system access node. At the same moment, her cyberdeck's masking program acti-vated,
throwing up a shimmering haze that rendered her actual persona almost transparent.
Beside her, a miniature lion, seemingly made of folded origami paper, sprang into being. It stood quivering on
clawed feet, as if sniffing the air. It inclined its head slightly toward where Lady Death hung, its glowing yel-low eyes
shifting back and forth as tiny red numerals scrolled across the spot where its pupils should have been. Then its nose
snapped around as if picking up a stronger scent. It leaped into the SAN and disappeared with a pa-pery, rustling
sound.
"Desu," she whispered to herself. "The trace program has been fooled. Time to go."
Still maintaining her masking program, she pushed aside the painted cloth banner that hung in front of her. In that
one motion she exited from her family's private LTG into the Shiawase Corporation system itself.
The system was patterned after a kare-sansui garden, but with high-tech imagery overlaying the traditional
ele-ments. Instead of following a Western-style, right-angled grid, data flowed in sinuous curves reminiscent of raked
sand. The ripples fed into the fiber-optic roots of the miniature bonsai trees that were the system's datastores, or
flowed around the clear glass boulders that represented sub-processing units.
At this early hour, the system contained only a handful of deckers. Their icons were scattered across the
huge ex-panse of landscape that stretched out on either side of Lady Death—tiny, human-shaped figures
that swam like tadpoles through the datastreams below.
Lady Death plunged downward, toward the raked-sand plain. In an eyeblink she was inside a
datastream, sur-rounded by the pea-sized grains of sand that represented individual packets of data and
moving rapidly amidst the flow. She came to another SAN, this one sculpted to re-semble a temple gate
with ornate brass scrollwork and dark, heavy wood. She pushed it open, stared at the more conventional
grid of right-angled neon lines that lay be-yond, and entered the address of the LTG she wanted to ac-cess. Then she
flowed through the door and into the rigid Western-style grid of the Seattle RTG.
The database she sought was a fansite devoted to manga musk. Like the two-dimensional animated
cartoons of the previous century from which it took its name, manga mu-sic was over-the-top—devoted to
action, color, and spec-tacle. The singers who fronted its bands wrapped their music in cartoonish elements,
using a blend of illusion magic and high-rez graphics technology to produce in-credible spectacles.
The manga music fansite offered free simsense downloads—home recordings done by fans at live
con-certs. These allowed other fans from around the world to experience the thrill of seeing their favorite
bands perform live. Many of the simsense recordings were crudely edited, or were marred by having been
shot by fans who were jazzed on amphetamines or hallucinogenic drugs. But it wasn't the experience of
seeing her favorite singer that Lady Death was after. She wanted to find out where Shinanai was. Perhaps
one of the fans had seen one of the un-derground, unauthorized concerts that Shinanai was rumored to be
secretly giving in UCAS.
Shinanai—the legendary lead singer of Black Magic Or-chestra. Shinanai, the woman whose name meant
"death-less." Shinanai's image was burned into Lady Death's
memory: tall, thin, with nearly translucent white skin and silver-blonde hair shaved high over elven ears but long in the
back. A delicate tracery of luminescent blue face paint accentuating high cheekbones and piercing aqua blue eyes.
Black leather pants, cinched tight with straps and buckles from ankle to thigh. Red mesh shirt covered by a black
leather jacket with its sleeves cut out. Fingertips, each and every one bearing the tattoo of a grinning skull. And a
voice that could howl as raw as a shadowhound or sing as sweet and pure as a synthesized flute.
Shinanai was just one of many aidoru—singers who were idolized by Japanese high school students. But to Lady
Death, Shinanai was everything—and the only aidoru worth thinking about. She had an intensity, a way of
mes-merizing you and stealing your heart away with just one smoldering, shiver-inducing look. And so Lady
Death—or Hitomi, as she was known in the meat world—had slipped away from her guardians and sneaked backstage
to meet Shinanai in person. Captivated by the singer's magic, she had run away from home and school and family to
become Shinanai's lover.
Or at least, she had allowed Shinanai to love her. It had been enough simply to allow Shinanai to embrace her, to
stroke her skin, to kiss her lips with a passion that Hitomi had never felt before. Shinanai neither asked for nor
ac-cepted physical stimulation in return. Instead Shinanai drank of Hitomi's soul.
A little too deeply. When the shadowrunners who had been hired by Hitomi's father caught up with Hitomi, they
found her on the blood-soaked bed of the hotel room in Seoul that Shinanai had vacated moments before. Hitomi had
died of blood loss after Shinanai had drunk deeply from her femoral artery, letting the passion-pumped blood flow until
Hitomi expired. For Shinanai was a vampire.
The runners' shaman and medic had been able to revive Hitomi, to pull her back from just over the brink of death. He
said her ki was strong, despite the fact that the vampire had been supping upon this life force. But Hitomi knew that
her will to live came not from any physical or psychic strength. It was simply that she could not bear to die and
never see her beloved aidoru again. She had walked away from the brink of death by choice.
They had kept her in isolation in her family's private medical clinic for many months after that. Her guardians kept
watching and waiting, fearful lest Hitomi herself be-come a vampire. But somehow her body had resisted the HMHVV
virus.
Hitomi knew that Shinanai had intended for her to be-come a vampire, that Shinanai had killed her so she could
share eternal life. Only the shadowrunners' arrival had forced Shinanai to flee. In her heart, Hitomi knew that Shi-nanai
would be happy to see her again, would be hoping that Hitomi would be able to track her down. But a part of her still
wondered why Shinanai had fled from the shadowrunners, instead of fighting them. Vampires were supposed to be
legendary in their strength . ..
Ironically, Hitomi—as Lady Death—had once claimed expertise on vampires and had commented more than once on
their cruel, sadistic nature on the Shadowland postings she loved to frequent. But her information had come from
tridcasts and news reports. After having met a vampire first-hand, after having become Shinanai's lover, Hitomi now
knew how wrong she had been. She only wished she could convince her guardians of this fact.
Since that night in Seoul, two separate attempts had been made on Shinanai's life, forcing her into hiding. No more
was Shinanai giving live concerts—at least, not for the general public. Hitomi had no doubt that the shadow-runners
hired by her father were to blame, and that they would continue tracking the vampire until their job was done.
In killing Hitomi, Shinanai had ensured her own death. Double-lover suicide.
As for Hitomi herself, she had not been allowed to leave the Shiawase arcology for the fourteen long months that
had passed since her "death." Her guardians made sure she did not stray, that she could not follow through on her
compulsive need to see Shinanai again. But that did not mean her mind could not wander freely, that she could not
access Shinanai in other ways as Lady Death .. .
The manga music fansite was tricky to find. Few regular
deckers even knew it was there—only hard-core manga fans ever accessed it. The fansite was located on the Seat-tle
RTG but was invisible, due to the fact that it could only be accessed by means of a "vanishing" SAN—a system
access node that allowed entry only at specific times of day. In addition, the SAN "teleported" on a regular basis,
switching its network address to various locations on the Seattle RTG according to the dictates of a secret algorithm.
To know where to access this SAN and at what time, a decker had to know someone who knew someone who knew
the sysop who had created the algorithm ... and so on. It was kind of like scoring a BTL chip—or so she guessed,
since she'd never had cause to purchase illegal simsense. It was a highly secretive process, based on word of mouth
and trust.
Lady Death followed a dataline to the pulsating drum-head that was the icon of a nightclub known as Syber-space.
The dull black octagonal sent out a steady rhythm that Lady Death could "feel" in her meat bod—a bone-thrumming
bass that mimicked a syncopated heartbeat. A favorite nightclub of deckers, Syberspace was physically located in
downtown Seattle. But the virtual nightclub was accessible to deckers around the world. And one of its nodes,
seconds from now, would connect with the manga music fanbase.
Lady Death dove through the head of the drum, into the Syberspace construct itself. It looked like a nightclub,
complete with a mirror-backed bar stocked with glowing bottles and a large dance floor. The icons of other deckers
drifted through the room, occasionally touching a bottle to access a biofeedback program that would either stimulate
or sedate their meat bods, as desired, or placing a palm on one of the many bar stools whose seats resembled trode rig
interfaces.
Although the nightclub construct was realistic in the ex-treme, the deckers' icons gave the place a surrealistic feel. A
somber-looking man in top hat and tails sat next to a gray and white cartoon rabbit with white gloves, big floppy ears,
and a gleeful grin. A topless teenage girl with mohawk hair and baggy shorts rode a jet-propelled surf-board past a
clown, a gigantic red cockroach, and an Asian
woman in a stylish business suit. A sasquatch jived alone in the center of the bar, his massive, hairy hands moving in
intricate patterns like those of a Balinese temple dancer, while in another corner a trio of personas whose faces and
bodies were smooth metal ovoids stood silently, accessing the program that would induce in their minds a simsense
recording of the live performance that was actually going on in the meat-world nightclub.
Lady Death bowed to the club's sysop—a portly man in bacchanalian toga and headband of gold grape leaves—
and asked for her "drink" by name: Magical Mystery Tour. The bartender smiled and crooked a chubby finger, and a
yellow bottle floated over to Lady Death. For just a mo-ment, the bottle took on a new shape: long and cylindrical still,
but with a periscope and portholes down the side. Hurriedly, before the vanishing node disappeared and the
submarine became merely a bottle again, Lady Death touched it...
And found herself inside the manga music database.
After the high-resolution realism of the Syberspace sys-tem, it took her a moment to get used to the overly
sim-plistic but crowded landscape of the fansite. Everything was outlined in heavy black lines and deliberately
pixelated, so that individual dots of primary color could be seen within each icon. Cartoonish renderings of manga
music singers and musicians capered and wailed across a landscape rocked by explosions, while rocket-propelled
Battlebots roared unnoticed above the heads of adoring prepubescent fans whose overly large eyes slavishly
fol-lowed the musicians' every move. Although music was be-ing performed with furious abandon, no aural elements
were included. The only "sounds" were the cartoon speech bubbles that hung above the musicians' heads and the
mu-sical notes that swarmed around them like bees.
To access one of the simsense recordings that had been posted here, the decker reached out and touched one of
the cartoon speech bubbles. Their captions were sometimes cryptic and sometimes straightforward, but were always
punctuated to the max: "Meta Madness rocks Orktown!!!" or "Chillwiz concert a SCREAMER. I yarfed my lunch!!!" or
"Guess Hue?!?"
Lady Death searched for anything that looked like a Black Magic Orchestra concert upload. A total of three
cartoonish icons of Shinanai materialized in front of her, making Lady Death gasp with longing. But the captions
above their heads were already familiar; these were sim-sense recordings of concerts from a previous UCAS tour, from
before the time when Shinanai went underground. Lady Death considered sampling them, then reluctantly re-alized
that downloading them onto her cyberdeck would increase the chance of her foray into the manga music site being
detected by her guardians. She dismissed them with a wave and set her browse utility scanning on a variety of
keywords. But the titles to Black Magic Orchestra's hit singles came up dry, as did the names—both real and stage
names—of the band members.
Lady Death paused, frustrated and disappointed. No new postings. Donzoko. She stamped a foot in frustration.
How would she ever find Shinanai?
Then she remembered the lyrics to the song that the aidoru had been composing, back when they had been
to-gether in the hotel room in Seoul. To the best of Lady Death's knowledge, it had never been performed at a pub-lic
concert. Based on a tanka, a traditional thirty-one-syllable poem, the song had compared a woman to a well in which
water rose anew each spring, and from which her lover drank again and again. Lady Death now realized that it was a
veiled reference to Shinanai's vampirism. At the time, she thought it was simply a metaphor for love.
She chose the title of the song as the keyword for her search: Shunga. In literal translation, Spring Pictures—a
euphemism for erotic simsense. Within a nanosecond or two, a cartoonish image appeared before her: that of an
an-drogynous singer with a sexy pout, clad only in a black velvet cape that was wrapped tight around his/her body.
Bright pink cherry blossoms drifted down like snow as the singer crooned silently into the speech bubble that floated
above. The icon was human, rather than elven, and did not look a thing like Shinanai. But the caption over the head of
the figure fit the imagery of the song: "I wish you well. I wish you would. I bet you WILL!!!"
Lady Death touched the caption and began downloading
the simsense recording into her cyberdeck, onto the optical storage chip that was deliberately not listed on any of the
deck's directories. As the data flowed, she noted the date and time that the recording had been posted, and the
jack-point of the decker who had uploaded it. It had been posted just yesterday, from Kobe, a suburb of the Osaka
sprawl. If it really was a recording of an underground Black Magic Orchestra concert, recorded by one of the fans who
had seen the show live and then immediately uploaded the recording after the show, that meant that Shinanai was
barely a five-minute maglev ride away from Lady Death in the meat world.
After so many months of numbness, Lady Death felt a rush of emotion. Joy and happiness warred with caution and
fear. She could barely contain her impatience during the few nanoseconds it took to download the simsense recording;
she simply could not wait to log off the Matrix and scan it. Perhaps Shinanai had hidden a secret message in the song,
a call for the school girl Hitomi to rejoin her lost love.
Lady Death checked her cyberdeck's time-keeping log. It was 9:46:59 PST in the meat world—2:46:59 in the morning
in Osaka. She had been running the Matrix for a mere forty-four seconds. Hopefully, her guardians had not yet noticed
that she had strayed into the forbidden territory of the manga music fansite. If they had, there was a possi-bility that
Shiawase deckers had already erased the contra-band simsense recording as it flowed through her family's private LTG
and into her deck. But if all was still well and Lady Death's mirrors utility and masking program had done their work, in
a second or two, when she jacked out, Lady Death would at last know where her beloved Shi-nanai was today . . .
09:46:18 PST
(12:46:18 EST)
Jackpoint: Toronto, United Canadian
and American States
Dark Father stared at the creature that waited for him be-low, in the private conversation pit. The thing was a strange
blend of two different paranormal creatures. It had the squat, heavily muscled body of a gargoyle, as well as that
creature's large leathery wings, pointed ears, forehead horn, and jutting muzzle. But its flesh was covered in the green
and black scales of a mimic snake, and a forked tongue slithered in and out of its hinged jaw. Its neck was just a little
too long, and its beady eyes were serpentlike slits under heavy brows.
The combination was probably intended to be doubly unsettling. Had the creature actually existed in nature, its
victims wouldn't know whether they would be constricted to death and then swallowed whole, or dive-bombed from
above and raked with talons and claws.
In fact, the creature was a construct within the Matrix, an icon representing a computer decker. But even though it
was unreal, composed only of pixels of light, it had the ca-pacity to be deadly, just the same.
Dark Father descended a spiral staircase made of float-ing white rectangles. When he reached the bottom and
stepped onto the green marbled floor of the conversation pit, a metallic boom echoed overhead. He looked up and saw
that the sub-processing unit had been sealed off with what looked like a gigantic metal hatch, octagonal in shape.
Eight black pillars had appeared to hold it in place. Jagged blue bolts of electricity rose one after the other be-tween
the pillars, crackling as they wavered their way from floor to ceiling.
Dark Father recognized the program: a form of barrier IC named Jacob's Ladder. It was intended to guarantee ab-
solute privacy to the two occupants of this SPU, one of several secure nodes on the Virtual Meetings host, Hidden
away in a remote corner of the Seattle telecommunications grid, Virtual Meetings' black pyramid contained a number of
private iconferencing sites, making it a favorite meeting place for shadowrunners.
And for blackmailers.
The gargoyle leaned against a sundial that was set into the middle of the conversation pit's floor. Glowing white
numerals announcing the time of day encircled its rim, pat-terns of white against the sun dial's black marbled finish.
They crawled with painful slowness around the rim; sec-onds always seemed slower in the Matrix, where words and
deeds were accomplished with the speed of thought. The conversation pit was theirs until ten a.m.—ample time for
them to conclude their meeting.
Dark Father stared coldly at the gargoyle. "Well? Here I am." He stood with hands folded in front of him, an
ebon-black skeleton with yellowed eyeballs, wearing a tall top hat and a black suit that hung loosely upon its bones. A
pale white hangman's noose, knotted around his neck like a tie, was a stark contrast to bones and cloth so dark that
they were difficult to see against the backdrop of inky blackness that lay beyond the sub-processing unit.
The gargoyle—who went by the handle Serpens in Machina—flashed Dark Father a quick smile, revealing
needle-sharp teeth. "There you are," he said. "So that's what you look like." The gargoyle shifted his wings slightly
and Dark Father heard the creak of leather and smelled the dry muskiness of snake. The persona icon was high-rez
enough to include aural and olfactory compo-nents, in addition to its visual and tactile presence. Ser-pens in Machina
must have some mighty state-of-the-art equipment. He was not someone to be trifled with.
But Dark Father already knew that. He had come prepared.
"Have you arranged for the credit transfer?" the gar-goyle asked.
Dark Father nodded. "Nine hundred thousand nuyen is waiting in an account in the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinschaft
Bank. All you need to access it is the passcode."
"Wrong," the gargoyle said. "You'll be the one access-ing it. I have no intention of getting hit with whatever IC
you've loaded the account with. At precisely noon today, Pacific Standard Time, you will transfer the money in three
equal portions into the accounts of three organiza-tions: the Ork Rights Committee Seattle chapter;
VVA-MOS—Victims of Violence Against Metahumans and Other Species; and the MetaRights League of Boston."
Dark Father shuddered at the list. Neo-anarehists, metahuman agitators, and terrorists. In the real world, his lip
curled at putting nuyen in their coffers.
"And your take?" he asked.
"Nada," the gargoyle answered. "I'm like Robin Hood. Take from the rich, give to the poor . .."
"You're targeting the wrong person," Dark Father countered.
"You are rich, Winston Griffith III."
Dark Father's eyes narrowed at the use of his real name. He was at a disadvantage; despite his best efforts he had
摘要：

SHADOWRUNPSYCHOTROPELisaSmedmanAROCBOOKROCPublishedbythePenguinGroupPenguinPutnamInc.,375HudsonStreet,NewYork,NewYork10014,U.S.A.PenguinBooksLtd,27WrightsLane,LondonW85TZ,EnglandPenguinBooksAustraliaLtd,Ringwood,Victoria,AustraliaPenguinBooksCanadaLtd,10AlcornAvenue,Toronto,Ontario,CanadaM4V3B2Pengu...

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