Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

They'd overrun him soon after he noticed Harpy lying on the floor, and everything had been confusion for a while. They had jammed most of his equipment, and he had to go for a few harrowing moments looking at the world as it really was, without AR overlay. Drab and grey, dull and lifeless. He could have slept with his eyes open-the unaugmented world, as far as he was concerned, provided no interesting visual stimuli.

His equipment was working now, but it wasn't doing much for him. There was only one available node here, and all it did was throw up some AR designed to weaken his resolve. The overhead lights got a little harsher, the table edges looked a little sharper, and there was a slow drip-drip-drip of water coming from an unidentifiable place. He thought about shutting off his AR perception, but he didn't want to give the Prometheus bastards the satisfaction.

There were two big guys standing near the only door to the room, armed and cybered to the teeth. Vitriol briefly experimented with hacking into one of the guy's arms, but he was rejected with extreme prejudice. He was not on his home turf, he didn't have access to outside nodes where he had all sorts of tools and agents stored, plus these guys could probably take his head off with a single backhanded swipe, so he decided to leave their equipment alone for the time being.

Then the door opened and the show started. The guy that walked in was a by-the-book corp security drone, down to the black tie, mirrored shades, and flat head.

"Mr. Vitriol," the man said. "Fake politeness, banal courtesy, tough-guy posturing, blah blah blah. Now that that's out of the way, tell me what I want to know or I'll take it right out of your head."

"Hi," Vitriol said.

The man shook his head. "No, we're done with that bullshit. No banter, no time for you to be a smartass. Tell me what I want to know, etc."

Vitriol leaned back in the wobbly metal chair, casually throwing his right arm over the back. "What do you want to know?"

"Who are you working for?"

Vitriol smiled. "Would you want any of the runners who work for you to give you up so easily? I didn't think so. So I can't tell you-I got professional standards to uphold."

"Fine," the man said, then looked at no one in particular. "Bring it in."

"Who are you talking to?" Vitriol said.

The man focused back on Vitriol. "Not you."

"Okay. And what are they bringing in?"

The man smiled and looked oddly cheerful, even with his mirrored shades still in place. "The nice thing about your operation here, Mr. Vitriol, is that we already know what you were after. We caught you after your agents had pointed it out to you and started to retrieve it, all before Mr. Carruthers alertly terminated your connection." The man smirked. "Convenient, isn't it, that your connection stayed intact long enough for us to find out what you wanted, but not long enough for you to actually get away with it? One might even think we planned it that way."

The interrogator was awfully self-satisfied, but in Vitriol's experience that was a pretty common trait in corp security officers. "Well, you're all very clever then," he said.

"Yes, we are. You were attempting to get your hands on the plans for prototype NT67T/H7, codenamed Project Siren. I assume you weren't just grabbing it randomly, especially since you dedicated so many agents to finding it. So you know what we can do with Project Siren?"

"No," Vitriol said. When you were expected to lie, he figured, why tell the truth?

"We can use it-to be specific, our marketers can use it-to persuade. To insinuate our way into people's heads and make them think what we want them to think."

"Sounds ominous."

"Ah, yes, the deadpan reaction to the major, rather ominous technological advance. You play your role very well, Mr. Vitriol. Sadly, the truth is the project is not yet as powerful as we may desire. We can only nudge minds at the moment, perhaps hasten them to move in directions that they might otherwise have chosen for themselves, without our assistance. It may not be that momentous, but it is a start.

"Okay."

The man tilted his head down and started tracing random patterns on the metal table surface with his finger. "We had to perform a significant amount of brain research in order to develop this product, as you might imagine. Which means that we have a large supply of nanotechnology dedicated toward discovering what is happening in different parts of people's minds."

His head jerked up quickly, and he reached his hand toward Vitriol's head, like he was going to press the tips of his fingers through his forehead and knead whatever he found in there.

"We have the tools to reach in there, Mr. Vitriol. Into your brain. We can find what's in there." He leaned back. "So you can tell us what we want to know, Mr. Vitriol. Or I can send in the agents that can find it for me."

"You can't do that," Vitriol said. "No one can do that."

"But we think we can."

"Who gives a shit? All that means is that you're delusional."

The man gently shrugged. "That may be," he said. "But we're delusional enough to try it."

"Fine," Vitriol said with a casual wave of his hand. "Waste as much time as you want. You don't have anything that can do what you're saying."

"But we have nanotechnology research that interests you enough to break in and attempt to steal it. So you know we have nanites here that can affect your mind, and we're willing to use them. They are nanites that have some kind of effect-if they didn't, we would never have continued Project Siren long enough to catch the interest of whoever hired you. We have nanites that can affect the brain, and we're going to put them into your skull.

"But maybe we don't know what we're doing. Maybe we have these nanites that can do things to your brain, but not the things we think they'll do. And we will put these things into your brain and let them run wild and we will see what they do to your mind. Are you willing to see what the results will be?"

Vitriol wished his eyes hadn't grown wider, but he knew they had and there was nothing he could do about it. "You can't do that. You can't just take someone off the street and inject things into their brain!"

"First of all, Mr. Vitriol, we didn't just pull you off the street. Second, while human testing is sometimes frowned upon by the more squeamish corporations, many of us know that the use of human subjects can provide great advances in learning. So when you are whatever you'll become after this, Mr. Vitriol, you'll know that you helped the cause of science."

"I don't think this is necessary," Vitriol said, wishing there was something, anything interesting in the room to look at.

"You're prepared to talk? About your conversation with Blood Sister, perhaps?"

"About what? What do you-" He kept a nervous eye on the room's door. "Okay. I'll talk. Let's negotiate."

"Not that kind of talking, Mr. Vitriol. The kind where you tell us what you want to know."

"I can't-"

The door to the room opened, and a man in a long white coat walked in holding a small metal box. The man with the sunglasses waved his hand abruptly in front of Vitriol's face.

"It's too late. We'll do it my way."

"But-"

"We're done," the man said, and walked out of the room as the man in the white coat approached. • • •

Vitriol didn't go out for a while after that. For a few days he simply didn't feel like it, and after that he stayed in because he thought it would be best to lie low. He didn't go home, either-his home was a dump, and he didn't want anyone to find him there. He stayed at a hotel, the type of place he could afford with the money he had earned, with a false identity that came as an additional form of compensation.

When he finally went out again, he avoided his usual haunts, even staying away from a sphinx party he heard about. But there are some things in life that, like chronic headaches, cannot be avoided no matter how hard one tries, and one night Vitriol found himself in the same bar as Gemmel. He was not able to avoid the dwarf, and he was surprised to realize that he didn't want to. He should probably know what other people knew about the incident.