Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

The thing is, I'd worked for this Johnson before, and he'd always been a straight burner. He'd been the one who leveraged the Yokahama smartdust deal for us, and that had been pure sugar, a quick in-and-out that netted each of us forty-K nuyens, easy money.

And it had been a while since our merry band had scored. This time, our Mr. Johnson was offering us 200 K. We needed the money, and it wasn't like we could afford to be picky.

The bastard was grinning at me. "You don't believe me, do you?"

"Truth?" I asked. "Hell no. I think someone's playing with your head, man." I didn't add that I was still trying to see how the Johnson might be trying to scam us. This thing just wasn't adding up.

"Ah. But if it's true. If Zayid has found the Gate… think of what it might mean!"

"Look," I said. "It's reality-check time, okay? Has anyone told your sponsors that this thing isn't real? It's a freakin' work of fiction, for the gods' sake!"

"That," Mr. Johnson said, "is a matter of what you believe, isn't it?"

"Aw, c'mon, Slick! The effing Necronomicon? Get real! Lovecraft was a writer, okay? He invented the thing for his damned stories!"

"And if enough people believe in a thing, Mr. Faceman, it takes on a certain amount of hard-cache reality. You know that."

Of course I knew that. Everybody since 2011 knew that. But, damn it… this was fiction!

H.P. Lovecraft. The guy was all but unknown when he was alive, a minor horror writer in the pulp magazines of the day. He acquired quite a following in the years after his death, though, spawning a sub-genre all his own, populated by monstrous gods or godlike monsters that cared nothing for humanity save how they were going to eat us for dessert. Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Hastur the Unspeakable. Azathoth, the daemon sultan bubbling and blaspheming at the center of infinity. And, of course, Great Cthulhu himself, lying dreaming in sunken R'lyeh.

Jesus. All those stories from the 1920s and '30s, set against a backdrop of hopelessness, nihilism, madness, and despair. God doesn't love you; He's going to squash you like a bug. Or better. God loves you, because you taste great with a little BBQ sauce. Maybe that's why old HP was so popular with the younger set, even now, a century and a half later.

And Lovecraft had invented the Necronomicon as a singular plot McGuffin, an ancient tome of dark magic replete with forbidden knowledge, including the incantations and formulae necessary for calling forth dread Cthulhu and his kind. It was supposed to have been written by Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab. Hell, anyone who speaks Arabic ought to get a clue right there. No Arab would ever be named "Abdul" in real life. That's Western racist ignorance. It means "slave of-" and needs to have a name tacked on at the end. "Abdullah," for instance, "Slave of God." Do you understand? Lovecraft made it up… and he got it wrong!

"Let me get this straight," I said after a moment. "Nakamura has hired this Arab magician or technomage to open some sort of a gateway to… what did you call it? An alternate reality?"

"Or a parallel dimension, if you like."

"And this Zayid character is supposed to find an actual, physical copy of the Necronomicon and bring it back."

"Exactly."

"And you want us to hijack the book before Zayid passes it on to his boss."

"Just so. Can you do it?"

"Not if the book doesn't exist!"

"Ah, but it does exist. It must. Don't you see? For 150 years, millions of readers, the fans, the devotees of H.P. Lovecraft, have read those stories, and they have believed. Believed! Did you know that fifty years after Lovecraft's death, libraries at places like Harvard and Oxford were deluged with search requests for that book? Perhaps a dozen works were actually published under that title, adding to the confusion."

"You… you're saying that because a bunch of losers believed the Necronomicon was real, it is?" I looked him up and down. "That's just whacked! You been doing too much BTL, man?" I was serious. Folks jazzed on better-than-life sims could pick up some weird delusions, sometimes.

"I assure you I'm completely rational," Mr. Johnson said. "And in earnest. Belief is everything. So, will you take the job?"

Belief? Was that all it took to create reality from fiction? Belief?

Nah…

But we did need the nuyen.

"Okay," I said. "We'll take it. But half up front. And it's nonrefundable if this turns out to be a goose chase."

"Uh-uh," Mr. Johnson said. "Fifty-K up front. And you wear nannies."

"Shit. Why?"

"So my people can peek over your shoulders, as it were. What you see and hear, they'll see and hear. And they'll know you're not ripping them."

"Hey! You've hired us before! When did we ever scam you or your clients, huh?"

"Never. And you won't." He shoved a plastic bag across the table at me, with a tangle of equipment inside. "Besides, there's one thing more."

"What?"

"If you can't get the… merchandise, my clients want to be sure Nakamura can't get it either. These will help verify that."

"Makes it more complicated, man," I told him. "Seventy-five kay up front."

He hesitated, then nodded. "Done."

An hour later I was on the streets of Pittsburgh, my collar and hood up against the thin drizzle of acid rain, shouldering through the muggliemasses beneath the neon wink-blink of come-hither signs in twenty different languages, beneath the five-story buildingboards with their smiling, naked women and sleek cars and mindless MadAv babble. Megacorp massage, direct to you from the nuyen necromancers. An alien world, Slick, a billion klicks from the streets.

In my belt was the bag of nannies, plus a credstick worth 75,000 nuyen. Not bad for a morning's work.

I didn't know who our Mr. Johnson worked for, of course. Shadowrunners generally don't. But the guy had the fashion sense and street-cred trust-me feel of a Fed, and I was pretty sure our employers were the good old UCAS.

Nakamura, of course, we knew. Roger Nakamura was Pittsburgh's grand high Pooh-Bah of Mellon-Mitsubishi, itself a branch of Renraku Megacorp.

The team was waiting for me at the Eat 'n' Meet at Fifth and Forbes, almost in the shadow of the M amp;M Tower. Boy, they were just gonna love this…

I'd been working with them for maybe three years, and loved 'em all like siblings. Better, maybe, in Cammy's case. I never banged my sister.

Her name was Camilla Gonzales, but we all called her Cammy. The name fit. She was a weapons specialist who had this way of blending into the background so perfectly you'd never know she was there. And Thud's name fit too. I never knew what he called himself, but he was eight powerfully muscled feet of rather dim attitude, and those curved ram's horns growing from the sides of his skull gave him a certain in-your-face presence, you cop? Then there was Scooter, our pimple-faced magician, our very own wizardry whiz. And Dee-Dee wasn't just a hacker. She made computers speak, roll over, and sit up and beg.

And me? Well, never mind what my birth name was. Cam, Thud, Scoot, and Dee all just called me Fixer. I was the team's face, the one who talked nice to the Mr. Johnsons and brought in the gigs.

"We're supposed to do what?" Cammie said after I'd laid out the deal.

"I know," I told her. "Sounds a little over-the-top…"

"Over the top? It's not even in this galaxy! Hey! Earth to Fixer! Comm-check!"

"Did you tell this clown the difference between fiction and reality?" Dee-Dee asked, grinning.

"Of course. He told me belief is everything."

"He's right, you know," Scooter said. "Belief is what makes the world we know."

Scoot was using The Voice, and that made us all take notice. Normally, he's got this adenoidal whine that makes him sound like an annoying teen fanboy, but every now and again the adenoids vanish and his tone drops about two octaves. It's what he calls his magical voice, and when he talks that way, you know he knows what he's talking about. Cammie calls it speaking ex cathedra, which sounds like she thinks he used to be a church.