Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

"Scoot," See said, shaking her head. She reached out and rapped the tabletop with her knuckles. "This is real." She tapped the side of her head. "This is imagination…"

He cocked his head to one side. "So… when you run the Matrix, it's not real?"

She scowled. "Of course it's real."

"But it's all in your head."

"No it's not!" She waved vaguely in front of her face. "It's… it's out there…"

"What you keep forgetting, Dee-Dee, is that according to the well-known laws of quantum mechanics, we create reality. In effect, there is no 'out there' out there."

I'd heard this argument before. It was popular with some hermetic magicians, I knew, though it wasn't at all mainstream. Not yet.

"You're talking about the Awakening, right?" I asked.

He nodded. "And a lot else. But we brought the Awakening on ourselves."

"Nonsense," Cammie said, but she was frowning. "That was just… just magic."

"What do you think magic is, but the use of belief to change reality?"

I glanced at Dee, at her delicately pointed ears, then at Thud, who was sitting there sharpening the tips of his horns, apparently not even listening, massive as a mountain, with fangs protruding two centimeters up from behind his lower lip.

An elf, a troll, and two humans. A hundred years ago, it would have been four humans. So where did the metahumanity come from?

Oh, yeah. We did it to ourselves. At least Scoot and a few like him thought so, and I had to admit the theory made as much sense as anything I'd ever heard. Seems that back at the end of the 20th century, and through the first decade of the 21st, we had all kinds of belief in the Big Changes coming. Cop it. The fundy Christians were so certain that Armageddon was right around the corner, with all the hosts of Satan ready to rise up and follow the Antichrist. And the fundy Muslims, the Shiites, anyway, were invested in the coming of the Mahdi and the creation of Allah's New Order on Earth. Even the New Agers got into the act, focusing on channeled messages of coming Earth Changes, and the ancient Mayan prophecies that the Fifth Sun was coming to an end in 2012.

With that much pure, raw belief gnawing at the foundations of Reality, man, something had to give.

And it did. It's tough to remember sometimes, sixty years later, that the Old World Order was all human. No trolls. No orks. No elves. No dwarves. And no magic. None that worked reliably, at any rate.

We called it the Awakening when the Old Order fell. Hidden away within the human genome were all of the metahuman racial types, it turned out, and suddenly Black and White and Latino and Asian didn't matter anymore. We were all humans, and we were sharing the planet with the stuff of myth and legend. Magic worked and dragons were real and Civilization itself was crumbling around our ears.

So, what the hell? Maybe old H.P. Lovecraft's little nightmares could have something to them after all. The potential of becoming real, if enough people closed their eyes and thought about it real hard.

"What do you think about all of this, Thud?" I asked.

"Don't think," the troll rumbled. He sounded like a good-natured earthquake. "Just do. Long as the nuyen're there."

Thud could be remarkably down-to-earth about things.

"We got our advance," I told them. "Look, at the very least we clear better'n eighteen-K apiece, right? We go in, show 'em it can't be done, and get out. Simple."

"Yeah? What if it can be done?" Scooter asked. The Voice had gone, and the annoying fanboy was back.

I shrugged. "Then we get fifty-freakin'-K apiece. How hard can it be?"

"Don't say that, Fix," Cam told me. "Don't ever say that. Somebody might be listening."

"They will be." I chuckled, and held up the bag of nannies. "Count on it."

"We really need to wear those things?" Dee said. "I don't like it."

"Me neither. But it's just for the op. They won't be watching you shower."

"It's just upgraded RFID," Dee said. "No big deal."

She used the streetslang pronunciation, "ar-fid." Radio frequency identification devices are everywhere-those little tags that control shoplifting and inventory, keep track of the kids, and let you dial in to the local net to get the name and number of the pretty girl you're chatting up on the street. They work by broadcasting a limited chunk of data that you can read on your commlink from like thirty or forty meters away.

Nannies are the same, but with more bandwidth, and with audio and vid channels. You wear the little flesh-colored dot on your forehead. It sees everything you see through an ultra-small nanocamera, and hears what you hear through a microphone the size of a large protein molecule. The range varies, depending on whether it's a government or a corporate model, but it's a lot farther than forty meters… and it can get through almost any of the usual RF barriers. Mr. Johnson's people really would be watching. • • •

It took Dee three days to hack the system, but we got what we needed to make the strike. Mitsubishi-Mellon had all kinds of defenses up, of course, but there are always cracks in the walls. We'd snuck into tougher places.

The biggest problem was that we were operating under deadline. Our Mr. Johnson had provided us with a few details. Seems he had a pipeline into this Zayid character's inner sanctum-a circle of twelve that was doing the heavy lifting for Zayid's major working. A street shaman named Shifter hadn't liked what he'd seen, and he'd made contact with our Mr. Johnson's people, whoever they were.

So, courtesy of Shifter, we knew Zayid was doing a series of incantations every night of the waning Moon, and that it was all coming to a head at midnight on the night of the new Moon-the 5th. And that was three days from my meeting with the Johnson.

But Dee found us a way in that ought to bypass the defenses at the front entrance, at least. We'd need to jimmy a lock to get us into an infrastructure service tunnel two blocks from the M amp;M building, then follow the fiber-optics and water pipes into the tower's basement. At that point, Dee would have to hack the building OS to take down certain surveillance cameras and the pressure sensors in the floor, and there would be guards outside the staff elevator.

From there it was up sixty-eight floors to where Zayid was doing his thing.

Simple. What could possibly go wrong? • • •

What indeed?

How about the extra SWAT-rigged security facing us as soon as we stepped out of the service tunnel?

I still don't know what the hell went wrong. Maybe Dee missed a security line when she hacked in. Maybe the whole op was compromised from the start. Hell, maybe we were set up. But Cammie stepped through that door, muttered a heartfelt oscar-sierra over her comm, and rolled for it as the bullets started slamming into the wall.

Scoot spat something under his breath, and a guard three meters away snapped backward, arms pinwheeling as he slammed into a wall. Thud reached out with two hands the size of large turkeys and grabbed a couple of other guards by the throats, hoisting them off the floor and giving them a hard shake as a pacifier. I stepped out from behind him with my Predator IV in both hands, squeezing off one shot after another into the mob of black-suits in front of us.

I don't know if it was Scoot's stunbolt, the sight of the Predator, or Thud's enthusiasm, but the rent-a-cops still standing bolted for the cover of a bend in the hallway. I pulled out a bouncy-boom, squeezing hard to arm it. I tossed it hard, aiming to bounce off the floor, hit the back corridor wall, and ricochet behind the corner. On the third bounce, it detonated with a serious ear-ringing wham, and corp-cops were spilling back out into the opening, hands clutched to bleeding ears.

"Put 'em to sleep, Thud-boy!" I called. I didn't like killing the local security, even if a second ago they'd been trying to kill me. After all, their only crime was trying to earn an honest credstick… unlike yours truly.