Deadly Game

Preface

By Fade

Author’s Note: When I first wrote Deadly Game, I didn’t expect it to get read by anyone but a few bored regulars at Shapcano’s site. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, and extremely flattered by how many friends and acquaintances have expressed interest in reading Deadly Game, but this brought with it an unexpected problem. Most of these people have no knowledge of the Shadowrun universe, and consequently got pretty confused because I assumed knowledge of so many things when writing.

Rather than go back through and completely re-write Deadly Game, I thought that I’d save some time and effort and try to write a preface that would sufficiently explain everything. Unfortunately, the one-page preface has taken on it’s own life as I sought to make it ‘really cool’, and I now find myself writing a preface to my preface.

Those of you familiar with Shadowrun will probably recognize that this is supposed to be a Shadowland post. For anyone reading who is unfamiliar with Shadowrun, I’ve written the preface in the form of a post to an electronic bulletin board called Shadowland. The people who hang out in Shadowland are generally in positions to know things, and by pooling their knowledge they have a much better chance surviving when the real powers of the world start locking horns.

Captain Chaos runs Shadowland, so he starts the thread. After that, you’ll get a brief explanation of how the world got from where it is now, to where it is in the Shadowrun universe. That is why I wrote this whole thing, the posts following the history, are just how various people might react to the information contained in the history. To make a long story short, don’t worry if you don’t follow the rest of the stuff-I hope to eventually tie everything together with the sequel-Hunting Shadows. Oh yeah, Shadowland happens to reside in the Matrix, a huge virtual reality computer network that makes the current internet look like a couple of wires and a battery.

--Fade-- July 31, 2002

>>>>>Heads up everyone. I just got this in today. Admittedly, the source is somewhat dubious, but it fits too well with some of the other stuff I’ve received lately to ignore. All I’ve got at this point is a gut feeling, but it is the same kind of feeling that I got just before the Chicago fiasco with the Universal Brotherhood.

Check it out, and let the rest of us know if you have anything that can shed some light on the subject. Oh yeah, I included the message Cutter sent me describing how he ran across this. Check the bottom of the post if you are interested in seeing what he had to say.<<<<<

--Captain Chaos (3:23:03/05-02-59)

Hello. I find it strangely odd that after all the years I’ve seen, and places I’ve been, that I’m at a loss for what to say. I suppose hello is as good of a beginning as any. Today I’m feeling my age, so forgive me if I sound like a tired old man. I suppose in all reality I am just what I sound like, but the old often have things to teach the young.

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t give you my name, it wouldn’t mean anything to you, while putting me in no little danger. <<DATA DAMAGED .98 Mp CORRUPTED>> told me to give you the code word <<DATA DAMAGED .3 Mp CORRUPTED>> and said that would be enough. I do not wish to go into all of my qualifications, suffice it to say that I am one who is intimately acquainted with the events that I am about to describe. You see, I’ve lived through the last 60 hellish years, one of the few who are still around who remember events like the Great Ghost Dance, or the massive computer virus that the deckers of Echo Mirage managed to stop.

Perhaps most importantly, I was not only around during those events, but due to an accident of birth, combined with the exercise of a considerable amount of effort, I was in a position to know what was really going on.

The general public never gets the truth. Even in the late 1990’s in the United States, the ‘free press’ only rarely stumbled into the truth. Those in power tend to do a much better job of covering their tracks than anyone ever wants to believe. For instance, ther <<DATA DAMAGED: 12.8 Mp CORRUPTED>>

I on the other hand, knew most of the movers and shakers of the day, so I got the truth. The give grown men the shakes, fuel for conspiracy theorists, X-fil…never mind. I suppose it is the prerogative of the old to always think that others will remember the same things we do. Please forgive my occasional use of references to things which no one in this day and age remembers.

Perhaps I should start with a explanation of events as the world remembers them. You’ll have to pardon me if I get things a little out of sequence. I find that often the sequence matters less than the motivating forces.

Back around the year 2000, things were continuing on more or less as they had for the previous hundred and fifty years or so. The United States of America still existed, and technology was at a relatively low level.

Then it happened, magic came back. There were a number or different indications, but I think the first thing most people noticed was the birth of a large number of metahuman babies. Trolls, orks, dwarves and elves all came back into the world. Of course, the increase in the level of magic didn’t affect just humans. An amazing variety of plant and animal life came into existence over the next few years. Unicorns, hell hounds, devil rats, harpies, and an incredible number of other magical creatures appeared quite rapidly during this time. At some points it seemed like there were now more magical creatures than there were normal creatures.

Also about this time, technology was starting to show the first seeds of the advancements that would lead to such heavy modification of the metahuman body. We now take it for granted that if you have the money and want to be smarter, that you can have cerebral boosters installed to increase your brain power. Alternatively, if you have heart problems, a vat grown heart can virtually eliminate any chance of a heart attack, all while dramatically increasing your ability to do aerobic work.

Policemen can be implanted with wired, or boosted reflexes, to increase their speed, and help insure their survival when confronted with dangerous criminals. Of course, there is a dark side to all this technology. The vast majority of implanted cyberware, and bioware is designed to make people more efficient killing machines. Stronger, faster, smarter, these people whether called street samurai, razors, or gillettes can then prey upon normal citizens. I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself.

After magic started coming back into the world, two things happened that had major impacts. One of the events was the mass ‘goblinization’ of people around the world. From a strictly statistical standpoint, having 5% or even 10% or the population undergo a sudden change into trolls, or other metatypes doesn’t seem to be all that important. In real life, even much lower percentages can be incredibly devastating to the social order.

People fear what they don’t understand. End of story. Not only do you have all the humans running around trying to decide what is going on, but the brand new metas were generally fairly traumatized by the event. An amazing number of atrocities were committed. From the almost worldwide night of rage, where racists killed and tortured hundreds of thousands of metahumans, to the confinement camps in Japan, everywhere people looked there was evidence that humanity really hadn’t learned anything from the horrors of the past.

Although all of these events did their share of destroying the social order, there was help from an additional set of actions. Ironically, it was a set of people fighting discrimination who managed to finish destabilizing things. Native Americans were among the first to draw upon the newly awakened magical energies, and they did so on a spectacular scale. While, holding off the United States military, a group of native Americans, caused every dormant volcano along the west cost to erupt simultaneously, and freed their people from a variety of containment camps, all in few short months. When the smoke cleared, the Native American Nations owned most of what had been the western United States.

The landmark rulings giving multinational corporations the status of foreign nations were pretty much the final straw. With their newly won extranationality status, the corps no longer had to answer to anyone but each other.

Enter the world of today. Major corporations are always involved in covert warfare against each other. To maintain plausible deniability, they hire shadowrunners to raid, assassinate, and generally wreak havoc on their opponents.

The worldwide computer network known as the matrix has become so complex and vast that deckers, those who plug their brain directly into the net, swear that something intelligent has made its home <<DATA DAMAGED: 16.8 Mp CORRUPTED>> re.

Magicians wield powers thought impossible just a few decades ago, heavily modifying the conventional definition of reality, while street samurai, seeking to become a kind of urban predator, have their bodies so heavily altered that some question whether or not they can still be termed metahuman.

What few people realize is that most of the events of the last sixty years were either caused by, or manipulated to the best benefit of select groups of people. The course of action that you have decided on is likewise designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. I strongly council you to do all that you can to oppose <<DATA DAMAGED: 55.3 Mp CORRUPTED>>

<<Captain, I thought that you might want to see this message. I don’t know what it means for sure-it looks like it never arrived at it’s intended target. Whoever sent it must have put too much information into it. I’m sorry if I sound a little incoherent, but I’m scared drekless by what I’ve just seen. The original message was heavily encrypted, but something, or rather several somethings, decrypted it enough to figure out that they didn’t want anyone knowing what was in it.

The cutting crew and I ran into this thing outside one of the main lines coming out of Tir Tirange. It was under attack from some of the frostiest programs I’ve ever seen. These things seemed to be a cross between smart frames, and black ice. They probably were set to look for keywords in packets floating by them, and trash anything containing information they didn’t want people knowing about.

The only reason this thing is still around is that the smart frames seemed to be getting into each other’s way. From where I was at, it looked like there were three or four different interests represented by the progs trying to wipe this thing.

The crew decided that anything people wanted destroyed that badly was worth saving, so we jumped in to stomp out the frames. That is when we found out that the frames were some kind of deadly black ice. I lost Ebony and Ripple before anyone knew what was going on.

I’ll be honest, everyone likes to pump up the opposition when telling stories. It makes us sound nova hot when we proceed to tell people how we managed to win. Chip truth, these things were the scariest pieces of work I’ve ever seen. They were running in a section of the matrix that was neutral or downright hostile to them, and they were still executing so fast that we couldn’t follow their actions about half of the time. We’ve taken to calling them super frames.

The five of us that were left would have been squashed if a couple of independents with skills like I’ve never seen hadn’t chanced by. As it was, one of them looked like he got flat lined before everyone else was able to crush these things.

The fact that people are even willing to court the possibility that knowledge of these kinds of programs will get out, means that they are desperate to ensure that whatever was in that package doesn’t become common knowledge.

Oh yeah, we did manage to get a partial trace on the original packet, and a couple of the super frames. One of the independents swears that the package came through the one of the black ice sites owned by the Council of Princes in Tir Tirange. Interestingly enough, one of the super frames seemed to originate from another site owned by the Council. The other super frame that we got a trace on seemed to come from somewhere in England. I’m not sure what that means though-there isn’t anyone located there that should be able to field this kind of tech.>>

--Cookie Cutter (1:23:03/05-02-59)

>>>>>There you have it, you’ve now seen everything that was sent to me, what does everyone think?<<<<<

--Captain Chaos (3:23:13/05-02-59)

<<It is obvious that there must be two factions in the Council, but I don’t know why one of the other ‘super frames’ would have come from England.>>

--Ice Water (3:33:03/05-02-59)

<< What is up with all this conspiracy drek. I get tired of seeing this stuff every time I log on. Of course the corps are all out to screw us over. Big deal, any three year old not born in some kind of corporate enclave knows that. So what. As for this business of there being factions in the Council of Princes, that is seriously old news. They have fraggen Lowyfer on the council. That worm could have easily sent the message, and killed it both. There is no way to tell what he is trying to do.

Next this quack will want us to believe those vampire conspiracy theories that De Vries is always pushing. I mean, the second frame did actually come from England, and that is where De Vries says the vampires are based.>>

--The Realist- (3:33:13/05-02-59)

<<I don’t see any reason for the kind of artillery that Cookie Cutter is talking about to be revealed unless this message is a serious threat to someone. Unfortunately, all we have left is a brief, somewhat inaccurate history lesson.

It would appear however that something big is in the works.>>

--Mental Giant (3:33:54/05-02-59)

<<Mental Midgit more like. Cookie Cutter has been battling a chip addiction for the last two years. He has pretty much lost any credibility he ever had. Odds are heavily in favor of Cookie Cutter coming up with this story in an attempt to try and garner some free publicity.

Even if that isn’t the case, it is still probably some convoluted ploy by a corp.>>

--The Realist (3:34:09/05-02-59)

<<Basically, it looks like no one seems to have anything to contribute except for opinions. Personally, I’m inclined to believe Cutter, he’s actually been clean for six months now. Not only that, but the rest of the Crew is as straight as they come. I guess that is all folks, keep your eyes open, and let the rest of us know if you find anything else.>>

--Captain Chaos (5:43:03/05-02-59)

__________

This story is copyrighted by the author. The author grants license to all parties to copy and redistribute his work, as long as it is not used for commercial gain or modified in any way. Additionally, the author must be given credit for his work, and his contact information, sl1th@hotmail.com, should be included with any copy of his work. All other rights are reserved.

To take a page out of Shapcano’s book, Shadowrun is a Registered Trademark of FASA Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Used without permission. Any use of FASA Corporation's copyrighted material or trademarks in this file should not be viewed as a challenge to those copyrights or trademarks.