Shadowrun Read online

  INTRODUCTION

  John Helfers

  It is my great pleasure to welcome you to Drawing Destiny, the third anthology of original Shadowrun short stories, all centered around one of the biggest things to be introduced to the SR universe since Dunkelzahn’s assassination (okay, maybe not that big, but it’s still pretty big).

  The Sixth World Tarot was born from the ingenious mind of Loren Coleman at the 2014 Gen Con, and from the moment I heard what he had planned for both it and the game in general, I knew we had to do a collection of short fiction based around the deck itself. A living magical and metaphysical object basically capable of altering reality to suit either its or its holder’s desires…or not—what could be more Shadowrun-y than that?

  Of course, no Shadowrun artifact would be complete without being, well, adapted to better fit into the Sixth World. Featuring stunning original artwork by Echo Chernick, the Awakened Tarot both is and isn’t the tarot deck you may be familiar with. The identities and aspects of certain cards have been modifed to better suit the dangerous future world the deck now exists in. Also, the “living” aspect is quite correct—as the universe’s timeline progresses, some cards will change their images as they affect and are affected by world events.

  When I put forth the call for stories involving the Awakened Tarot, the response was not only overwhelming, but overwhelmingly positive. Of course, given the wide-ranging nature of the Sixth World Tarot, the stories cover a wide range of themes and characters as well. Some are straightforward (or as straightforward as a Shadowrun story gets) encounters with a tarot card, for better or worse. Some stories deal with the aspects of a particular card, and how those can impact a character or team’s actions or mission. And some are more esoteric, delving more deeply into both the near-infinite nature of the tarot deck itself as well as the plots and schemes constantly being hatched and carried out all over the Sixth World. And when both of those collide, the results can be spectacular…or they can be very quiet. The aftereffects of these encounters, however, are sure to be felt down the line at some point.

  This anthology features many returning authors, such as Michael A. Stackpole, Jennifer Brozek, Chris A. Jackson, Kai O’Connal, Aaron Rosenberg, Steven S. Long, R.L. King, Malik Toms, Russell Zimmerman, and Jason M. Hardy. I’m also pleased to bring more authors into the dark world of Shadowrun anthologies. Some, like CZ Wright and Scott Schletz, have already written excellent short fiction for the RPG. Others such as Lucy A. Snyder, Josh Vogt, Jaym Gates, David Ellenberger, Monica Valentinelli, Devon Oratz, R.J. Thomas, O.C. Presley, Bill Aguiar, and Jeffrey Halket, are diving into the fictional side of the world for the first time.

  I’m very pleased to include all of them in this volume, and hope that you enjoy their stories as much as I did. So turn the page and enjoy this collection of Shadowrun stories that all hinge, in one way or another, on the turn of a card…

  SNIPS AND SNAILS AND BINARY TRAILS:

  A WOLF AND RAVEN STORY

  (THE MATRIX)

  MICHAEL A. STACKPOLE

  “Forget her role in this, Longtooth. Your plan is flawed.” The Old One growled from the depths of my soul. “You are a hunter, not a trapper.”

  Being that the Old One is a slice of the Wolf Spirit living inside me, he has an opinion about everything. And by opinion, I mean complaint. His general solution to any problem is the direct application of sharp fangs to soft throats. I tended to agree with him in this particular case—but we didn’t share the same order of events. Kill first wasn’t really a starter in this case, and wouldn’t become so, no matter how much he insisted.

  I stopped short of telling him, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” because he’s not a huge fan of the Bible. Kind of makes sense, since it was stories written for shepherds, and he claims to predate the deity to which it’s devoted. Moreover, he’d be quick to remind me that “A time to die,” comes pretty hard on the heels of my quote, and he’d be damned smug about it.

  “You just hate being trapped in concrete canyons reeking of sour man-scent.”

  “Better a city of maned apes than what you plan for us.”

  “I won’t say you’re wrong, but there isn’t any choice.” I brushed my fingers over the silver wolf’s-head pendant at my throat. I took a moment to relish that last true sensation—preferring it to the press of the ’trode coronet tight against my head. My fingers slid down to the launch button on the deck and I let them hover. “Third time is the charm.”

  I hit the button and launched myself into the Matrix. Light flashed—not before my eyes, but behind them, in my mind. In the world of meat I became another zombie, jacked into a deck at the back of a bar. My eyes saw nothing, not the babydoll heads hanging from the ceiling, not the neon signs blinking out their last moments. I couldn’t smell anything, either—in the Weed, that was a blessing. Bodies jostled mine, music made ears bleed, but I wasn’t there.

  Instead I was in the Weed of the Matrix, full of bright lights and soothing sounds—no dented metal, no browned bloodstains, and a place anointed with an industrial scent sold as “Antiseptic Ambrosia.” The Weed’s owner hadn’t spent much nuyen building the dive’s virtual twin. Still, it let me imagine that if I ordered a cold beer, I might actually get what I wanted without a side of Hep-J. I especially liked that the virtual bartender had more teeth in his smile that the entire night shift had in the real world.

  In the Matrix, beauty doesn’t just run skin deep, it goes all the way down to your credit limit. No one was what they appeared to be. Case in point, I appeared to be a golden-haired little boy, all dressed up to play Robin Hood in some charter school production of Ivanhoe.

  The Old One howled with disgust. He thought I should have been a puppy.

  Back a decade or three ago, the very first time I jacked into the Matrix, I hadn’t been much older than the kid’s form I’d appropriated. Back then, the flash of light condensed itself down into a safety box. Looked like a little boy’s bedroom. Blue walls, team poster of the Seattle Seadogs on the wall above faded dinosaur pictures. A few dinosaur toys and a baseball mitt and sheets with teddy bears on them—nothing too stimulating. The orphanage wanted us to feel secure, but not excited enough to need tranking. Normal room to make us normal—normal, that is, if you didn’t live in a dank dormitory for unwanted kids.

  That safety room had a window that looked out on the Matrix. Wasn’t much more than a dark skyline in the distance. Below it and up both sides, bookcases had been filled with volumes of various sizes and bindings. That wasn’t because of any sense of tradition—the orphanage’s software was about ten revs behind the rest of the world. If I wanted to know anything about anything, all I had to do was find the right book on the shelf.

  What could go wrong? It was all secure—despite the orphanage’s software package being that old. The orphanage had nothing of value in it. Not even us kids. If we had value, after all, we wouldn’t be there. The safety room was more than safe enough.

  I think they even did a study to prove it.

  The monsters out in the Matrix had a different perspective—and likely hacked the stats in that study to make sure no one saw it through their eyes. They looked at the safety room the way a fox looks at a chicken coop. One ten revs old. And while they saw us kids as disposable, too, they still had use for us.

  Some of them even recycled.

  I’d avoided being a stat in the victim column of other studies, and went on to a fine career of monster killing in the company of Doctor Raven and his other associates. Didn’t give me much time for Matrix adventures, and then I mostly rode sidecar to a real decker. Valerie Valkyrie, Doc Raven’s resident IT goddess, liked driving, and the monsters stayed as far away from her as they could g
et.

  Time to get moving. I walked out of the binary copy of the Weed. A hooded green cloak shrouded me one step past the door. It had been a gift from a monster, coded specially for the boy I appeared to be. Val had explained how it was really just a software package that spat values to variables and shot messages to lurking bits of code. Those programs would shoot off other messages, then kill themselves, immediately destroying any link to the person who’d made the cloak.

  I didn’t really understand all she was saying, but the Old One reduced it to basic terms that worked well. This world has your scent, and winds carry it to the monster. Because of the cloak, and the intricate plots the monster put together, I called him the Weaver. I wanted to call him the Weevil, but Raven cautioned against underestimating him.

  And in the Old One’s opinion, I insulted weevils.

  Just outside the Weed, the Seattle of the Matrix spread out before me. The city’s virtual appearance wasn’t much better than the Weed’s real one. Old software, older servers, and a tiny budget for maintenance meant the landscape remained dark to save zettabytes in graphics storage. As with the Weed, business owners preferred spending on their interiors instead of the outside, the trick being to keep patrons inside instead of letting them waltz out into the darkness.

  I started down a street, waiting for structures to shift. A step here, a step there, and change blossomed. The larger corporations projected images that promoted their brand. Strength. Security. Intelligence. Matrix wizards spent endless hours and fabulous amounts of money creating images that dominated subjective reality the moment you moved within draw-distance. Sumitomo. Lone Star. All the big corporate names became lighthouses in the darkness. Urban renewal in a nanosecond. They created brilliance and order in a world of darkness and shabby chaos—suggesting that as in virtual, so it was in reality.

  Corporate deckers, they weren’t the only ones who could warp the Matrix’s reality. Most deckers learned how to do some of that. Little things, here and there—a little graffiti to let the world know they existed. A little more to be part of guerrilla marketing campaigns—adding soothing sounds to a public space, or random animations to make the Matrix a bit more weird. Sometimes they hired out to clean up that kind of work—a graphics-oriented protection racket. Nice site you have here. Be a shame if something happened to it.

  The Weaver knew to do more. Much more. How much more I didn’t know, and Val didn’t even offer a guess. Until he’d come to Doctor Raven’s attention, she’d not had even a hint of his existence. That left her a whole lot more frightened than I’d ever seen.

  But Doc said we’d deal with him, and that worked for me. Raven’s a whole bunch of paradox poured into a mold you figure to be Native American just before you notice he’s also an Elf. Man of science. Man of magick. He solves problems for people who can never pay him back, and does so at the expense of those who figure they’re beyond mortal concepts like justice and compassion.

  The Weaver was one of those problems that needed solving. He lurked just outside those the safe rooms. He stalked bored children whose parents gave them everything they wanted—guaranteeing the kids would want none of it. The Weaver studied them and the things they liked. Not necessarily forbidden things, though that appeal couldn’t be denied. His victims wanted connection and novelty. They wanted people who paid attention to them, sympathized with them, and shared the things in which they delighted.

  And when those kids slipped out of the safe rooms, he pounced. The Weaver invited them to tour with him, promising fun and adventure. He shared secrets with them. Shared patiently, waiting, grooming, encouraging, and teaching. He promised and delivered, earning trust so he could later harvest innocence.

  I turned left and walked into the Fujiwara Center—the accessible part of Fujiwara’s Matrix presence. Most of the people dressed respectably for business, but I didn’t stand out. In fact, no one paid me any attention. That most basic access level of the center provided a whole host of consumer services and showcases for Fujiwara industrial and entertainment properties. Every visitor was a potential customer that the staff took great pains to avoid insulting. The customer was always right, no matter how they chose to dress.

  The center felt very much like a consumer mall, save that people blinked in and out of existence with staccato regularity. Depending on how much people had spent on their decks and software—and whatever their native decking skills were—they could access data at blinding speeds. Some of them appeared as little more than blurs. Others wouldn’t be visible at all and, from their point of view, the rest of us looked like torpid ghosts.

  The Old One snarled. “This is blasphemy, Longtooth.” No matter how real the sensory input seemed, everything was an illusion. The Old One didn’t know what to trust. Not just because he could get more information from a brief sniff of a weak wind, but because the illusion could shift in a nanosecond, and never had to be anchored with reality beyond a slender cable leading into a deck.

  Deeper in the center, through layers of ice above and below us, deckers worked at breaking into the Fujiwara mainframes and security forces fought to withstand their attacks. Because of all that covert warfare going on, Valerie instructed me to pass through at least one of the larger mainframes on each outing. The Weaver’s code proved really good at erasing itself, but with so much going on in a center, the chance that a scrap of his binary magic might survive general havoc made the detour useful.

  I emerged from my corporate sojourn, and my true journey began as expected. There, to the right, peeking out of an alley, stood a small green-woman. She appeared to be a sprite, a half-meter high, with wooden flesh and a luscious green-leaf mane. She looked a lot like a character in the Wysteria fantasy novels—close enough to be familiar, different enough to be exotic. Playful. Beckoning and teasing. She winked at me, then ducked back into the shadows.

  I followed quickly, the cloak flapping and snapping as I ran. More values to variables. Into the alley and then through, the decker’s world transformation beginning slowly and subtly. The alley’s wet concrete gave way to crushed stone at the start of a path into woods. Skyscrapers became trees. Bodegas turned to underbrush. As I spun to look, the alley disappeared into a dark tunnel through more of a forest. The human landscape had given way to a woodlands that should have made the Old One rejoice.

  “But it is a trap, Longtooth.”

  And such a beautiful one. Clouds parted overhead, allowing golden sunlight to splash down. The garden I’d run into evaporated into a glade. Wildflowers in red and blue and yellow exploded into bloom. A soft breeze made long, green grasses dance. The sun’s kiss warmed me. My virtual face smiled because, as my profiles and records had noted, my hideous asthma made this sylvan slice of nature a deathtrap full of pollens that would suffocate me.

  But the Weaver made sure I felt secure. He shared this with me, and guaranteed I wouldn’t be hurt. More trust built.

  I had no true idea of what the other traps had looked like, or how many had fallen afoul of them. None of us ever would. The Weaver had worked hard to make sure unraveling his byzantine schemes would be incredibly difficult—and even managed to silence his victims’ parents once he’d stolen the children and discarded them after use.

  By the time his young friends had shared enough about themselves that the hunter could fully ensnare them, they provided him a means to learn their parents’ deepest and darkest secrets. Once he’d taken a child, he’d erase all traces of their existence. He’d then inform the parents that if they went to authorities, he’d expose their secrets. Their child’s innocence would pay for the parents’ guilt, poisoning the souls of those forced into that bargain.

  He even tossed in a promise that he’d make sure no one else got their other children, as if that were balm for heartbreak.

  Had it not been for his ego, he’d likely have gone to his grave with his crimes unnoticed. But Raven got wind of a child who had inexplicably vanished and, through a variety of means, obtained familial DNA s
amples. No John Doe samples in the Seattle morgue matched that family. Val figured the coroner’s database had been hacked, so she ran the previous twenty months through decryption and found a match for the missing child.

  And several other samples that decrypted with the same key. Using other keys, she found seventeen matches going back five years. Doc figured the Weaver groomed multiple victims at a time, choosing which one he’d disappear whenever the victim had ripened properly. They’d vanish, he’d deal with the parents, and his last act would be to encipher DNA results if and when the bodies were ever found.

  The encrypted DNA was the Weaver’s stack of trophies. They sat there in the database, hidden in plain sight. Evidence of his crimes existed, for those who knew where to look, and would reveal his horrid glory long after his death. Even though his success depended on no one knowing he was out there, he couldn’t abide the idea that his infamy would rot away with his own physical remains.

  The breeze stiffened for a second, tickling my nose and making the flowers dance. Like a good magician’s flourish, the dance distracted me, just for a heartbeat. When I looked up again, the castle had appeared, there, on a hill, wolf’s-head pennants flying high atop white granite walls.

  The castle came straight from the fantasy world of L. C. Ingold’s bestselling Wysteria novels, which my SwellReads® profile said I absolutely adored. I liked the stories—just the kind of thing any man would be happy reading to his son. I knew the books well enough, and had watched some of the video adaptations, to shore up that part of my role.

  “He is here, Longtooth.”

  “I know.”

  As I had done on outings before, I sprang up and ran into the woods, following the green-woman’s laughter. Tall oaks spread their branches into a green canopy through which bits of sunlight twinkled like stars. So carefully had the hunter crafted the forest illusion, that even the loam felt soft beneath my feet. Though my avatar ran through a forest of ones and zeros, I could have easily believed I was in the forest outside Seattle, allowing the Old One his freedom.