Encroaching Viscosity

Encroaching Viscosity
File:Null hop.jpg Uh oh.
Date 2085-01-08 GM Asmodeus Location Matrix / Seattle (Bellevue) Status Threat Level: High
Factions Involved
ShadowHaven Grid Overwatch Division	Null Sect
Bunny Hop	Cyberwerewolf SINtax Daemon Null Hop
Casualties and losses
One Sprite, One G-Man(?)	SINtax, Cyberwerewolf(?)

Summary

Curiosity killed the rabbit-sprite. Also probably a G-Man.

Background

(This run stems directly from Guerilla Gangoons.)

After one particularly suspicious meet with a Johnson in a not-quite-abandoned convenience store north of Glow City, Bunny Hop opts to do a little investigation into a very strange host to satisfy her own curiosity, for paydata, and as always, to have a good story to tell to Anhe as payment for her expertise in the future.

The Plan

Get in, stay hidden, dig around, and get out. Bunny Hop compiles and registers a sprite specialized in getting at secret information and delaying the deployment of IC, and promptly names it Luna.

The Investigation

Bunny Hop's red rabbit persona rezzes in through a doorway to the bombed out, overgrown sculpting of long abandoned city streets. Steadily creeping vines block her way ahead, although doors to interior areas at her left and right reveal some small truths about the nature of the host at play. On her left, a room of bunk beds conceal blood-stained diary entries beneath each of the pillows - some list shifts where people with nonsense names clock in and out of work at nonsense times for nonsense durations - someone named HCBRN has had two shifts, one lasting twenty-five minutes, and one lasting fourteen seconds, both shifts spaced literally years apart from one another. Other diary entries sport apparently normal names: Jane Foster, Horatio Graves, Bjorn Fell, and Layla Vane, although Bunny Hop notes with mild alarm that the dates and times of at least one of these visits corresponds exactly with the time her shadowrunning team had spent meeting the Johnson in a convenience store during the events of Guerilla Gangoons. Surmising that these are records of those who visit, as well as records of the AI who controlled the holodrone the group had seen mimicking a cashier during that time, she copies them over to a device, replaces the files where she found them, and continues.

The room across the street on her right is guarded by a locked door - after a simple hack on the fly to gain access permissions, she finds that it leads to a simple power generator, and after some examination of its code, she concludes that this seems to be the bit of the host responsible specifically for power devices slaved to the host. The lights of the convenience store, the compressors in the freezers, and so on. Making a mental note, she emerges once again to face the vines. Though she knows from her own experience as a hacker on the Matrix that they're dangerous and have been correlated with disappearances in the past, she lifts a straightened palm and slightly curled fingers just in front of her nose, and whispers a brief prayer to the Resonance to ask for its wisdom as well. It whispers to her in turn that these vines, rather than being a corrupting influence, are baked into the reality of this host intentionally, and that whatever this place is meant to be, they are an integral part of it. She opts not to hack them away, in fear of alerting whatever might be present.

Continuing on, she bypasses a small bushel of vines creeping in the sleeping quarters and opens two more doors, finding that each of them lead to rooms that seem to be slowly decaying, in a digital sense. They blur, as though not fully processed, and the geometry simplifies into easily computed shapes. Skeptical, the rabbit avoids the worst of these rooms even after determining the lack of any resonance signatures that might indicate dissonance, and hops over the rail onto the street level below.

She peers into another room, only to find a werewolf with its back to the door, devouring a file. She leaps back behind the threshold of the door to remain hidden, decides to revisit that room later on, and presses forward. Across the street, another locked door is hacked and opened, revealing what appears to be a combination abattoir and indoor growery - little flowers grow in pots under intense UV lamps, and Bunny Hop finds on examination that they appear to be low-level personas. Meat hooks hang ominously across from her, encased by vines that yank them toward the ground. The room is otherwise empty, thankfully, save for a dried bloodstain on the ground.

Bunny Hop pulls on a latex glove and kneels to touch the stain. With her free hand, she whispers another prayer, and the Resonance brings metadata to the forefront of her mind. This belongs to a man named Albert Gomez, though whether this was the name given by the host, his SIN, or his true identity, she has no idea. A decker running on an Aztechnology Shadow Warrior, killed by biofeedback. Though a technomancer with a meatbrain, she knows enough about hardware to realize it's not an amateur using a device like that, and so presses onward with caution.

The Twist

Three glass doors in succession block her way, themselves guarded by a DR5 data bomb each - three that she's able to disarm without much trouble. The room beyond seems to be a lab - though her examination is disrupted as a man dressed in a dark suit, sporting a bowler cap but no mouth, uncloaks and unmerges with the walls of the room. He levels an Ares Predator at her head, and asks her bluntly what she's doing here. Ever a brat, she points toward him to ready a spike and fires back that she could ask him the same thing, and he follows with a simple request: describe the weather of Seattle. Describe the scent of its air.

A little baffled, Bunny Hop stutters an honest reply - that the air is bitter even through a sick mask. That the cold bites through layer after layer of clothing as though she weren't wearing any at all. Apparently satisfied with her poetry, he lowers his gun and asks her if she knows what this place is. As though chastising her, he explains that there is no way out, that if she has marked or been marked at all that they already know and have already trapped her. She refuses to believe she's been owned - a quick glance over her persona reveals no marks that she can see, and she smugly bites back that she's clean so far, unspotted and uncompromised. The man is unimpressed. He has been trapped here for six months, he explains - his biomonitor tells him that his body is on an IV drip, to which BHop quips that it's nice to have friends who can afford that.

The way out lies in the Foundation, the man continues. If she can find a way there, they can enter and alter the host significantly enough to allow for his escape. Bunny Hop adamantly denies a Foundation dive, and perhaps in denial, tells him that she can leave at any time. He doubts her, though entrusts her with a highly encrypted file nonetheless. If she can get out, he tells her, she can take this to a man who will be waiting in Bellevue, each day at 4:00 PM. Handing that information over may save his life, and may result in a hefty financial reward. She accepts ownership, and though still warily doubting the severity of his claims, continues onward, entrusting her sprite to keep an eye on the situation and inform her if anything changes.

Her explorations continue - she avoids a large, multi-jointed slender man skulking in a courtyard area, and slips away to double back toward where she came, just to double check that she can, in fact, leave the host at will. This doesn't go as planned. The werewolf from before, mere yards from the entrance, watches as the door opens and she is revealed. The two of them wait a beat. She slides the door shut without a word, and the werewolf roars in alarm.

Thinking swiftly, BHop attempts to slip a wedge into its half-obscured code, and succeeds, all while slipping through corridors and alleyways to hide away from it. As it breaks through the door, she is already gone - she winks and waves a smug 'bye-bye~' while trotting to her next destination across yet another back-alley road.

Where It All Goes Wrong

This room sports a trid-projector and a chainlink fence, half-obscured as though coated in frosted glass. Ominous shapes move in the space beyond, and the rabbit hears movement nearby. She hatches a quick and dirty plan, and places a mark on the trid projector, which-

Immediately whirrs to life. Flickering into being is she herself. Exact height, weight, color. All as it should be, safe for her mouth, a gaping triangle of razor-like teeth.

Bunny Hop, stunned frozen, can only take stock. Her doppelganger is every bit herself, her own code copied and enhanced, even though the whispers of the Resonance do not cling to it as they do to her. She takes a tentative step back, and turns to flee, only to run face first into a large Daemon, and the multi-jointed man from before. On reflex, before she even thinks, she rezzes in a samurai's blade and jams it through the slender man's torso - an injection of hostile code brings it to its knees as it derezzes by chunks, and she takes the path its defeat provides to sprint away. The Daemon falls out of sight, though the false her blazes behind - it leaps and spin kicks, and her leg extends in sick and grotesque segments, knee by knee by knee, to do the same, even if she deftly twirls and leaps back to avoid its strike.

Once more, with trepidation and horror on her face, she raises a hand in prayer just in front of her lips, curled as though clutching prayer beads, and lifts her other to the grotesque imitation of herself, pointed like a gun. She begs for the Resonance to come, zeroes out any code that may stand in its way, and digs a channel toward a well of the Resonance, which comes in two bright, intersecting streams of light. Twirling around one another like a double helix, her Hyperthread tears through her doppelganger's arm. Ichor, black as the void outside the walls of the host bleeds from her in viscous streams, and blends with the darkness following behind her as the host itself seems to fall apart.

The Daemon rezzes in behind her, though she breaks free of its grasp as her false self strikes her again, squarely in the torso. It leaves its mark on her. Bunny Hop, synesthetic toward code, finds the color fading from her eyes, a pressure building in her ears. One by one they fade to grey, and her confidence in her ability to win this encounter grows dim.

She calls her sprite, a small, smoldering black rabbit, which twirls into being beside her and immediately screams, loud, intense, painful, in an attempt to jam the signals of everyone involved. Bhop, for her part, shuts her eyes and flips her brain into AR, though she finds with horror that when she opens them, she is still fully present in the host, despite what the virtual kinetic part of her tells her. She crosses her arms in front of her face, and braces for yet another flurry of blows by her worse self.

And she survives. She takes no damage, and the desperate pleas to jack out, to please leave, for the world to give her solid ground beneath her feet - they are somehow answered. The pressure gradually fades. The spots in her eyes, though they still blink, are not quite as intense. She herself flutters her eyes open, and finds herself braced for impact, her meat body perfectly mimicking her persona, in a secluded corner of the library she had used to mitigate the impact of a Trace Icon.

She blinks, and gradually lowers her guard. Just to the side, a pair of eyes glares toward her from a display, though swiftly enough titles of books, one by one, overlap and take its place.

Aftermath

Bunny Hop immediately tries to boot back in via AR, just to dismiss her sprite - though finds that she shivers when she tries. The muscle is there, ready to flex, though a blind fear does not allow her to open that digital third-eye. At the very least, she thinks, she can deliver the file - although, as she finds her Scoot where it had been parked, pressure still in her ears, spots of void still in her eyes, and her quivering heart unable to even open a mapsoft to guide her there, she breaks down and slumps to her knees beside her vehicle.

She eventually finds her way home, and curls up in bed, afraid of even touching the Matrix, a living Hell for a technomancer. She is unaware that she had been the victim of a psychotropic fear-inducing bit of hostile code.

The next day, her fears at least somewhat assuaged, she logs into the Matrix only to find that the sprite she had brought cannot be found. She prays briefly for it, that it had found its way back to the Resonance and had not been the next victim of that host's brutal inhabitants, and travels to Bellevue for the scheduled meet.

A man with a cyberarm sits on a bench and stares out at the ocean, and though she makes no secret of her approach, he does not face or acknowledge her in any way. She picks up easily enough, and walks to sit nearby, within arm's reach, without acknowledging him either. He extends an arm, and she gives him the file that had been given to her - curiosity had overwhelmed her, but a data bomb at such a high rating held far too much risk for someone of her skill. The man rises and leaves - and where he sat, a small, brown envelop waits, sealed shut by wax melted in the shape of the symbol of GOD, and containing a small, generic thank you letter to someone for using the Grid Overwatch Division anonymous tip line. Alongside it are 20,000 crisp UCAS dollars.

Bunny Hop bitterly laughs, and realizes she is way out of her paygrade. She tears up the letter with her hacker's pride.

Game Quotes

"Are you telling me these xenosapient AIs literally did this for the vine?"

Player After Action Reports (AARs)

Bunny Hop

How do I even approach this? Normally I'd walk away, but the sprite I called there is... If they didn't get out, I don't want to even imagine what they've done to it. Can I even call myself a cyberpriestess if I don't fight for them?

... Though I gotta admit, part of me is just bitter. I won't lose next time, nanimono...