the lower floor watching from the ground gallery. But then again, Mr. Creech, the project analysis guru, was always onsite these days.
“Mr. Sandrakar, wake my brother.” Cerburus spoke without hesitation.
It was the first time Majay had been referred to by name by anyone here and the first time Cerberus had spoken to the rumor of his relation to the dragon. Spec-ulation was rampant that the AI was actually Eliohann’s e-ghost, but no one dared mention that in earshot of Cerberus. But now the AI had called him brother—what-ever that term meant to an electronic entity.
Majay activated the next set of protocols that would start the nanites flowing through the IVs that had been inserted by the surgical removal of a single scale in each of the dragon’s limbs. From above he could see the irides-cent goo beginning to flow through the thick tubes. As it reached the needles and entered the dragon, he expected some kind of immediate reaction. But nothing happened.
Majay focused back on his work and started moni-toring the dragon’s vitals, ready to halt the flow just in case something went wrong. The feed was half done, and the only sign of change was a slight increase in Elio-hann’s heart rate. As the feed reached the three-quarters mark, things started to happen. Heart rate and blood pressure both rose, but it was the brain activity that had Majay eagerly leaning forward to look down into the lab.
The readings were spiking, and he could see the dragon starting to twitch.
Majay slowed the flow of the last quarter. In his AR display he could see something strange happening around Eliohann. It looked like something was forming on the Matrix, and Majay’s excitement spiked again as he contemplated what it would be like to be one of the few to ever see an AI born into physical form. He watched in awe as the swirls of bits and bytes began to form into the shape of a massive tree. He was in awe at the beauty of its crystalline trunk.
Majay was so distracted that he didn’t even notice when all hell broke loose in the Matrix around him. Un-identified personas suddenly appeared in the node—
ing persona, it shifted and grew into the ferocious three-headed beast of Greek mythology.
Majay was suddenly aware of the battle and watched in horror as the two sides engaged relentlessly. Cerbe-rus was powerful, but the numbers were not in his fa-vor. Majay considered helping, but there was nothing he could do. The best he could do was completely cut all the power and kill the local nodes. Problem was, he had no idea if that would work.
“Majay is it? Would you mind doubling the nanite flow, sugar,” Majay heard from “behind” him. The accent was familiar, but he had never seen the persona before.
Speaking with the same tone and southern drawl as Dr.
Xavier was a female persona of stunning beauty with stark white eyes.
Majay was shocked to see the coalescing tree lash out a branch and slam the woman to the ground. More branches launched at the other intruders. Cerberus broke free of his fallen opponents and blinked to Majay.
“Unlock the datacord!” he howled at the frightened and overwhelmed tech. He was talking about the datacord plugged into Eliohann’s datajack. The universal connecter was in place, but the cord was datalocked and set onto a monitoring sequence to keep tabs on brain activity.
“You can’t do it. His brain isn’t a node,” Majay argued.
Cerberus snapped his virtual jaws shut in front of Ma-jay’s AR display. Majay was in no danger, but the effect was still quite intimidating. “It’s my node, but if you don’t do it soon, he will have my node. The process is work-ing but somethwork-ing is wrong. Somethwork-ing else is encodwork-ing into Eliohann. I need access. NOW!”
Majay suddenly realized what had happened. Up un-til that morning he was supposed to get the coding from Cerberus, but instead he got it from Dr. Xavier. She had said there was a slight change. In the end, he hadn’t got-ten any code from Cerberus at all. He had just followed Dr. Xavier’s orders. What had he done?
“Unlocking now. I’m so sorry,” Majay apologized.
Cerberus likely didn’t catch the apology; the icon was disappearing, slamming itself through the narrow bandwidth into the meatnode of Eliohann’s mind. Majay
hoped it worked. The tree was still lashing and pummel-ing the eight personas, who seemed to now be only five, and Majay turned his attention back to the view beyond his AR feed.
The lab below was abuzz with activity as techs ran to try to stabilize the spiking vital signs of the dragon.
Majay watched in horror as the whole scene changed in an instant as Eliohann awoke.
The dragon flailed violently at first, sending techs tumbling with a wide swipe of his tail. As the beast tried to rise he stumbled and tumbled from the table, smash-ing two techs into the wall with his lack of grace. Tal-oned hands rose to his head and scratched deep gouges down his scaly face.
Then came the flames. Eliohann spat flame and scorched the room around him, then drove his own head into the flames. Which was a futile gesture. The madness grew, and the dragon threw his massive bulk around the room, smashing through walls. Majay saw his AR flash red as nanite-containment units flashed breech warnings. Two and three were shattered, while four and six were leaking. Five, as well as eight through ten, re-mained green.
The ruptured tanks sprayed nanites into the room forming an iridescent cloud around the raging dragon.
Eliohann launched upward, slammed into the glass of Majay’s observation room, spiderwebbing it, and tum-bled back to the lab floor. More jumps cracked the other walls, and dust joined the iridescent fog.
Majay could see nothing, but he felt every impact of the massive dragon as it twisted, looking for a way out. The ground trembled and rumbled beneath him as the dragon broke the surface and crumbled some of the building above. A moment later, the chaos was over.
Majay rushed to the cracked glass and tried to look down into the lab below. Dust still hung in the air, ob-scuring visibility below so much that Majay didn’t notice the window at first. The spiderwebbing was growing, the cracks expanding.
Majay watched in horror as the nanites slowly de-voured the glass. He had finally thought to run when the glass gave way and the iridescent wave poured over him. There was a burning feeling at first, and he coughed as dust and nanites filled his lungs. But the burning faded quickly from his mind as the pain in his head drove him to his knees.
His mind screamed for an end to the pain, an end to the agony.
And a voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once responded to the screams, “Join me, and I will ease your pain forever.”
INTRO
What happened in Chicago was easy to blame on the insect spirits, though a few still keep a wary eye on Ares for their hand in detonating the Cermak blast. The sto-ry of Boston slowly unfolds and the truth will eventually be revealed, but there is no single culprit such as insect spirits to blame.
Some may blame the AIs behind the CFD virus, but in many ways they are victims as much as anyone else. The ultimate decision about the fallout from this whole disas-ter will fall into the hands of the players of both these ad-ventures and the Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown video game. The climax of this adventure is not a great battle of gunfire, spells, and wicked programming; it is in-stead a decision, a point at which the runners will need to decide whether they will deliver the guilty into the hands of the law, or allow their accounts to swell with nuyen and hand the proof over to those that it incriminates, or deliv-er it to a third party to write a truth for all to believe.
SETUP
The runners are hired by Detective McCarthy for a very important and very secret operation. He provides the runners with a list, a similar list to one the runners may have seen before, that contains a list of project names and locations for the runners to investigate, along with some instructions.
McCarthy isn’t able to offer the runners much, but he is able to promise more if the investigation pans out.
He can offer the runners 10,000 nuyen each. If the in-vestigation pans out, the runners have the potential for a 50,000-nuyen reward from Knight Errant for aiding in the investigation, which can help make this very much worth their while
The locations can be investigated in any order the run-ners choose, but as more investigations occur, later ones become more difficult as other forces look to stop the runners. The runners are also under orders to keep every-thing to themselves until it is all ready for delivery to Mc-Carthy. This requirement offers more potential difficulties, as one of the investigations involve acquiring a witness.
EVENT 1
This event takes place at the NeoNET Towers, the megacorporation’s headquarters in Boston, located in-side the Hub Containment Zone. The runners need to gain access to the Towers and extract Dr. Gaiden Alco-val, but before that they need to gain access to the Hub Containment Zone, an area Knight Errant has not yet asked them to enter.
The Hub Containment Zone is a unique spot right now, and getting in is the runners first obstacle. There are three
basic ways of getting into the HCZ: from above, from be-low, and over the wall. From above requires the runners to gain access through one of the skyscrapers, as almost all the buildings shorter than ten stories have been overrun.
If the runners have made the right contacts during their time in Boston they could get a lift into the HCZ, including a flight directly to the NeoNET Towers if the runners are willing to put that connection at great risk if they cannot conceal the flight as it arrives. If the runners come into the HCZ through another skyscraper, they need to either take the skywalks between the buildings, brave the streets, or go down into the Catacombs.
The Catacombs are the secret to getting into the HCZ from below. Though the infection ravaged the Hub above the ground, the Catacombs fared better. Many fled down to get away from the ravaging head cases. The Catacombs has also been very vigilant at blocking off its entrances from the head cases and removing potential infected from the tight confines of the underworld. Run-ners using the Catacombs to get out onto the street or into the subbasement of one of the buildings need to understand it could very well be a one-way trip. If the guards at any door think someone might be infected, or they just don’t like someone, they have the right to re-fuse them entry. If runners force their way back in, well, the Catacombs will be their worst nightmare, especially if any head cases get in behind them.
“Going over the wall” is not literal, as most of the HCZ is actually surrounded by reinforced fencing, not actual walls, but the walls are growing. The ground level around the HCZ is a quadruple layer of reinforced fenc-ing, secured buildings, and walls that are slowly replac-ing the fences. The two middle fences serve as a protect-ed corridor for guards traveling around the border. The outside layer of fence stops head cases in areas that are still badly overrun around the outside of the HCZ, mostly to the south. Runners who want to go over the wall need to either sneak through all the layers or bribe guards to look the other way and let them through. McCarthy can’t risk others knowing the runners are on his payroll, so he can’t get them clearance as he has for past operations.
The runners are going to have to be resourceful.
The streets of the HCZ are similar to the MCZ. There are head cases roaming the streets, both shamblers and ragers, as well as some of the more mentally intact head cases controlling many of the buildings downtown and developing their own plans for the HCZ. The obstacles in the area are numerous and not limited to head cases.
The HCZ also has corporate forces that are still work-ing to protect their buildwork-ings and interests in the area.
This protection often means guards taking shots at those running on the streets, especially if they look normal (a relative term if there ever was one). The normal people in the HCZ belong on the upper floors of the buildings, not on the streets, so guards presume anyone on the ground is there causing trouble—whether it’s against them or not, they don’t often care. Warnings are rare, but
they occur if the runners are running with active com-mlinks and broadcasting ID. Though not likely, it would give them a chance to be asked why they are there be-fore the guards use them for sighting in their rifles.
The NeoNET Towers are the next difficulty for the runners. The five outer towers are all surrounded by head cases. This seems to be one of the major collecting points for the shamblers, as if they are drawn here for some inexplicable reason. Each of the five outer towers has been lost to the head cases to some degree.
Tower One is lost below the eleventh floor and is the second worst of the towers in terms of head case infil-tration. The walkway on the second floor has been de-stroyed to prevent access to the Central Tower, but the head cases have continued to push back the buildings security force to almost the next bridge, which is already wired with explosives.
Tower Two (the numbers go clockwise but start with One at the south point of the star, is the worst. After suf-fering massive structural damage from Eliohann’s attack, the tower was evacuated and had no security forces to hold back the head cases when they came. Now the en-tire tower is controlled by them.
Tower Three is secured above the third floor, mainly because there is no access left between the first three floors thanks to a series of bombings that destroyed all the stairs and scorched the elevator shaft. Some are worried that Tower Three is structurally unstable, but it is still guarded by a skeleton crew on the lookout for head case activity.
Tower Four is secured at the fifth floor and has a strong desire to push the head cases back. Up until re-cently, Tower Four enjoyed its status of having the low-est secured floor. A recent push drove survivors from the second floor to the fifth, but the head cases are thin between the floors, and they might be susceptible to a push back.
Tower Five has the highest first walkway and they have secured down to the ninth floor, but they still send teams down into the lower floors to hunt down head cases and keep their numbers too thin to really push for any higher floors.
Each tower has a central bank of six elevators along with a central decorative stairwell. The outer stairwells (there are five of them, one at each angle of the pentag-onal tower structures) are all plain ferrocrete stairs and metal railings with alarms on the doors since they’re in-tended for emergencies only. The inner stairwell’s bland-ness is broken up on each walkway floor with a decora-tive level and the stairwell itself is interrupted by a pair of doors, one out, one back in. The Central Tower has a similar layout of outer stairwells but has sixteen elevators in its central bank and two decorative stairwells. The Cen-tral Tower is also double the size of the outer five.
All the outer towers have a helipad as the inner half of the top floor, with the other half being an executive office suite complete with a small apartment for when
they have to “work late.” There are no other landing places on the outer towers. The Central Tower has five suites and five helipads.
The runners can choose any tower to try to move up through. Each poses its own challenges and chances.
The Minuteman Security forces that man the secured floors are not at every door, they simply lock or barricade the doors and try to respond to attacks quickly by mon-itoring them and having regular patrols. This can give runners a chance to sneak past unguarded doors. The runners can also shoot their way past, since the guards are used to shamblers and ragers, not firearms, but the runners risk leaving access to that floor if they push past with head cases on their heels or nearby. Tower One has a lot of head cases. Tower Two is all head cases with se-curity blocking off the bridges. Tower Three has limited access to the lower floors. Tower Four has ghouls in the basement snatching bodies from above. Tower Five has ghouls and a small pack of six hellhounds (p. 405, SR5) that seem to be enjoying the ample food supply.
Dr. Gaiden Alcoval is located in Tower Four on the 93rd floor. He has a lab and an apartment on this floor, as well as round-the-clock personal security. The securi-ty is as much to keep him safe as it is to keep him there.
Dr. Alcoval knows that he is a target for extraction as he is one of the few surviving members of the original Proj-ect Vulcan staff. The security around Alcoval consists of eight members of the Knights of Rage, five guards (p.
220), one mage (p. 220), one decker (p. 219), and Sean McNulty (p. 220), all loyal to Celedyr and willing to die to keep Alcoval in NeoNET’s hands. Two guards are
220), one mage (p. 220), one decker (p. 219), and Sean McNulty (p. 220), all loyal to Celedyr and willing to die to keep Alcoval in NeoNET’s hands. Two guards are