So you’ve read this all, you know in general what peo-ple are looking for, and you think you can work in this arena. Assuming you don’t already have a fixer ready to put you in touch with the right people (and if you do, stop reading and make the call!), here are some people who can help you get into the head-case-related-ex-traction game.
Kia: Of course you should go to Kia! First of all, traction is how he got into the game—no one knows ex-tractions like someone who was themselves extracted.
True, he’s been working the entertainment side of the street for a while, but he knows how to get people out of tight situations, and people are turning to him to arrange their runs. He’s got the business. Just ask.
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Thanks so much for doing my advertising for me. Iassumed JackPointers already knew where to find me.
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KiaNikola Taul: If you want to look at a government official who is neither dragging their feet in response to CFD nor pretending it doesn’t exist, look to Seattle Downtown Mayor Nikola Taul. Taul was an energetic go-getter from the moment she took office, and she’s been working to make sure response to CFD is just as vi-brant as her streetscaping projects. It helps that she has the University of Washington and Harborview Hospital in her district, as she has tapped into experts from both institutions to help her craft an appropriate response.
She had those experts work with Renraku to ensure their quarantined area of the ACHE would actually keep the virus contained.
As part of her efforts, Taul has wanted to check up on the high-tech clinics in her area, and she is not above
hiring shadowrunners to look into institutions that are not as cooperative as she would like them to be. One such organization is Executive Body Enhancements, which has long been the preferred augmentation clinic of the Yakuza. Word is that the Seattle Yaks are dealing with CFD cases, and Taul is concerned
EBE is spreading it. Unsurprisingly, a Yakuza-connected clinic is not all that eager to share anything about its op-erations with a government official. So if Taul is going to get the information she wants, she’ll have to turn to us.
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The scope of infection in the Yakuza isunconfirmed, as they certainly are not talking about it. The rumor is that several people, including a handful of shategashira, have been infected. One of the victims is Clay Mori, one of Keiko Shotozumi’s most trusted lieutenants. Shotozumi is reported to be very upset about Mori’s condition, to the point that she is reportedly considering returning to the shadows to administer whatever justice she can. So if you run into a shadowrunner named Kiku in the Seattle area—be very, very careful.
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SticksSamantha Roth: Yes, she’s pretty high up the ladder, but she’ll know what Samantha Villiers is up to in Albu-querque and what kind of help she is looking for. If you have any way to get a message to her, that would be a good path to pursue.
Alex O’Keefe: If, as some believe, the CFD virus is linked to Matrix phenomena like artificial intelligences and e-ghosts, the person to talk to is Alex O’Keefe. Just be ready for things to get weird.
O’Keefe’s background is odd, to say the least. We know that there was a guy named Alex O’Keefe who was a systems administrator for Novatech, and he died during Crash 2.0. Then, back in 2071, someone claiming to be Alex O’Keefe showed up in a Lone Star node, saying he had been kidnapped. The desk officer got a little skeptical when the SIN this O’Keefe showed was connected to a dead man, and when the sergeant confronted him with this fact, O’Keefe went nuts, trashing the node in ways that took Lone Star spiders months to repair. Then he dis-appeared, and Lone Star couldn’t find him.
This scene was repeated in a few other law-enforce-ment facilities in the next year; he hit Knight Errant later in 2071, then Centurion in early 2072. Thankfully, the repeats weren’t as violent as the original, as possibly O’Keefe was becoming adjusted to his extra-corporeal state.
After the Centurion visit, O’Keefe dropped out of sight for a while, and there are no stories or records about him until mid-2073. Two different teams, one in Seattle, one in Wales, reported doing runs for a Mr.
Johnson who they met only in VR. Mr. Johnson was
hap-py to share his real name, saying he was “Alex O’Keefe, but not the real one.” His description—short, balding, a little on the manic side—is consistent with the O’Keefe who was with Novatech and the one who showed up at the law-enforcement corps, with the exception that the physical O’Keefe had a paunch that the virtual one seems to have lost. In both cases he hired teams to do datasteals—the Seattle one went into MicroDeck, while the Wales team (naturally) took data from NeoNET.
O’Keefe then started hiring fairly regularly, almost al-ways datasteals against tech firms. Teams who worked for him described him as honest and trustworthy but also a little intense—he required frequent check-ins, and
KIA
occasionally would make disruptive calls to teams in the middle of their runs. But late in 2074, a new twist en-tered the story. A team was hired in Tokyo to go into MCT and pick up some files that, according to the team, tied into MCT’s secret technomancer research. It fit the profile of an Alex O’Keefe run, and Mr. Johnson even gave the name of Alex O’Keefe. Thing was, she ap-peared in real life, not VR, and she was a she, specifical-ly a sturdy Hispanic dwarf who was maybe in her earspecifical-ly twenties. Despite this disparity, this O’Keefe acted just like her virtual counterpart, right down to the annoying comm calls. Plus, she repeatedly referred to NeoNET as Novatech, which the VR O’Keefe is also said to do.
This meatworld O’Keefe continued to make appear-ances and hire runs, as did the VR version. One team hired by the virtual version took it upon themselves to ask the dwarf if she knew about the virtual entity with whom she shared a name. According to the report, she smiled slightly and just said “He’s a good man,” then moved forward with the job.
The point is, O’Keefe seems like the exactly the right sort of person who would hire you for CFD-related jobs.
And he/she might have some very definite CFD connec-tions and knowledge.
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Be very very careful with this one. The virtual O’Keefe isnot a real AI. He’s a corporate puppet, responding to the commands of whoever is controlling him. My best guess is that it’s Aztechnology pulling his strings—O’Keefe recently hired a team to retrieve information from Genetique, but security anticipated the team’s every move and arrested the lot of them. The team had made several successful runs against Aztechnology previously, so the speculation is that O’Keefe hired them specifically to capture them.
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Kia>
So how does the real-world O’Keefe fit into your story?>
Nephrine>
Copycat, hoping to coast off the virtual O’Keefe’sreputation. Though if the VR version double-crosses too many more teams, she might regret that decision.
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KiaTess van Hama: When MCT starts extracting some of the people identified by their software, you can be sure that van Hama will be arranging some of the jobs. She is trusted by them and is good at what she does. She also might be arranging runs to pull out Saeder-Krupp, as her friendship with Johnny Spinrad keeps providing opportunities in that direction. This also means that if Zeta-ImpChem needs runs to destroy evidence mount-ing against them, van Hama might well be the one to organize them.
TESS VAN HAMA
Standing on the fire escape above the city noise, Raine turned to the window and stared at his reflection. His physical reflection, not the ghostly one peering back from the glass. Inside the shitty apartment, Raine’s twin brother Shyne slouched on the couch, watching the trid while emptying a bag of soy-pork rinds. An urban brawl game was on, and it looked like the Mountain Dragons were winning yet again. Everything seemed normal.
Too normal, in fact.
Raine leaned on the railing, took a drag on his ciga-rette, and contemplated the city streets a dozen floors below. “So,” he said to the cloaked, elven figure waiting just outside his peripheral vision, “you’re telling me he’s one of them. That he’s lost his soul, or a piece of it.”
“’Fraid so,” the shadow said, regret seeping into her voice. “Unless he’s got some new headware he didn’t tell us about, there’s a … dead spot in his aura.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“I have something I’ve heard other magicians try. I don’t expect it will work, but it’s the best option we have.”
Raine frowned and studied his brother for several moments. As a pair, they’d run the shadows for so long sometimes he had to stop and remember what Shyne’s real name was. Between the pair, Shyne was the perpetu-al optimist and could perpetu-always lighten up even the toughest of crowds. He was the glue that held the team together.
Why’d it have to be you? Raine silently asked his broth-er. Why couldn’t the virus have taken me instead?
“All right, let’s do this.” He took a final drag on the cigarette and flipped the butt out into the street. “Wait for my signal, Lana. Don’t want to spook him.”
Lana vanished once Raine started crawling back through the window. Inside, he pulled up a chair and sat down right in front of the trideo set.
“Hey,” Shyne said to him, “you’re blocking the game.”
Sorry, brother. This game’s being canceled on account of Raine.
“Game’s not important,” Raine said. “Listen, you re-member that one time we pulled the ol’ twin switch-eroo on that Ares guard? Remember how I caught that piece of shrapnel in the neck after he figured out what we were doing?”
Shyne wasn’t even acknowledging him; he was trying to get a better angle on the trid. “Yeah, what about it?”
A wistful feeling rose in Raine’s chest as he glanced down at the whitish scar running along his brother’s ex-posed neck. Just millimeters away from the carotid ar-tery. Then he met the eyes of the lying thing sitting in front of him.
Nothing but deadness stared back at him. An emp-ty shell.
Raine looked past his brother and nodded. Lana’s in-visibility spell dropped. Before Shyne could react, Lana grabbed his head from behind and started chanting.
Shyne screamed. Blood spurted out of his ears and nose.
Moments later, the apartment stank of burning flesh.
The smoke alarm went off. Building security would be up soon. Staring at his brother’s ruined body, Raine wanted to cry, but he couldn’t.
Shyne had already been truly dead long before the spell hit him.