The Ain Beni Mathar Integrated Thermo Solar Combined Cycle Power Plant, much more succinctly known as “ISCC Ain Beni Mathar” is a natural gas power plant sitting in the middle of nowhere in northern Morocco. While the majority of power produced by the plant comes from natural gas, the power plant, parked right in the arid desert, can generate a significant portion of its power from solar energy as well.
Currently going through a long-overdue upgrade process, the plant should see its power output expand by 216 percent and, perhaps more critically, see its efficiency boosted by up to 67 percent, making the facility one of the top three power plants in Morocco. Much of that energy will be surplus destined for sale to Europe. The project is being run by a conglomerate of interests headed by Saeder-Krupp, including Spinrad Industries and some local development banks.
If the forced cooperation between S-K and Spinrad wasn’t bad enough, another sworn enemy of S-K, Sandstorm Engineering, was left fuming on the sidelines when they were maneuvered out of the deal. To say the project is at risk would be an understatement, though S-K has too much to gain in the project to let it fail.
ISCC Ain Beni Mathar’s host is still undergoing sculpting upgrades but is largely functional. The host renders as a sort of airship palace floating in the clouds. The luxurious estate is built in the Moorish style. Large domes supported by intimidating archways decorated with fine geometric patterns give way to huge tiled rooms with simple furnishing accented by colorful cushions and flowing draperies. The azure blue of the sky surrounds the whitewashed, gem-encrusted walls of the palace.
This upper section of the airship serves as working environments for most of the personnel. To access the power- control systems, users must nestle themselves into odd little brass pods attached to the underside of the airship’s hull. The brass pods then slowly descend down telescoping poles into the clouds. The lower the user goes, the more they will discover the bright blue skies that surrounds the airship are not to be found at the lower altitudes. The virtual reality has the airship floating peacefully on top of the worst storm imaginable. Inside the tiny little brass cabin, users are plunged into a sky rending itself asunder. Hurricane-strength winds gust by as lightning crackles and thunder booms, shaking the pod. The brass pod contains
archaic-looking clockwork instrumentations and gauges that permit the user to perform required operations to the power core (i.e., the storm clouds).
It is not advisable to trigger an alarm in the host—especially not when trapped inside one of those little brass pods. Within the administrative sections—the airship—IC renders as grey-suited, black-sunglasses-wearing, handgun-toting guards. Within the storm clouds, the IC is the lightning around you, the rattling winds and the booming explosions.
Host Rating: 7
Normal Configuration: Attack 6, Sleaze 7, Data Processing 8, Firewall 9
Security Procedure: Patrol IC running at all times. One Standard Security Spider patrolling at all times.
Once alarmed, the host launches IC in this order: Probe, Killer, Track, Black IC, Crash, Marker, and Sparky. If one of its IC gets bricked, it will use the next Combat Turn to reboot that IC rather than moving on to the next one. A Security Troubleshooter will arrive (1D6) Combat Turns after an alarm is triggered.
Uses: While already nothing to scoff at, the ISCC’s host is scheduled to finalize its upgrades within the next few months, boosting its power and thus security by almost 30 percent. Many of the project’s enemies—are there is no shortage of those—thus see a unique but shrinking window of opportunity to enact their plans. Interested parties, ranging from insiders with agendas to Sandstorm Engineering Mr. Johnsons eagerly looking to derail the project, are all seeking competent hackers to perform raids. Runs include project spec data theft, imbedding hidden files to be activated later, or outright tampering with the core controls. Of course, no killing blow can occur with an on-site presence, so invasion in support of a physical operation is highly likely as well.
Saeder-Krupp, for its part, is no fool. S-K counter-intelligence agents are well aware of the circling Sandstorm predator and feel they can trust Spinrad about as much as ghoul in a morgue. Contracts looking for deniable assets to set up surveillance and string operations against project insiders and set up search- and-destroy operations within the ISCC host against any and all intruders are also on the table, giving shadowrunners a unique opportunity to look at things from the other side, for once.
THE PERFECT HOST >>
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in real-time with other facilities to buy supplement- ary peak power when needed, transact with resource suppliers, and generally keep the corporation running at full speed.
Power plants are extremely complex devices with millions of sensors monitoring the system at all times. Turbines and cores are especially important, as melt- downs and critical failures can cause the destruction of entire regions (as can be seen in places like the SOX or the Scottish Irradiated Zone). Multiple shut- off valves and sub-systems ensure that some random hacker won’t be able to bring civilization to its knees, but a hot decker can still do a lot of damage in there. Since power is one of the few things all corporations can agree is necessary, cyber warfare targeting power plants will make them issue an order to exterminate with extreme prejudice faster than you can say “it wasn’t me.” Of course, there are recent examples of nobody giving a frag about lines in the sand. I heard from a little bird that someone had shadowrunners running around Bogotá not long ago blowing up Saeder-Krupp’s power plants down there, and no Thor shots went off to punish the offenders. Like all things when the corps are involved, it depends on exactly how much money is being lost, natch.
RETAIL
Ah, the wonderful world of retail. As much as the corps would love to do business only with each other, at some point they have to dip into the mucky pool of the unwashed masses and fuck them out of some money so that they can go on with the rest of their business. Most corp suits I’ve ever talked to would prefer avoid- ing retail if at all possible. When doing business with other corporations, they know their client. They’re cor- pies just like themselves. They think like each other, don’t take things too personally since it’s not their money they are spending, and usually are tempered by the fact everyone knows they need to keep a long-term working relationship, so being moderately nice to each other—polite, at least—is in everyone’s best interest. In retail, you can throw all that away. You deal with mil- lions of the little people who don’t share your culture and certainly don’t mind giving you shit on every oc- casion. Generations of “the customer is always right” has empowered these uncouth savages, and they think they hold the bigger piece of the stick.
But these characteristics work both ways. With busi- ness distributed over millions of little guys with largely no expertise in purchasing, it’s a lot easier to screw most of them out of money (or, at least, not let them screw
you out of money). Each consumer is an opportunity to
break out the book of marketing tricks, such as impulse buys, upsells, and all that stuff. For a period of time a few decades ago, consumers held the upper hand in the consumer/retailer world, with online reviews and
general word-of-mouth being outside of the control of retailers and presenting a frank review of the quality of products and services. Retailers weren’t about to let that kind of shit stand, of course, so nowadays all of this is perfectly controlled by the corporations. Through count- less means, such as diversion and distraction, disinfor- mation propagation, discrediting negative ringleaders, and generally leading the conversation, retailers have created the warm, cuddly, everything-is-always-all-right shopping climate we know and oh-so-love. The new commlink you just bought can explode and kill your pet dog, but the public will never hear of that kind of stuff. Retailers’ brainwashing is so powerful, and brand loyalty so ingrained, that no fellow consumer would ever be- lieve anything bad about a product.
Now that I’m done ranting, let’s look at how that af- fects hosts. Perhaps I make it sound too fait accompli, but it actually takes a monstrous amount of processing power to positively control popular opinion so strongly. Retail hosts are about three things, really. The first is con- trolling stocks and the accounting of the business, the second is hosting all that incoming shopping traffic, and the last bit is basically all marketing.
While it’s important and requires a lot of energy to stay on top of the supply chain and figure out how many widgets you have and what it’s all worth, that kind of stuff was mastered by computers fifty years ago. So that’s not really challenging any host.
A bit more significant is having enough power to accept the huge volume of visitors hitting your host to come shopping. There are no other host types that need to accommodate as much user volume as retail hosts. The most important factor there is, just as is the case with a brick-and-mortar store, the look and feel of the space. So the virtual experience, the sculpting of the host, is very important.
The real differentiator for retail hosts, however, is in the marketing area. Retailers need to monitor all possible Matrix activity relating to their products and services so they can control it. With dissent (lost sales) bottled up, retailers can then turn their atten- tion to making more sales. That comes from knowing what consumers are looking for. Since most Joe and Jane Civilians know themselves about as well as they know quantum physics, retailers analyze the behavior of consumers to understand them, rather than directly asking them. Retailers have to divine what consumers are logically (or, even better, illogically) going to buy next, and then offer it to them before anyone else.
Most of the processing juice of a host is dedicated to this latter activity. Prodigious amounts of information are collected on consumers and then analyzed. Retail hosts typically buy and sell consumer habit information with other retail industry corporations, all in real time. This uses most of a host’s processing power. Without any doubt, the retail industry is all about large volume processing.
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