Burnout Run

>>>Jackpoint :RunnerBoard:Stories

[Subject - user:Gurkha, Recorded 10.31.2068 by user:GwynSea]

"...thing on? It is? Good. 'Cause I'm only going to tell this one once. And light me up another one of those. I'm going to need it.

So, you want to know about what happened in '59, huh? OK, sure. Why not?

Alright, so the thing about what happened that night is that, like a lot of street-level tragedies, it started in a boardroom a long, long way away. In this case, what I'm talking about is 'White Monday', September 29th, 2059, the Japanese stock market crash that ended the Second Japanese Bubble. Billions of Nuyen worth of value simply ceased to exist. It was chaos in the financial world, which, like usual, caused chaos out here in the material world. Chaos is opportunity, and some people made fortunes, but where there's winners, there's losers.

The big loser of White Monday, the grand champion of getting their asses kicked that day, was Fuchi Industrial Electronics . These days 'Fuchi' is just a footnote of economic history, a name kids see on antique junk, but back before this, 'Fuchi' was what it was to be on the matrix. If you didn't build your 'deck yourself, the 'deck you used was probably a Fuchi. Yeah. So, they were a big deal. And in less than a week after White Monday, Fuchi had fallen to pieces and Novatech , which hadn't existed a week before, had its seat on the Corporate Court .

Which is where we came in. Like Roadwork's  crew do now we just called ourselves 'The Team'. The Thief River Thief was leading us in those days, and the Thief and me shared matrix duties, I'm not bragging when I say I was the better decker but I'm not being humble when I say he was the smarter. Besides us two 'plugheads', we had Offroad, the old Rigger of the Team, who'd been around since ever, that crazy bastard spellworm Jackalope and the new kid, Redhawk, our sammie.

We met about the job, the way we did every time, at Kroll's for breakfast on the morning of the 7th, I think it was a Thursday. I remember it was cold. Drek, it was cold. TRT looked paler than he usually did, which was saying something, I don't think he'd slept all that night. His eyes still had that long haul twitch. He said that things were moving fast and we had to move fast too. The run was planned for that night. Offroad never complained, no matter what and Red was too green to know up from down but Jack and me, we couldn't shut up long enough with our arguing with the Thief to let the other one argue with him. It was too soon, I said, we weren't consulted said Jack. It didn't do a slotting bit of good. Once the Thief got an idea in his head, a manstorm wouldn't shift it.

So the job was: Fuchi, now "Novatech", had a major site in Fargo and for the next few weeks it was going to be chaos as it was decided who owned what there. Our job was to go in and grab a whole bunch of paydata while nobody was watching the store. Not just cracking the matrix to get the stuff they kept on the accessible network, I could have done that myself, Drek, YOU could have done that. The stuff we were looking for was real top-shelf, kept in a private, off-line server. Which meant sneaking in and actually physically plugging my head in (yeah, yeah, I know, but back before the second crash we still had to do that).

One day was not enough time to plan a run like this. But apparently, according to the Thief, this paydata had an expiration date, if we had waited until morning, he told us, that data wouldn't be there to steal. So what we did is what we always did in situations like this, which is just do the things we were good at until something stuck. The Thief knew a guy on the Great Plains Campus security team who he laid out a lot of nuyen to get to look the other way and let us into the complex, I spent all day spinning code and fighting security programs so I could take control of all the right cameras when we did.

The plan, such as it was, was that TRT's guy would let us in, and Jackalope would run around in astral to distract the security spirits, while Offroad, who was also our infiltration specialist, snuck me and Red in, me to hack the data and Red to guard my meat while I was inside. The Thief would stay in the van with Jack's meat.

And it worked. Slot me but it worked. We got away with it. The guard we bought stayed bought, the cameras I cracked stayed cracked. The spirits Jack was distracting stayed distracted. We weaved our way through that glass and pastel maze until we came to the inner chambers, the server rooms. Banks and banks of slim black boxes. But our server wasn't connected to that. It was off to one side, in a room all on its own. Just one server, an old one, sitting alone on the floor of the cold-room. But I didn't think about it, I didn't have time. The clock was ticking until Corporate Security figured out that we weren't QUITE as clever as we thought we were. So I just sat down, strung that wire from my head to that box and started to plow through the dense, but out-of-date layers of security.

And made the worst mistake of my life.

I have spent the last decade or so trying to figure out what it was I found in that server. I have exhausted my contacts' patience, I have lost nights of sleep trying to keep up on the latest research but I've never been able to crack it. Recently I've been reading some stuff by this new wave of otaku... no, wait, we're not calling them that anymore are we, take that part out, by some "technomancers", yeah, keep that, and some of their descriptions of the "Resonance" is as close to what I experienced that night as anything I've seen, but even that doesn't quite sound like what it was.

Whatever it was, the moment I made contact with it, the fraction of a second I broke through the security I realized that it hadn't been programmed to keep me out. It was there to keep this program from activating. At least I think it was a program. It had to be a program. It was stored in a hard drive. I remember seeing lines of code, although I've never successfully identified the language. So it was a program. Had to be.

Right?

But whatever it was, once it started running it hit me like a ton of virtual bricks. It got into my datajack and corrupted my comm and, I'm told, started sending poisonous, self-perpetuating feedback into my brain, forcing my own glands to start poisoning me with neurotransmitters.

To me, it just felt like an all-expense paid trip to hell. I wasn't aware of anything outside of that at the time, although some part of me must have been watching because I recalled it clearly later. Recalled the Corp Sec descending on us, guns blazing. I have clear memories of the security footage, which was apparently still streaming into my brain, of guards still in Fuchi blue uniforms gunning down Red and Offroad trying to get me to out. I can still see, from a mechanical birds-eye-view, my body lying in the corridor, soaking in Red's blood, while Fuchi suits walked away, leaving me for dead.

It was still dark when I came back to myself. I was in the van. Jackalope's body was lying next to me in the back, still breathing. It would keep breathing for days before it stopped. Jackalope would never return to that body. Thief was driving. He told me it had all gone wrong. All wrong. He dropped me and Jack's body off at a safehouse with a street doc we knew. He then kept driving. That was the last time I saw the Thief River Thief.

The Matrix was knocked out in the Fargo-Moorhead area for a full twenty-four hours. Our own little practice Crash, five years early. The news called it the 'Blackout of the 8th'. In the shadows we call it "The Burn-out Run". They named it after me. Because I'm all that's left.

See that was because, the docs later told me that I had 'electro-chemical hypersensitivity', what we in the business call "scorched". I can't deck anymore. Not really. I left the shadows. Or the shadows left me.

Fuck this. Fuck all this. Pass that thing over, I need another goddamn hit..."

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