Sim Hell (Remastered)

I hate the foundation.

But we had to go there anyway in order to kill Pierce, so I really had no other option. And so, Me, Freddie, Neon and Captain Cancer (Best not to ask where he came from) plummeted into it, knowing full well that we'd end up having to navigate nonsense dream logic in order to find the nodes and their connections. In theory all we needed to do was indentify the control node and then interact with it to destroy the hose. Of course, since it could be anything and the interaction could be anything, that just meant we were casting a very wide net.

We got an eleventh hour call from Dayglo, which was her asking for help to go reclaim the spirit of the Brooklyn Bridge form Aztechnology for some random neo-anarchist reasons. We said 'yeah, that's nice, will totally get on it' in a way that was a massive brush-off and instead asked her to watch Nobosuke Yamura’s yacht. With that minor obstacle out of the way, we jacked in.

That moment when you wish you'd geeked somebody when you had the chance

Word of warning. After the events of the last couple of days I am so angry that it is going to be very hard for me to give an even remotely coherent summary. So yeah. If there’s huge gaps in this summary I don't frakking care.

This whole terrible downhill slide began in the aftermath of our execution of Teh Dave and the mess with Doctor Hughes. The SK Johnson had asked Us to follow through with racking down everyone he had infected, which then meant finding the people that Teh Dave's underpaid bar staff had sold the CFD bombs to. All of which was resulting in a massive headache-inducing mess of people to track down and find out just how badly they had been infected and how heavily subverted they were.

The good news is that Teh Dave had a list of all the people he had infected. With Minster's aid, we were able to compare that to Runners he knew in New York and find out who were on the known to be missing list. From what we had found, some were more vulnerable to the infection then others, most notably those with more augmentations. Of those he’d infected, we found only two that were still missing and unaccounted for, which is good after a fashion.

Digital Apotheosis

Nothing to do with anything, but I broke up with Alphonso. Turns out I wanted a stable mature long-term relationship and he wanted a trophy Shadowrunner girlfriend he could show off to all his racer buddies. His loss.

So that aside, let's talk Pierce. Thanks to Neon's efforts, we know how to kill him. Disrupt him in the Matrix, then take out the device that he uses as his refuge when he flees there to recompile. Of course, that means fighting a Crazy Digital Murder God in their native environment as well as then walking into what was doubtless going to be a well-prepared, well-defended secured facility that would be on alert and ready for us. Easy, huh?

This outcome is probably inevitable

So we have a plan to kill Pierce, and I mean kill-kill him. Disrupt him in a way that means he can’t recompile or bring himself back or the other things that Crazy Digital Murder Gods do in order to keep themselves from dying. And it needs to be done, While we’ve disrupted his operations, cost him his allies, killed his crazy bug cultists and ruined their ritual and all that, he’s still active and functional and out there, and he’s still a threat. Killing him is the only way to stop him from coming back and trying some other insane stunt in the name of Dr Okabe’s mutli-stage beyond the grave revenge plan.

The theory is simple. We know where his ‘safe haven’ is, where the device is that he’s designated as a place to fall back to if he’s ever disrupted and needs to recompile. The idea is that we disrupt him on the Matrix and damage him enough that he has to fall back to it, and then once he has we bust in there and destroy everything so he can’t come back at all. That’s it, end of story, no more Crazy Digital Murder God out to get us all or blow up the city or whatever else.

Data Dumpster Diving

So I said that I'd talk about what we found in the foundation. One of the reasons why I hold off adding it to the last post is because, well, there's a lot of it and a lot of it ties into other stuff that we did, and that last post was already as confusing as all get out. So here we go.

No good can ever come of this

The first run where Me, Freddie and Neon worked together had the three of us head to MCT's Cavilard Research Facility to take out one Dr Shin Okabe. This was not an extraction or anything; this was all wetwork and ensuring that he was dead. However, in retrospect, it seems that was what got the whole damned ball rolling and started us on this mess that has gotten us where we are now, fighting a Crazy Digital Murder God and his Bug Shaman allies. No, really.

In order to explain things a bit more, I need to quickly cover a bit more about Dr Okabe. See, the Doctor was not only an expert in computer software design and development with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and behavior, but he was also a Technomancer. (Geez, this sounds good, doesn't it? Read on, it gets better). But before that, he was one of those creepy-as 'Otaku' guys. Oh, and he used to work for Renraku. Oh and guess where he was during the late 2050s. If you answer involves a certain arcology that was taken over by a Crazy Digital Murder God, then you're correct. I told you it got better.

Sim Hell

Stylish early 20th century Me

I’m going to start this by assuming you know what the Foundation is. If not, go ask a Decker like Lightspeed or Neon and they’ll explain it to you (even if that explanation is ‘blah blah blah blah blah nerd stuff’) then come back.

So now that we all know what it is, let’s give you some background. We’d discovered that Pierce was a crazy digital murder god, and we discovered that he had some crazy long term plan. We didn’t know the full details of said plan, however, only bits of it. Added to that, we had no idea where Pierce was hiding, which meant that if we ‘killed’ him in the Matrix, he’d just run off to his safe haven to recompile. Above all else, to this, Pierce himself had deleted all the data we needed on his creation and function down to the point of destroying the research facility host.

The good news was that in theory it survived in the Foundation of the research facility where he was ‘born’. Added to that, Neon had been able to drop an anchor into that Foundation’s Portal Node, which mean that in theory she could get into it again. Unfortunately, we could only do it by jacking in through a friendly host’s foundation and then jumping across from there. The upside is that we know somebody who runs their own data store that we could use. And so Lightspeed joined us on this crazy little trip, which proved to be very useful.

Cluster-fragged sixteen ways to Sunday

Calling today a complete clusterfrag would be an understatement. The worst part of it was that we lost one of our allies, that rarest thing in the shadows; a Johnson who is good to the team and doesn’t try to screw you over.

Ares Johnson, RIP

Ares Johnson (We call him that because we never knew his real name. But that’s the rules) was good to us from day one. We didn’t initially know that he was from Ares, but he sent subtle signs. Like the fact that he was clearly a grizzled veteran. Or the cowboy accent. Or the fact that he liked to meet the team at steakhouses where he’d buy us all massive steak dinners (One of which was the first time Abbey had ever had Steak!). That sort of subtle sign.

And as we did more jobs for him (all of which paid very well), we managed to get ‘in’ with him as we found out more about what was going on. It was a complex mess involving a MCT AI research facility, a plot by elements of the Salish-Shidhe Council to engineer an incident that would allow them to annex Seattle, Bug Spirits, illegal street races, fire drakes, jumping out of hotels and fighting helicopters, the assistant to a Tir Tangire prince, stealing weapons research without hurting anyone in the process, the deaths of Wraith’s old team and, above all else, a Crazy Digital Murder God (I’ve heard the preferred terms are ‘AI’ or ‘Xenosapient’, but I think that this is more accurate) who was involved in manipulating all of the above in order to improve MCT’s market share. I am not making this up.