DeckCon 2078

Well, it’s Deckcon time again, which means that we get a lot of work trashing one of the world’s largest consumer electronics shows. I mean, it’s the only reason I’d be there otherwise, as the thing’s a total nerd-fest. Just look at how excited Neon gets for it as proof. And just like last year, we were busy throughout the show doing various jobs for various people. The offers came in thick and fast, and yet we managed to be at cross-purposes throughout.

The first job we got wasn’t actually a job, however, but also was rather personal. Ishtar, our least favourite Babylonian Goddess-themed pop star, had thrown down an open challenge as a publicity stunt. She was goign to be putting on a livecast show on the first day of Deckcon, and she was openly daring people to hack the feed. Naturally, Neon immediately wanted to hack the feed, but was trying to think of a way to do such that wouldn’t immediately be giving her what she wanted.

Obnoxious drones for beginners

Some days the jobs come thick and fast, so much so that you don’t even get time for a break or anything. Now don’t get me wrong, I like a bit of excitement in my life (Well, a lot), but at the same time, it’s nice to have a bit of a breather on occasion. You know, go to a club, have a good time, chase cute dumb Elf guys and so on. And to be fair, in the case of the last two jobs we had, both of them came rather fast an unexpectedly.

Job one came in the form of a Dwarf who worked at Hilderbrandt-Kleinfort-Bernal. For those who don’t know, it’s Europe’s biggest bank that’s not owned by one of the Megas, and is a AA in its own right. This guy, Jody Stubbleton, had been just a regular boring corp suit working as a Data Analyst within the bank. You know, the sort of boring, mindless no imagination corp drone job that we all loathe and despise. Anyway, Jody had stumbled across some data that He found to be rather strange and suggested that the bank had been up to something dirty (No, really?). Now he was looking to get out, and was afraid for his life.

Diplomatic incidents

The last few days have been complicated, to say the least. A lot of things happened, and we’re not entirely sure of what’s going to come of all of it. In fact, to be honest, our team has either achieved a major breakthrough or is completely screwed and under somebody’s thumb, and it’s hard to tell which.

How we got to this point is complicated to say the least. Following our trip to the foundation, we found a whole pile of useful information on Pierce and his crazy plans as well as his insane Bug Shaman allies (They’re Bug Shamans, of course they’re insane) and their own goals and how they were going to execute them. This also came with a bit of good/bad; the bad was that their intended sacrifice/host for the bug queen was Snow Fox, the daughter of a major Salish tribal leader and also Wraith’s fiancée (or something). The good was this meant we had a way to find her.

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.

Dangerous Aquaintences

So beyond the team, there's a bunch of people we know one way or another. These guys are more or less allies, although this being what it is and our doing what we do, there's plenty of ways that any given ally could be tomorrow's deadly enemy. It's the way things go.

Lightspeed. Yes, she always looks this grumpy

Lightspeed was a runner in the 2050s, but since she's an Elf, it doesn't really show. She used to be a decker back in the Old Matrix and had the good luck to survive crash 2.0 which drove her into retirement. Nowadays she's more of a consultant and info broker and is rather well connected, even if many of her contacts are other old fart ex-runners. She definitely knows her stuff, and I suppose the fact that she lived so long as a runner means that she knows what she's doing. Her network has been very helpful to us in a number of ways, not the least of which is getting us some more recognition. She also apparently runs her own Data Store which serves Seattle area runners.

While she hasn't said much, I got the impression that most of her old team were dead or retired now. The few times she's mentioned them, she didn't seem to have many nice things to day about them.  Lightspeed apparently has a lot of her old pre-Crash cyberdecks, although they're utterly useless now. She turned one of them into an Ant Farm.

We jokingly call her "decker mom", although it turns out that she actually is Neon's mom (and, incidentally, refers to Neon as "the brat" a lot). Apparently, she didn’t know that Neon was an active Runner for some time, until someone 'outed' Neon in front of her. On the other hand, it explains a lot about where Neon got a lot of her skills and knowledge from.