Shadowrun Legends: Psychotrope by Lisa Smedman

Author:Lisa Smedman [Smedman, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2016-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

09:50:55 PST

Bloodyguts clung precariously to the wall of skulls, his fingers hooked in a pair of eye sockets. The wall formed an impassable barrier that blocked all forward movement. It seemed to have a top; Bloodyguts could see empty black space “above” the uppermost layer of skulls. But the higher he climbed, the farther away the top of the wall seemed to be.

Dark Father and Red Wraith were far below, standing on a mirrored surface that reflected their images like shadows. They had each walked in a different direction along the base of the wall, seeking the ends that—like the top—remained tantalizingly just out of reach. Occasionally one or the other of them would stop and inspect one of the skulls, searching for any anomalies.

While most of the skulls were empty, several had data plugs in their eye sockets. A mass of fiber-optic cables draped the wall like transparent vines, connecting one skull to another. Fat white maggots crawled slowly through the cables. They traveled in glowing pulses—a string of maggots wriggled past, and then the fiber-optic cable was empty of light for a time. Then another string of maggots, longer or shorter than the first, and another. Each time they flowed in through an eye socket, the jaw of the skull would vibrate, causing the teeth to chatter. The vibration was too rapid to follow, but somehow regular. Bloodyguts was certain that it was some sort of algorithmic code.

Locking the fingers of one hand tightly into the socket of the skull, he reached for one of the fiber-optic cables and pulled it free. A pulse of maggots—one of the longest and fastest he’d seen yet—was just entering the jack on the end of the cable. Quickly he popped the jack into his mouth. He tried not to gag as the maggots flowed onto his tongue but instead concentrated on swallowing as many of the foul-tasting insects as he could. They filled his mouth and spilled out over his lips, but he managed to choke most of them down. Eyes closed, he sampled the data that flowed into his mind and, ultimately—somewhere in the meat world—into his cyberdeck.

The data was still nonsense, either so heavily encrypted or so glitched that it was meaningless. But Bloodyguts had at last found what he was looking for. Although the fiber-optic cable looked like any other, the analysis provided by Bloodyguts’ commlink utility confirmed it: this dataline had an input/output bandwidth of more than one hundred megapulses per second. This was a main communications trunk.

Data continued to pulse through the cable, one string of maggots at a time. Choosing skulls at random, Bloodyguts pushed the data plug into one empty eye socket, then another. Somewhere in the meat world, telecom calls would be scrambled, machines served by slave modules would be receiving meaningless commands, and private or corporate data would be re-routed to someone else’s datastores. Assuming that the data flowing through the cable was intact—that it had not already been hopelessly corrupted by passing through this system—someone was bound to sit up and take notice.

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