Shadowrun: Identity: Crisis (Shadowrun Legends) by Phaedra Weldon

Author:Phaedra Weldon [Weldon, Phaedra]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2020-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty

The truth of why I’d been taken and tortured seemed almost…anti-climactic to me. For months, I’d sort of built up this other identity of myself as an international spy or businessman, carrying the secrets to global peace, or something equally as dumb. And though the reality was just as noble in the eyes of Loki and everyone else, I still felt like a complete ass for building the damn software. The parts of my memory that weren’t returning as easy were the ones that would tell me whether or not I had any conscience thought about the repercussions of what I was doing.

But then maybe I didn’t have any, and that’s why I couldn’t remember them.

Everyone else on the team were as surprised and shocked to hear about what I’d worked on. What I’d created. Variant wanted to know if it was possible for me to write the same kind of program as a wyrm he could use to analyze a company’s security system.

I couldn’t. Not without the basic information on the latest security systems on the market. And the last time I checked, those companies guarded their secrets quite nicely.

It was during this team meeting that I learned a lot more about Variant’s past. For some reason, it had never occurred to me to investigate him. I guess I hadn’t wanted to bite the hand that had healed and fed me.

I always knew Variant hated NeoNET. And given his present financial condition, I figured his violent emotions toward them had to do with investments.

I was wrong. I was so damn wrong.

Before his goblinization, Variant’s wife had worked for NeoNET in one of their R&D departments. He’d been a teacher, just as he said he was. And then the goblinization happened, and he was summarily let go from his job, since the initial attack had occurred in the middle of class, and frightened some of the students.

After it was clear what happened to him, Var fell into a deep depression. Their friends stopped coming by, the neighbors never spoke, and he couldn’t get another teaching job. His wife worked harder to keep the bills paid, taking on more projects with NeoNET than she should have. Variant finally got a job as a dock worker with a crew of orks and took up fishing, trading, and made a lot of contacts over the next few years.

But then something happened in his wife’s lab, some accident that NeoNET officials, especially one named Apollonius Turk, insisted was the work of technomancers. The autopsy showed Annette had also been pregnant. He lost both his child and his wife in the accident.

“So, because they hired this Turk guy, you knew there had been a problem?” I asked as the others broke for food and Variant remained in his chair. I moved to sit beside him.

“Yeah. Not many people knew Turk’s background. But I did. Just his presence alone set off alarm bells, and I knew the story about technomancers was just that—a story to hide what really happened.

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