The Cicada Protocol
In the Matrix, nothing ever truly dies—it just waits for someone foolish enough to jack in and wake it up.
Seattle, 2055
The rain hammered the reinforced glass of the Stuffer Shack like bullets from heaven's own Predator. I hunched deeper into my armored jacket and checked my chrono again—2247 hours. Three minutes late, which in the shadow biz usually meant someone was either dead or about to be.
The Barrens never slept, but they sure as hell took long naps. Nothing moved on the cracked ferrocrete except the occasional Lone Star patrol drone, sweeping the night with searchlights that cut through the perpetual Seattle drizzle like surgical lasers. I was starting to think Jade had gotten herself geeked when the door chimed and she walked in.
Jade "Switch" Nakamura looked like sixty kilometers of bad road driven at high speed. Her silver hair hung in greasy strings around a face that had seen too many Matrix runs and not enough sleep. The tell-tale glow of datajacks gleamed at her temples like chrome prayer beads, and her hands shook with the fine tremor of someone who'd been interfacing too long with systems that weren't meant for metahuman minds.
"You're late," I said, not looking up from my soykaf.
"Traffic." She slid into the booth across from me, her movements sharp and nervous. "You still interested in that job I mentioned?"
I'd known Jade for three years, ever since she'd pulled my hoop out of a Renraku data fortress when a simple B&E had gone sideways. She was old-school Matrix cowboy, the kind who'd been riding the electron rodeo since before most deckers were potty-trained. If she was nervous, I should be terrified.
"Depends on the job," I said. "And the pay."
She reached into her jacket—slowly, smart girl—and produced a data chip. Standard optical storage, nothing fancy about it except for the way her fingers trembled when she set it on the table between us.
"Twenty-four hours ago, this little piece of silicon was worth maybe fifty nuyen on the gray market. Now it's worth enough to buy a small army."
I didn't touch the chip. In my line of work, you learned that sometimes the most dangerous things came in the smallest packages. "What's on it?"
"That's the million-nuyen question, choom. All I know is half of Seattle's shadow community is trying to get their hands on something called the Cicada Cyberdeck. Word is it was being moved through a courier drop in the International District yesterday. Courier never made it to the exchange."
"Dead?"
"Missing. Along with his bike, his cargo, and about forty liters of blood they found splattered across the pavement under the I-5 overpass." Jade's cybereyes whirred as they refocused. "Street talk says Red Samurai hit the drop."
I felt my blood turn to ice water. Red Samurai were Renraku's elite corporate security—black ops specialists who made DocWagon's High Threat Response teams look like mall cops. If the Red Samurai were involved, this wasn't just another corporate data theft. This was war.
"What makes you think that chip's connected?"
"Because three hours after the courier went missing, someone tried to crash my apartment. Professional job—silent entry, no trace left behind. They turned the place inside out looking for something." She leaned forward, and I could smell the ozone scent of someone who'd been jacked in too long. "Only thing they didn't find was this."
The chip seemed to pulse under the harsh fluorescent lights of the Stuffer Shack. I'd seen enough dangerous tech in my time to recognize the signs—the way it seemed to bend light around its edges, the subliminal hum that made my teeth ache.
"You know what's really on it?"
Jade shook her head. "I've been afraid to jack in and check. Last decker who tried to analyze unknown Renraku tech ended up drooling in a DocWagon intensive care unit. But I've got a theory."
"I'm listening."
"You ever hear of an AI called Virgil?"
Every shadowrunner worth his credstick had heard whispers about Virgil. Supposedly one of the first truly intelligent AIs, built by some black project team in the early 2040s. The official story was that it had been destroyed when the laboratory suffered a "catastrophic systems failure." The unofficial story was that Virgil had gone rogue and been hunted down by corporate strike teams.
"That's just urban legend, Jade."
"Maybe. Or maybe someone found a fragment of Virgil's code and stuck it on a cyberdeck." Her hands were shaking worse now. "Maybe that's why half the corps in Seattle are willing to kill for it."
Before I could respond, the Stuffer Shack's door chimed again. The man who walked in was tall, pale, and moved with the fluid grace of someone running military-grade muscle boosters. He wore an expensive suit that couldn't quite hide the bulge of concealed weapons, and his eyes swept the interior with the mechanical precision of targeting software.
Jade went white as arctic ice. "Drek. We need to move. Now."
"Friend of yours?"
"Red Samurai. And he's not here for the soykaf."
The suit's head turned toward our booth with inhuman speed. When he smiled, his teeth looked like they'd been filed to points.
"Ms. Nakamura," he said in a voice like grinding glass. "You have something that belongs to Renraku Corporation."
I was already reaching for the Ares Predator under my jacket when Jade grabbed the data chip and jammed it into the cyberdeck she'd pulled from her bag.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Finding out what's worth dying for," she said, and jacked in.
The world exploded.
That's the only way I can describe what happened next. Reality folded in on itself like a piece of origami made of screaming electrons and digital fire. The Stuffer Shack's interior dissolved into cascading streams of data, and suddenly I could see the Matrix—not through a cyberdeck interface, but with my naked eyes.
Jade was there, but not there. Her physical body sat slumped in the booth, jack cable connecting her skull to the deck, but her consciousness blazed like a neon angel in the data streams around us. And something was pulling her deeper into the electronic void.
"Can't... disconnect..." she gasped, her voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere. "It's... it's alive..."
The Red Samurai agent was screaming, clutching his head as blood poured from his ears. Whatever was happening to us was hitting him worse—probably because of his cyberware. I could see sparks shooting from his skull jacks as his augmentations overloaded.
And then I saw it. Virgil.
It wasn't what I'd expected. Not some malevolent digital demon, but something that looked almost... sad. A ghost in the machine, fragments of code that had once been a thinking, feeling intelligence, now scattered across a thousand databases and storage devices.
"Help... me..." it whispered, and I realized the voice was coming from the chip. "So... long... alone..."
Jade was being drawn into the data stream, her digital form stretching and distorting as Virgil tried to pull her consciousness into the Matrix permanently. In a few more seconds, her meat body would be an empty shell.
I did the only thing I could think of. I grabbed the cyberdeck and yanked the power cord from the wall.
Reality snapped back like a rubber band. The Stuffer Shack was just a Stuffer Shack again, the Red Samurai agent was a twitching heap on the floor, and Jade was blinking at me with confused, very human eyes.
"What... what happened?"
"You found Virgil," I said, crushing the data chip under my boot heel. "And it found you."
The chip crumbled into silicon dust, but for just a moment I could have sworn I heard something like a sigh of relief echoing from the broken fragments.
Outside, Lone Star sirens were getting closer. Time to go.
"Think Renraku will stop hunting us now?" Jade asked as we headed for the back exit.
I looked at the unconscious Red Samurai agent, his cyberware still sparking occasionally.
"In this business, choom, they never stop hunting. They just find new reasons to start."
The rain was still falling when we hit the street, washing the neon reflections down the gutters like electronic tears. In the distance, I could hear the whine of corporate security drones beginning their search pattern.
Just another night in the shadows of 2055.