Nah…
But we did need the nuyen.
'Okay,' I said. 'We'll take it. But half up front. And it's nonrefundable if this turns out to be a goose chase.'
'Uh-uh,' Mr. Johnson said. 'Fifty-K up front. And you wear nannies.'
'Shit. Why?'
'So my people can peek over your shoulders, as it were. What you see and hear, they'll see and hear. And they'll know you're not ripping them.'
'Hey! You've hired us before! When did we ever scam you or your clients, huh?'
'Never. And you won't.' He shoved a plastic bag across the table at me, with a tangle of equipment inside. 'Besides, there's one thing more.'
'What?'
'If you can't get the… merchandise, my clients want to be sure Nakamura can't get it either. These will help verify that.'
'Makes it more complicated, man,' I told him. 'Seventy-five kay up front.'
He hesitated, then nodded. 'Done.'
An hour later I was on the streets of Pittsburgh, my collar and hood up against the thin drizzle of acid rain, shouldering through the muggliemasses beneath the neon wink-blink of come-hither signs in twenty different languages, beneath the five-story buildingboards with their smiling, naked women and sleek cars and mindless MadAv babble. Megacorp massage, direct to you from the nuyen necromancers. An alien world, Slick, a billion klicks from the streets.
In my belt was the bag of nannies, plus a credstick worth 75,000 nuyen. Not bad for a morning's work.
I didn't know who our Mr. Johnson worked for, of course. Shadowrunners generally don't. But the guy had the fashion sense and street-cred trust-me feel of a Fed, and I was pretty sure our employers were the good old UCAS.
Nakamura, of course, we knew. Roger Nakamura was Pittsburgh's grand high Pooh-Bah of Mellon-Mitsubishi, itself a branch of Renraku Megacorp.
The team was waiting for me at the Eat 'n' Meet at Fifth and Forbes, almost in the shadow of the M amp;M Tower. Boy, they were just gonna love this…
I'd been working with them for maybe three years, and loved 'em all like siblings. Better, maybe, in Cammy's case. I never banged my sister.
Her name was Camilla Gonzales, but we all called her Cammy. The name fit. She was a weapons specialist who had this way of blending into the background so perfectly you'd never know she was there. And Thud's name fit too. I never knew what he called himself, but he was eight powerfully muscled feet of rather dim attitude, and those curved ram's horns growing from the sides of his skull gave him a certain in-your-face presence, you cop? Then there was Scooter, our pimple-faced magician, our very own wizardry whiz. And Dee-Dee wasn't just a hacker. She made computers speak, roll over, and sit up and beg.
And me? Well, never mind what my birth name was. Cam, Thud, Scoot, and Dee all just called me Fixer. I was the team's face, the one who talked nice to the Mr. Johnsons and brought in the gigs.
'We're supposed to do what?' Cammie said after I'd laid out the deal.
'I know,' I told her. 'Sounds a little over-the-top…'
'Over the top? It's not even in this galaxy! Hey! Earth to Fixer! Comm-check!'
'Did you tell this clown the difference between fiction and reality?' Dee-Dee asked, grinning.
'Of course. He told me belief is everything.'
'He's right, you know,' Scooter said. 'Belief is what makes the world we know.'
Scoot was using The Voice, and that made us all take notice. Normally, he's got this adenoidal whine that makes him sound like an annoying teen fanboy, but every now and again the adenoids vanish and his tone drops about two octaves. It's what he calls his magical voice, and when he talks that way, you know he knows what he's talking about. Cammie calls it speaking ex cathedra, which sounds like she thinks he used to be a church.
'Scoot,' See said, shaking her head. She reached out and rapped the tabletop with her knuckles. 'This is real.' She tapped the side of her head. 'This is imagination…'
He cocked his head to one side. 'So… when you run the Matrix, it's not real?'
She scowled. 'Of course it's real.'
'But it's all in your head.'
'No it's not!' She waved vaguely in front of her face. 'It's… it's out there…'
'What you keep forgetting, Dee-Dee, is that according to the well-known laws of quantum mechanics, we create reality. In effect, there is no 'out there' out there.'
I'd heard this argument before. It was popular with some hermetic magicians, I knew, though it wasn't at all mainstream. Not yet.
'You're talking about the Awakening, right?' I asked.
He nodded. 'And a lot else. But we brought the Awakening on ourselves.'
'Nonsense,' Cammie said, but she was frowning. 'That was just… just magic.'
'What do you think magic is, but the use of belief to change reality?'
I glanced at Dee, at her delicately pointed ears, then at Thud, who was sitting there sharpening the tips of his horns, apparently not even listening, massive as a mountain, with fangs protruding two centimeters up from behind his lower lip.
An elf, a troll, and two humans. A hundred years ago, it would have been four humans. So where did the metahumanity come from?
Oh, yeah. We did it to ourselves. At least Scoot and a few like him thought so, and I had to admit the theory made as much sense as anything I'd ever heard. Seems that back at the end of the 20th century, and through the first decade of the 21st, we had all kinds of belief in the Big Changes coming. Cop it. The fundy Christians were so certain that Armageddon was right around the corner, with all the hosts of Satan ready to rise up and follow the Antichrist. And the fundy Muslims, the Shiites, anyway, were invested in the coming of the Mahdi and the creation of Allah's New Order on Earth. Even the New Agers got into the act, focusing on channeled messages of coming Earth Changes, and the ancient Mayan prophecies that the Fifth Sun was coming to an end in 2012.
With that much pure, raw belief gnawing at the foundations of Reality, man, something had to give.
And it did. It's tough to remember sometimes, sixty years later, that the Old World Order was all human. No trolls. No orks. No elves. No dwarves. And no magic. None that worked reliably, at any rate.
We called it the Awakening when the Old Order fell. Hidden away within the human genome were all of the metahuman racial types, it turned out, and suddenly Black and White and Latino and Asian didn't matter anymore. We were all humans, and we were sharing the planet with the stuff of myth and legend. Magic worked and dragons were real and Civilization itself was crumbling around our ears.
So, what the hell? Maybe old H.P. Lovecraft's little nightmares could have something to them after all. The potential of becoming real, if enough people closed their eyes and thought about it real hard.
'What do you think about all of this, Thud?' I asked.
'Don't think,' the troll rumbled. He sounded like a good-natured earthquake. 'Just do. Long as the nuyen're there.'
Thud could be remarkably down-to-earth about things.
'We got our advance,' I told them. 'Look, at the very least we clear better'n eighteen-K apiece, right? We go in, show 'em it can't be done, and get out. Simple.'
'Yeah? What if it can be done?' Scooter asked. The Voice had gone, and the annoying fanboy was back.
I shrugged. 'Then we get fifty-freakin'-K apiece. How hard can it be?'
'Don't say that, Fix,' Cam told me. 'Don't ever say that. Somebody might be listening.'
'They will be.' I chuckled, and held up the bag of nannies. 'Count on it.'
'We really need to wear those things?' Dee said. 'I don't like it.'
'Me neither. But it's just for the op. They won't be watching you shower.'
'It's just upgraded RFID,' Dee said. 'No big deal.'
She used the streetslang pronunciation, 'ar-fid.' Radio frequency identification devices are everywhere-those little tags that control shoplifting and inventory, keep track of the kids, and let you dial in to the local net to get the name and number of the pretty girl you're chatting up on the street. They work by broadcasting a limited chunk of
