"They’ve wanted that ever since you got the job."
"Yes, but now they might actually have a cause to rally around. We’re losing market share for the first time in years and Renraku is starting to beat us at our own game. That hurts the bottom line and that’s the one damn thing the Japanese can agree on. It’s turning into a mob scene at the board meetings, Miles, and the mob is going to start howling for somebody’s blood."
Lanier tapped his fingers against his chin as he considered the implications. He hadn’t known it was that bad, but Fuchi was good at keeping internal matters internal, and Lanier had definitely been out of touch for a while.
Fuchi had always been a house divided, made up of the powerful families that controlled the megacorporation. Two of them, the Yamanas and the Nakitomis, were Japanese industrial families who’d provided much of the capitol and investment money to create the Fuchi
empire
. The third, Villiers, was the business genius who had made Fuchi the top corporation in its field and kept it there. Feuds and infighting for control over Fuchi brewed all the time between the three families, only now it looked like Villiers’ seeming inability to slow Renraku’s runaway growth was uniting the other families against him. Villiers controlled more of Fuchi than any one man, but it was still possible the Japanese could hurt him if they got their act together.
"That kid is the only chink in Renraku’s armor we’ve been able to find so far," Villiers continued when Lanier remained silent. "We know Renraku arranged for people to infiltrate the otaku." Villiers left unsaid the fact that Fuchi knew about Renraku’s plan only because Lanier had been involved in the planning stages of it. Lanier’s skills as an intelligence gatherer had been too useful for Renraku to pass up. They had never revealed to him why they’d wanted someone to infiltrate a scruffy tribe of techno-mystics living in the Barrens, but they did call upon Lanier’s expertise to help set up the means to do so.
"This kid has the profile to be the agent the corp chose," Villiers said. "If he is, then he could be the proof we need that Renraku has been overstepping their bounds. We need evidence that this is part of the project you’ve told me about, the plan to use the otaku to get leverage over the Court. We need to get him to name names and give us the information Renraku sent him to look for."
"Part of the problem," Lanier said, carefully choosing his words, "is that we can’t get any leads on our subject. We’ve run all of the usual identification checks on his fingerprints, retinal patterns, and DNA traces. There are no records in any of the national databanks or SIN files we’ve checked. Our mystery otaku just doesn’t exist in any of them."
"Could Renraku have erased those records?" Villiers asked, not hiding the note of concern.
"All of them?
In every database in the world?"
Lanier shook his head. "I doubt it. If Renraku has that kind of ability, then this little game might as well be over. More likely he was born SINless. There are plenty of blanks who aren’t in the records who they might have recruited. He could even be a shadowrunner."
Lanier waited for Villiers to say something. When he didn’t, he went on. "The other problem is that the kid’s memory may really and truly be fragged up. Whether it was conditioning Renraku gave him or something that happened with the otaku, we just don’t know yet. If it is, then we might not be able to get anything useful out of him. Unraveling the mess of his wetware is going to be difficult and take time."
"Time is something we don’t have a lot of," Villiers said, starting to look more worried. "The push is already on with the
"You don’t have to remind me of that," Lanier countered. "My position is probably the most precarious of all." Lanier had worked hard to get even a modicum of the Renraku board of directors’ trust, and he knew if Renraku knew what he was up to they’d have had him killed long ago. And they still might.
"I’m not so sure of that." Villiers’ voice was cold. "Your seat on the board might protect you if this thing blows up in our faces. After all, if this operation fails and our case against Renraku collapses, you’re still on the board of the corporation that’s number one with a bullet. If it works, then you stand to be the one who knows when to jump before Renraku’s ship sinks. It sounds to me like you’ve got all of your bases pretty well covered."
Lanier was shocked at Villiers’ comment. Even though it was delivered in a cold and even tone, to Lanier’s trained ear it clearly carried a note of desperation. After all they’d been through, how could Richard even think to question his loyalty? How could he doubt Lanier’s loyalty?
Villiers leaned back in his chair, visibly settling himself. "I’m sorry, Miles. That was uncalled for. This whole mess has me on edge. We’re taking a serious chance to get this whole thing cleared up."
Lanier leaned forward in his seat, his voice low but urgent. "We’ll do it, Richard. We haven’t come this far to lose it all now. I know in my gut that this kid is the one we’re looking for. I’ll get the information out of him no matter what I have to do, and then we’ll be able to convince the
Villiers nodded soberly. "We’d better hope so. If we can’t pull this off, there may be no stopping Renraku, and then the Japanese will probably have me for lunch. You’ve got to find the proof we need, Miles.
And as soon as possible.
If anyone can do it, it’s you. I’ll be waiting for your call." His virtual hand brushed air off to his left, and the image of Richard Villiers vanished.
Lanier shut down the connection and reached up to pull the datacord from his jack. He held the plug in his hand and looked at it for a long moment before allowing the inertia reel in the desk to spool up the fiber-optic cable and stow the cord away. He stood up and smoothed his dark suit, adjusted his tie, and looked around the dark, quiet office for a moment before returning to his work.
Whatever
it
takes,
he thought to himself.
Whatever
it
takes,
I'll
find
out
the
otaku’s
secrets
.
Otaku n.
Originally
derived
from
the
Japanese
term
otaku-zoku,
a
highly
formal
way
of
saying
"
you
. "
Something
like,
"
Oh,
honored
sir
,
"
only
more
so
.
First
used
to
describe
an
identifiable
group
of
people
in
the
late
twentieth
century,
ironically
applied
to
Japanese
computer
"
nerds
"—
technologically
brilliant
but
socially
inept
individuals
who
spent
most
of
their
lives
shut
in
their
darkened
apartments,
communicating
with
others
only
through
the
primitive
computer
networks
in
use
at
the
time
.
Asocial
and
actively
antisocial,
the
original
otaku
represented
a
considerable
sociological
problem
for
Japanese
society
before
the
turn
of
the
century
.
Presently
the
term
otaku
is
used
to
refer
to
young
Matrix
users
indoctrinated
into
life
in
virtual
reality
from
a
very
young
age
.
These
users
display
amazing
facility
with
computer
systems,
along
with
the
same
stunted
social
development
as
the
original
otaku
.
A
popular
urban
legend
describes
otaku
who
achieve
a
kind
of
mystical
"
union
"
with
computer
systems,
allowing
them
to
access
the
Matrix
without
the
use
of
a
computer,
using
only
a
datajack
and
their
own
brains
.
—
World
Wide
WordWatch,
2057 edition
Miles Lanier adjusted his silk tie as the pneumatic door hissed open to admit him to the interrogation room. The chamber was largely bare of furniture or ornamentation of any kind, save for the chair and its attendant tables and rolling cabinets in the middle of the room. The walls were plain and unrelieved gray—ferrocrete blocks and metal plates. One wall had a dark glass insert to the observation room, its opacity controlled from the booth. Lanier knew that the technicians in the booth had been carefully monitoring and recording everything that happened in this room. No piece of information could be overlooked. He had already reviewed the recordings himself and decided it was time for him to take a hand in matters personally. Time was of the essence.
A quiet voice droned from inside the booth, repeating words familiar to Lanier.
"My life begins in an alley—a dark, hidden place in the shadows of the city. I awaken there like being
born ..
." Lanier himself had already reviewed the information from the subject. He doubted the technicians would find anything else useful, but had ordered the recordings reviewed again, just in case.
As the door closed behind him with a hiss and a metallic click, he turned his attention toward the
room’s
two other occupants. The first was Dr. Ferrera, busy checking her instruments and the monitors arrayed around the other figure, who was seated in a chair. Her glossy black hair was bound back from her face in an efficient braid fixed with a clip of silver and turquoise. Her smooth, dark brow furrowed as she examined readouts and displays, her long fingers expertly manipulating the controls to bring up other windows and information.
Lanier recalled when he had personally overseen Ferrera’s extraction from an Aztechnology facility down in Aztlan. That had been a difficult operation, but Lanier believed that gaining the services of a neurophysiologist of Ferrera’s caliber was worth every nuyen spent and every drop of blood shed. The Renraku board and Aneki
-sama
had personally congratulated Lanier’s coup in acquiring Ferrera’s services. Little did they guess that Lanier had his own plans for the brilliant expert in brain-computer
interfaces.
She looked up from her work as he approached.
"Well?" he asked. The look on Ferrera’s face was not promising. She anticipated his question and stepped to one side so Lanier could see the displays on the computer terminals.
"He responded as expected to the drug treatment," she said. "The compound caused a holographic memory replay, a kind of fugue state, in which he related all of the events of his involvement with the Netwalkers that he could consciously recall, like he was reliving those memories. We recorded all of it and analysis is underway, but..."
"But what?"
"It still gives us very little information to go on. There’s no clear data about his experience of gaining his ... unique abilities. We collected some interesting data about the use of the otaku abilities from the memory-playbacks, however."
Ferrera touched a control pad, and one of the display screens was filled with a three-dimensional image of a human brain, its various areas highlighted in various bright colors.
"The MRI scan shows some amazing neurological activity, even in the flashback sequences. He clearly utilizes areas of the brain not currently charted or much understood. It’s not unlike brain activity recorded in magicians working their spells."
"Are you saying his abilities are magical?"
Ferrera shook her head and blanked the display.
"Not at all.
Only that there are certain similarities.
All of the known magical abilities interact poorly, if at all, with technology. Magicians and adepts have reported psychosomatic pain and discomfort from immersion in virtual reality, most likely because of the lack of subconscious mental input from their magical senses ..."