The Atomic Question Ch 02

Power comes from lying, that's what Adam's father had said once. If you don't respect your peers, lie to their faces. You'll need those connections later in life--they'll remember your lies when it's time to hand out lucrative contracts. If you don't respect the professors or the teachers, lie about it to them. Fill your assignments with praise and adulation they don't deserve, agree with them on points you can prove them wrong about. You'll need their approval if you want to graduate at the top of your class. If the recruiter's oily smile makes you sick, lie that you find her mystifying. Say you want nothing more than to be a company man, to wear a logo on your back and a smile on your face. Benefits? You don't require those! The benefit is getting to work for a corporation!

This whole world is a house of cards, son. Lies are the stones that keep the cards from blowing away. No other business major had ever been so eloquent as his old man. Too often Adam found himself wondering how much of that parenting had been a lie. Is that how you got that gray hair so early, pops? Is that what gave you a taste for scotch, or young wives, or shade to get you away from who you are in the real world?

But Adam had heeded the advice in his own way. He was wearing a lie as he pulled up to 555 California Street. His uniform was the red and white of Renraku Computer Systems, a corporation that Adam Thacker had never and would never work for. The van he stepped out of was also a lie: it likewise bore the same branding and it turned heads because in San Francisco Renraku was hotly despised. They'd supported the Protectorate after all--enabled the occupation all those years ago. An elderly ork woman pushing a shopping cart full of junk threw a brick at the van while screaming murderer! Everyone out on the street would remember the man in the Renraku suit. And they wouldn't remember at all what he looked like beyond it... particularly not after he took off the hat, the glasses and the false nose.

A fortress of gleaming steel and mirrored glass loomed high above Adam, watched balefully by the magical eye in the sky. Fifty-two stories tall, it sported a sandstone facade without a single flaw or imperfection for it had been purchased and renovated relatively recently: just one year after the occupation ended. Colorful granite totems possibly carved in the traditional fashion--as in by hand--displayed the fearsome faces of animals native to the plains, with an opulent twist. The fangs of bears, claws of mountain lions, the talons of eagles... They were made from gold, tipped with sharpened rubies, treated with diamond dust so that they glittered in the lights of passing vehicles and drones.

More money had gone into the exterior decorations for this building than in the dozen city blocks around it combined, to say nothing of what was inside. The people shuffling by on the sidewalks, the wage slaves and the SINless, they would never do anything more than dream of what kind of world lay beyond the totems and glass. The burly men in suits and sunglasses with the guns on their hips would make sure of that. By Adam's reckoning the only thing distinguishing these fellows from the corporate muscle of Silicon Valley or Pacific Heights were the feathered headdresses they wore. And the only things separating all of them from the thugs and go-gangers on the street were the quality of their firearms and a shared delusion of grandeur.

For his part Adam preferred it on the street, where if a person meant to take you for all you were worth they were at least honest about it in the moment. The people behind the doors ahead would be smiling as they stabbed you in the back, and when you turned they'd still be grinning like they were doing you the biggest of favors as they stabbed you in your front.

Power comes from lying. 555 California street was strong evidence of that claim and Adam felt no guilt at all for lying right back to them. Fight fire with fire or so the saying had once gone.

He tugged the Renraku hat down over his head so that his faded brown hair was covered just short of being suspicious. Time to go to work. With a little luck the only witness that could accurately recall him after tonight would be the huge block of black granite set in the center of the front walkway area. Banker's Heart, they called it. Adam thought that was fitting since it was as black as night and as cold as stone, better suited to being a god's paperweight. It caught his reflection as he passed it on the way to the doors.

To the hired muscle everyone in a uniform looked the same. The guards for the private casino gave him looks only slightly less disdainful than those they gave passers-by on the far side of the street but one accepted his datapad with a meaty fist clad in faded brown leather. It was a lie, an imitation of a Renraku work order with the casino's address and name: The Golden Totem, property of the Ute Nation.

He should have called it in to his pit boss but that might get him reprimanded for wasting a tech's time, or a boss's time, or more likely both. A boss would have been well-informed about visitors of course--he would have known about work needing to be done and who was being contracted to do it.

But lies make the sixth world turn. Adam looked the part, and his pad looked official, and looks were everything. And everyone was used to ignoring the people who did the real work that kept the lights on so the party never had to end. Other factors contributed to his eventual decision--everyone knew that the Ute nation was desperate for partnerships with any corporation who could provide financing or investment, even one that was hated in California. Perhaps even especially one that was hated by anglos. How would it look to Renraku for their tech to be given a cold reception, forced to wait outside on the street with the scum?

So the fellow shrugged and handed the pad back, waving Adam in with his gloved hand.

Adam Thacker had been stealing from the rich for a number of years and there were some recurring facets to all the great dens of iniquity. For one it was always uncomfortably warm, like the air conditioning was struggling to keep up with the burning cigars, the stewing nerves and all the hot air escaping too-frequently opened mouths. No HVAC system in history had ever been designed to withstand the industrial quantity of smoke being blown in the direction of occasionally receptive ass-ends, the filters never imagined to be contending with a concentration of rancid smugness so pure that one would be forgiven for thinking that it was the product of a spell.

The Golden Totem had all that and more. High ceilings left plenty of room for whirring fans tastefully hidden above synthetic crystal chandeliers whose light emitting diodes shone down unworthy illumination on the dark deeds brokered behind gleaming false smiles, refracted a million or more times in glasses of wine or liquor the individual cost of which would make a shadowrunner gasp.

To stand at the windows and look through the bulletproof glass at the city below made it feel like a fortress, a bastion of wealth and luxury among a wasteland of scarcity. To congregate at the tables with the fabulously well-dressed and astronomically affluent would invoke the miasma of the mega-churches of the fifth world: career liars united only in the magnitude of their falsehoods, carelessly gambling with amounts an ordinary person could scarcely dream of but which in here was mere pocket change. The comet in the sky outside, a haunting reminder of the unpredictability of life in the sixth world, meant nothing in this place. Wealth had insulated them completely.

Speakers politely hidden inside of the enormous mouths of roaring mountain and desert animals carved into the walls emitted music at just the right volume to let gamblers and their retinue have audio privacy when in close conversation without letting it be a distraction or hindrance. From those mouths a man's voice crooned, loping and dry.

Your black cards can make you money, so you hide them when you're able... In the land of milk and honey, you must put them on the table!"

It was almost inspiring to Adam how cooperative the upper crust could be when they had common cause. One of those causes was the pursuit of ignoring the people who made the world work... At some point in the distant past a scoundrel's agreement had been made to pay as little attention as possible to anyone that could be classified as 'the help.' To acknowledge them is close to acknowledging that they're needed, and if they're needed then they should be well-paid. This perspective was as twisted and enduring as the belief that paying others well is the fastest way to go bankrupt, and so a uniform, a tool or a measure of grease or dirt on one's hands was tantamount to an invisibility spell when employed against a coven of plutocrats.

That's how Adam Thacker walked across the ground floor of the Golden Totem unopposed. A plausible uniform, a pace of someone behind schedule and with too much to do, an expression of overworked exhaustion and too little pay. Every eye that fell upon him slid off of him like water from an oiled-up piston. Everything as it should be, everyone thought.

Some thieves played the socialite. Stole drinks from trays, traded jokes with the gamblers, flirted with the staff. They relied on charisma, dumb luck and accomplices. Adam preferred to work a different way, which he characterized as taking things seriously. Partners came and went, and he'd had a few in the past he even almost trusted--or at least trusted so little that he sort of did trust them--but this time he was all alone.

His fabricated work order got him through three more doors. Eyes with dark circles beneath them paid little attention to the details. Like the rich, they saw things that were close enough to normal to not arouse suspicion. It could be said that a corporate career was a career in being fooled, from start to finish. Understanding that was the first step to taking advantage of it.

He didn't get resistance until he reached the service elevator. It was amazing luck that a waiter with a cart of trays was coming out as he was approaching, meaning he was able to get in after only a brief inspection from the security guard. A longer wait might have led to a more thorough examination or even verification. But then thefts always seemed to succeed on such razor's edge occurrences... That's what made them so thrilling.

Adam felt quietly thrilled as he rode the circular elevator up in silence. There was a camera on him but he had long ago trained away the reflex of looking up at it. That kind of thing always looked suspicious. Instead he looked through the glass front down at the floor where the gamblers continued the party that most of them had been born into, never having known anything else. He'd been born on the doorstep of that party, on the bottom rung of a ladder which for most people may as well have been the moon for all the hope they had to get a hand on it. Perhaps that was why he could steal from their kind so effectively. Takes one to know one. And now again he found himself wondering what he would do with it all, if he pulled it off. Change the world? There was no way to change the world with money. That was like trying to wash yourself clean with blood.

As the elevator took him into the ceiling of the casino Adam returned his mind to the task at hand.

555 California Street had once been the location of a bank's headquarters. Now like most casinos it sported a hotel portion above the floor where customers and clients could fuck escorts, take drugs and plot the continued ruination of the sixth world. Above the hotel was office space and data storage servicing the Ute nation's endeavors in San Francisco and the wider California Free State.

There was no basement. Modern casinos had no vault--all the money was electronic now, the chips just a novelty for show. Walk out with one worth a trillion nuyen and its value was wiped as it went through the door. The house always wins.

But Adam had asked the right questions when doing his research. When you want to draw in customers with enough money to lend a nation-state back into relevancy, you have to be willing to do their dirty work. Hide their skeletons. Stash their ill-gotten gains. Smile while you lie for them. Stolen orichalcum? Never heard of it, detective.

The service elevator took him as high as it could take him, to the top floor of the office portion. Up here there was none of the glitz or opulence of the casino or the luxury of the hotel. No carved animal heads, no dreamcatchers or whirling logs or symbols of native mysticism. The Ute Nation and the rest of the Pueblo Council had no interest in keeping up appearances in places that would never be seen, so it was all modern computers and sterile hallways, minimalist windows and the quiet hum of exhaust fans. The occasional whirr of a security camera or the cough of an underpaid wage slave.

People glanced at him as he walked down the main thoroughfare past cubicles and small offices. Always the assumption was that he was supposed to be here--if he wasn't, surely someone would have stopped him by now. The lie of his attitude took him far. It would take him to the true top, the secret floor accessible only through a stairway found in the casino security chief's office, the existence of which Adam had deduced by studying the building itself. It had electrical cabling and ventilation that accommodated for a floor above the highest that was visible in the architectural blueprints available in San Francisco's matrix hub. To him the mere fact that it had been omitted functioned as proof that it was there. Anyone could tell if they thought about it for a moment. But who had time to think when there was work to be done?

His first guess was that it was in the casino manager's office, but examination of the upper floor walls had revealed to Adam that there was nowhere in that generous space to put a stairway. It took up nearly a third of the building and had glass on three sides. The security chief's office however was small and spartan, tucked into a place against the exterior wall facing the street. It had no windows and an excess of electronics that "mysteriously" stopped right at the ceiling. And it made sense--with a reinforced door and only one access point, it turned that upper floor into a lofty dungeon where the Ute nation could stick anything anyone might want away from the questing eyes of the corporate court.

And it was good that Adam wouldn't have to threaten the manager. The man had a half dozen bodyguards and his well-lit office was no doubt heavily surveilled. Security would respond within a minute.

But if security itself was the one being held hostage? Response time would be drastically lower.

Adam had learned about the man who ran security for the Golden Totem. A real hardass that went by the name Serpent-that-stands. His father was in the camps when Daniel Howling Coyote started his war on the old America. Was by the shaman's side when they did the dance that ended that war.

Serpent-that-stands had emerged from his father's long shadow as a brutal and merciless enforcer for the Pueblo council. He was here working for the Ute nation by assignment, because he was the best they had. The most suspicious. The most effective.

It explained the door to his office: so heavy that it would take hours to force open. A panther cannon would sooner blast away the reinforced walls beside it than take it down. But Adam had come prepared for resistance of the technological kind. From out of his left pants pocket came his power pad, its singular wire yielding to the pinched fingers of his right hand and plugging into the terminal beside the door.

The object Adam now held in his hand had been the recipient of the vast majority of the wealth he'd appropriated over his career as a thief. Its contents: software to fool security systems, fabricated identification credentials that were both plausible and plausibly deniable, and no shortage of contemporary breach protocols for getting through boilerplate restriction devices. In short: a codex of electric lies. It was important to keep it separate and isolated from other systems unless necessary... and only a fool would put their tech into their body. That was just asking to be melted from the inside.

The principle on which Adam's device chiefly operated was ultimately a simple one. The system would say Present credentials. The pad would ask What credentials? The system would respond Credentials like these, presenting a list that was often quite short. And so the pad would say, here are those credentials. The system would read its own data as readily as if a mirror had been held up in front of it, and then the doors would open. The data for entry existed in the system--that was necessary after all, since it needed something to compare queries to. All the intruder had to do was lie. What was the machine going to do, disbelieve? Doubt was a metahuman inclination, absent from machines. It had no eyes, no instincts, no reason and no ability to discern anything about the person trying to gain entry. All it knew was what he told it and Adam was more than prepared to lie. Because power came from lying.

The strongest defense against a liar was someone on the other side of the camera pointing down at the door, someone to notice that the person getting in wasn't the person they said they were. But all too often that independent verification was too distracted to care, as well as too poorly paid. And sometimes, as Adam now suspected to be the case, they weren't even at their post.

When the door cracked open Adam resisted the urge to kick it further. A few heads in nearby cubicles had turned and it wouldn't do to arouse suspicion. Their reports would come later when they were questioned, and by then it would be far too late for their concerns to amount to anything. He calmly pushed it open enough for him to slip through, as graceful as anyone who had work to do and clearance to get it done. The security door shut behind him with a soft click, followed by a loud clank.

And then he was in. The security room of the Golden Totem was spartan and utilitarian, a stark contrast from the ultra-luxury of the casino. Its sparse lighting and total lack of any amenities beyond a single steel chair made even the offices and cubicles outside look welcoming by comparison, and this more than anything he had dug up or heard rumor of gave Adam an idea about what kind of person Serpent-that-stands was. One of the few who made the world work, by hook or by gods-damned crook.

A bank of clean, quiet display screens against one wall showed feeds from every camera on every floor. The casino area itself had only a few broad views from high positions pointed at the tables and doors, mostly for the purpose of satisfying gaming commission requirements. The clientele of the Golden Totem were not the type to sully themselves by counting cards. The hotel area rooms were monitored with thermal imaging so that security could confirm whether occupants were present, excusing any trickery from ice trolls or cryomancy, but there was nothing in the way of identifiable visual or audio surveillance. Discretion and privacy at a premium price, as well as plausible deniability.

The hallways, perimeters and restaurant/lounge areas however were all generously observed. If someone went to visit the men's room Serpent-that-stands knew about it almost as soon as they'd stood up. For a modern casino this was overkill, but it was a wise precaution for anyone with a safety deposit box that the corporate court would describe as questionable in its legality.

Standing in front of the screens in the mostly-bare office, Adam scanned the feeds hoping to find out where the man himself was. Anyone else he could talk his way past, but not the chief of security.