Upcoming infobroker and fixer heh? That’s what they’re calling me? The spider? Well I guess I can live with that too. So JackPoint wants to know a bit more about me? Well I’ve got the greatest respect for what you all do so let me tell you a story… You can call me Silk, although my real name was, is Susanna, or Ana for short. My life was going well all things considered, I’d dipped my toes into the shadows but I had a ‘real’ life too, university, a prospective career path, then it all went to shit… but, I’m getting ahead of myself, so I should start with what I look like?

I’m of moderate height, sleight build with light coloured hair and dark eyes. They tell me I’m a changeling and, like my sisters, I share some superficial traits with my orcish parents; the physical signs are slightly pointed ears and sharpened lower canines that any real orc would be ashamed of. Like my Mum I had a late genetic expression and look and feel human (whatever that means these days?). Whether because of my late expression or for some other reason I don’t appear to age in the same way that an orc would so although I’m in my mid-twenties I haven’t yet seen the unfortunate decline that some orcs go through about now… I think it’s the eyes that people latch on to though and make me stand out from an otherwise human looking orc. You can’t see the horns, but they are there let me assure you, so yes, a changeling…no I’m not going to say any more.

And who or what am I? Well like everyone else I’m a product of my background and upbringing but in short I suppose I can say I’m a part time runner now, but mostly, thanks to a timely inheritance, a shadow infobroker. They have told me I’m an Artisan Adept, but I’ve since realised that my Gift runs far deeper than that academic classification. It sounds slightly melodramatic when put into words but I see patterns in things, possibly even the Pattern, the weft and the warp of the universe. To a minor degree I can predict what is going to happen and react accordingly, even influence the patterns in ways that shouldn’t normally be possible. Hopefully I can use that to keep myself alive long enough to find the truth…

As I said I’m a third gen runner and have been around runners from birth, although Mum tried to ensure I had as normal a life as possible and wasn’t too influenced by the shadows early on. Despite what the trids might have you believe I think that I probably turned out more balanced than most of the other street drek that populate the shadows. I’ll give you a potted history, it would take too long otherwise, I’ve had a busy life!

When I was born my Dad was a runner, like Granddad (who probably died in some corp zero zone!), and Mum was working as a surveillance operative for the Feds. I don’t know much of the background of how they met, and it’s too late to ask now, but whilst they supposedly loved each other, it was a Romeo and Juliet relationship doomed by the divide between the shadows and the light. I’ve still got a holo of my Dad, he was a handsome orc from Europe and I now know he’s back on the scene (although he’s rebuffed my invitations to meet)… I don’t remember him really, just fragments I’ve got from pictures. He left when I was five or so, mum said he wanted to protect us from his life…

The irony is that mum became a runner herself when I was ten after some disagreement with the Bureau that meant she felt she could no longer work for them. She wouldn’t talk about it with me but I overheard things (being a quiet child that nobody notices had its advantages) and I gather that it was something pretty horrendous…probably something that the FBI as the ’good guys’ shouldn’t have been involved in.

I was yanked out of school, we ditched our SINs and disappeared. I guess mum had been prepared for this as we had fake documents and some liberated kit to hand. Rather than settling into a new dull life elsewhere mum began to work the edges of the shadows to make ends meet and to dig the dirt on whatever it was that sent us into hiding in the first place.

For me I was young enough that this was a big adventure…although I missed my friends I was able to sneak contact with them through the matrix. I was tech savvy enough already to hide my back trail (I was more worried about mum finding out than the possible repercussions from darker sources) and so thankfully nothing came of my childish indiscretion. It was also about this time that I began to see the beauty of the code itself and my love affair with the matrix was born and has never left me. My education became what mum could get from pirated edusofts but more and more what I discovered for myself.

Running and hiding coupled with the glory of the net have shaped me and shaped my magic in fundamental ways, whether it would have developed this way if we’d stayed safe in Seattle is anyone’s guess! My awakening came with my expression and puberty and as everything was so confused I’ve never really distinguished between any of them.

I began to remember everything I saw and have an intuitive grasp of how things fitted together. I saw the intricate patterns in the matrix and how these reflected and enhanced what I saw in life. I loved the feel of electronics in my hands, and as I was continually surrounded by the various bits of technological debris that were Mum’s trade I had plenty of opportunity to tinker.

Anyway, back to my story: Mum took, or was given, the handle ‘Mother’ (although not because she was one), and teamed up with a number of people over the next few years. Never anyone for long, she was too principled to work with the majority of the dross that call themselves runners, and she was incapable of hiding her disgust which hardly made for good team mates. She worked as a rigger and in surveillance and counter surveillance.

We bounced around for three to four years, living in an RV to avoid having a permanent and traceable address. We relied on the fake documents and smuggler routes to cross borders, although we stayed in the UCAS for the most part. I remember that mum worked in Boston and some of the other East Coast cities but eventually we drifted back west and found ourselves in Seattle once more. Mum wanted me back in school in preparation for the future and she said that her issues with the Feds had blown over and were no longer relevant (I still don’t know if she managed to dig up sufficient leverage or if the people involved simply disappeared). With some judicious editing of the data trail I went back to being Susanna Waters and was enrolled in school after an ‘extended period abroad’.

It was a bit of a jolt to be immersed in normality after so long away but mum convinced me that the social skills were as necessary as the technical ones and that I needed a taste of high school (gods help us all!). I was different and I knew it, and they bloody well made sure I knew it, but it was a proving ground and looking back I was glad of the experience even if it was shitty at the time. Another effect was to isolate me from mum’s continuing shadow work…and this was probably the real intention as I know that she didn’t want me to follow in her footsteps.

Mum met Bale on a trip to the UK (I travelled on a separate commercial flight) and she had finally found a runner that lived up to her expectations. As a former Special Ops and combat mage he exhibited a truly British display of honour, respect and good manners. A lot was put on for other people’s benefit, and he had a wicked sense of dry humour, but they clicked. They spent two years putting together a team that suited them and Balefire was born.

I gather that they were able to pick and choose their runs, because of both their professionalism and skill set. I would have given anything at the time to be more involved but mum was having none of it…she already felt that I knew too much about what they did. Escapade fulfilled the role that I used to fantasise about doing, covert op and B&E man, and Aria covered the matrix aspects of their work. Although mum disapproved I became friends with Aria and we frequently met up in the matrix… Funny to think that we’ve never met in the flesh despite her being the closest thing to a sister I could hope for. That’s a statement on the world if there ever was one!

My innate aptitude for tech meant that when the time came Mum insisted that I get a proper college education and as I had a valid SIN once more it was an opportunity to push myself and get an interview at Harvard to study applied matrix technologies and electrical engineering. There was just the small matter of paying for it all! Balefire may have been a team capable of pulling in the high end jobs but they were choosy enough that they weren’t exactly rolling in nuyen. At mum’s behest Aria approached NeoNet indirectly and I guess she shunted my name up the lists that the head hunters browse through (but avoiding any false modesty I expect it was probably in there somewhere anyway, my grades were good and I have a knack that my fellow students can’t touch). Their PULSE subsidiary eventually agreed to sponsor my course and although there were some reservations about taking a corps’ money so blatantly we figured in the end that it could serve our purposes in a ‘hide in plain sight’ kind of way (Although mum was always excruciatingly careful that nothing could link her shadowrunning back to me or our family unit paranoia was inevitably a way of life to a certain degree). I can honestly say that I excelled at my studies and I’m not ashamed to say that I intend to use what I’ve been taught to further my goals in the shadows.

It was hard being away from mum and missing out on the goings on in Seattle but this was another way of keeping me safe and giving me an opportunity to forge my own path without being influenced by the shadows.

I pushed myself harder than my contemporaries because I love it. I soaked up all the knowledge they could give me and asked for more. I’m not saying it was easy, far from it, whilst I remember more or less everything I still need to be able to process all that information… I asked Aria to help me get some ‘ware (I knew mum would be unlikely to agree), something that wouldn’t damage my magic too much. She cautioned me that it might be considered an unfair advantage over my peers (my Gift already set me apart) but I didn’t care. In the end I won her round and she brought me back to Seattle to an off grid supplier where the ‘ware wouldn’t need to be recorded. We went to this weird Stillwater place on the far side of Redmond and they hooked me up.

A spell in a bed and suddenly I was smarter than before and needed less sleep… Purists would probably say I could have achieved this with my natural magical talents but then I’ve never been afraid of tech and I felt better and stronger and even more in tune with my gift. Aria handled the payment side of things, although they were more interested in my coding than cash and I’ve been working to pay off the debt (since what happened that debt has changed somewhat…)

And so I was back at uni, living the student life of parties contrasted with excessively hard study…

…And then it all went bad when things seemed so perfect. August 2070, hard to believe it’s more than five years ago now; someone targeted Balefire for something they had done and mum was killed…I found her in a pool of her own cold blood…I’m sorry, it’s still painful to think about and my damn memory won’t let me forget any of the details… Who ordered the hit? I’ve known the ‘who’ now, for some six months, but not the ‘why’, much less the way to get to them and drag the answer out, I’ll get to that in a bit, it’s taken long enough to find out

Escapade and Bale got caught up in it all and suddenly the people I would have turned to were gone. Aria tried to help me but for a while I rejected her unfailing cheeriness. I slowly slipped into a despondent state and began getting more and more behind on my college work. Concerned emails began coming in from my sponsors and I wasn’t able to tell them anything…how could I tell them my mother was a runner and she was gunned down in her own home whilst browsing the matrix? In the end we found another shooting and attached my mum’s details to it…something more prosaic to hide what really happened…I hated it but there’s no choice… They offered me counselling but I was afraid to go. I was hanging on by my fingernails and some corp shrink judging whether I was profitable or not would likely have sent me over the edge!

I needed to get back on track, but whenever I thought about doing anything about it things seemed to get on top of me. Aria pulled me along and stopped me from sinking too low but I knew this was something I needed to deal with myself. The pain is less now and has being replaced with a burning desire to find out exactly what happened to my mum, to Balefire and most importantly why!

I spent months snooping around trying to find leads, to no real avail, whoever it was covered their tracks too well but I knew that they had to be the same ones who hit Stillwater and that the events couldn’t be unconnected. This was my first real foray into the darker shadows… I came back to Seattle and began hooking up with mum’s old contacts and anyone who could teach me the skills I’d need to survive. I got a job in a coffee shop to give me a reason to stay over in Seattle and began doing a couple of solo shadow jobs to bolster my confidence and help pay for the information I needed.

I should explain a bit more about Stillwater and what happened there…it makes what happened to me pale in comparison but was, at least back then, less personal for me despite being the source of my ‘ware. They were, are, a transhumanist group, a commune maybe. Big into mixing magic and tech and pushing the boundaries on both. Relatively harmless on the face of it until he decided it wasn’t. A group of specialist mercs were hired to assassinate the group’s council, the same bastards that killed mum.