[Shadowrun][JDR-ENG].. - Index of - Free

HISTORY LESSONFOR THE REALITY IMPAIREDI remember when I was a kid, my mom would sometimes drag me tothe museum. I spent so much time playing with computers, you see,that she was worried that I wasn’t keeping a firm grip on reality orseeing enough of the world outside my room. The museum had somepretty good displays, but my favorite was always the giant dinosaurskeletons. It was a morbid fascination—they were dead, and yet eternalat the same time. I made a game out of finding new ways to sneak upand touch the bones without alerting security.These days you can still go to the museum, but most folks don’tbother. They can have it brought to them and experience it virtually.The people who do bother usually get to see the augmented reality displaybecause the bones are so fragile now they might crumble to dust.I’m still trying to decide whether that’s good or bad. You can’t touchthe bones, but they won’t disappear, either.So what is a legend supposed to do when the world changesaround him? Most of my colleagues are dead—hell, Captain Chaosshould’ve been writing this, but he went down with his ship during thesecond Crash. Someone’s got to look out for the next generation, andit might as well be me because I’m the last dinosaur of my kind, andI’m better than some AR display.The following is a history lesson for the reality impaired, becauseas I’ve learned over the years, my mom was right: there’s more to lifeand the world than what you filter through your computer or commlink.Call this a last shout-out to Cap, the neo-@’s, and everyoneelse who’s willing to learn something for the sake of knowledge, notjust survival.—FastJackkicked off city, state, and federal charges of criminal negligence aimedat Seretech.Thank the Supreme Court for their decision. Seretech claimedthat defending the truck from the mob ensured that its cargo didn’t getout and create worse scenarios, and the Supreme Court agreed. Theyupheld the corp’s right to maintain an armed force for protection of itspersonnel and property. Corps 1, World 0.In late ’00, things heated up when the radical eco-groupTerraFirst! allegedly attacked a Shiawase Inc. nuclear power plant.Shiawase security forces repelled the attack, but used the incident asan excuse to advance their position that public law enforcement wasinsufficient to provide the kinds of protection it and other large corporationsrequired. In the end, the Supreme Court in its supreme wisdomgranted multinational corporations the same rights and privileges asforeign governments, establishing corporate extraterritoriality in whatcame to be known as “The Shiawase Decision.” Later on, TerraFirst!got its hands on evidence proving that Shiawase and a few other corpshad conspired to stage the attack, but this evidence was destroyedwhen a bomb wrecked the group’s California office and killed severalkey members. Suspicions are strong that the bomb was planted by ashadowrunner—welcome to the Sixth World.What does this mean for you? It means that you now know whygetting caught stealing Ares R&D while on Ares property is one ofthe worst career moves you could ever make, but being able to skip offonto another corp’s property while hanging onto Ares goods may meanliving to steal another day.A HISTORY LESSON FOR THE reality impairedThe Rise of the MegacorpsSo how did we get in this mess, anyway? While many people experiencelife as an augmented-reality-enhanced shopping spree or as aneverending stream of hypnotizing entertainment experiences, the restof us see things quite a bit differently—and they’re not a cheery shadeof rose. When your daily concern is scoring enough nuyen to eat andwatching your back against your fellow shadow denizens, you knowthere’s significant room for improvement with the world.Seretech & ShiawaseImagine this: it’s the late 1990s, and corporate entities are growingmore powerful with each passing year. Increasingly unwilling to entrustthe safety and security of their assets and personnel to public lawenforcementorganizations, these entities gradually begin supplementingthem with their own private security forces—forces that, far fromstereotypical doughnut-eating “rent-a-cops,” grow more and more toresemble paramilitary groups armed with the best equipment available.1999 was the worst year ever. (It was also the year I was born.Mom joked for a few years that I was the herald of the End of Days.After that, better candidates came along.) Thanks to a three-monthlongtruckers’ strike, no fresh food was coming into New York City.Food riots broke out, and the whole city was engulfed in violence.Unfortunately for us, it also engulfed a Seretech Med-Research truckhauling infectious waste. A running battle erupted between Seretechsecurity personnel and the mobs—who were convinced the truck wascarrying food—and ended up at one of the firm’s medical researchfacilities. To make a long story short, it resulted in a bloodbath andResource RushMeanwhile, the corps suddenly realized what sort of power lay in theirhands and acted quickly to exploit the hell out of it. Not even a yearafter the Shiawase Decision, the United States government invoked“eminent domain” to bring property under its control, and then licensedits exploitation to corporate sponsors. Corporations weresnapping up these opportunities left and right, and they didn’t carewhose toes they stepped on in the bargain. This usually meant lootingNative American reservation lands of resources—a practice that theAmerindians, understandably, were less than pleased about.Lone Eagle IncidentThe more radical among the Native Americans formed the SovereignAmerican Indian Movement (SAIM) to fight the corporate takeovers.They didn’t do much but talk until 2009, when United Oil Industriesacquired the rights to the petrochemical resources in one-tenth of theremaining reservations. Having had enough, SAIM responded by capturinga missile silo at the U.S. Air Force’s Shiloh Launch Facility innorthwest Montana, then threatened to launch the missiles unless theU.S. government and the corps returned all the land taken from them.Predictably, the government pretended to initiate talks, and thensent in the Delta Team anti-terrorist squad. The Deltas recaptured thesilo, but not before someone “accidentally” launched a Lone Eagle ICBMtoward the Russian Republic. Everyone thought for sure this was the beginningof the end, but amazingly the warheads never hit. To this day noone knows how that happened, though a million and one theories havebeen advanced and everyone (including me) has tried in vain to find out.24 history lesson for the reality impaired