Let just say that the meet at The Fragged Capacitor didn't just go sideways; it went full vertical. I was barely two sips into a lukewarm synth-beer when the air pressure in the room spiked and that telltale sign of a high end mage stepping into the local astral space. Mouse (my current fixer) is as wiz as they say, but she brought more than just a data shredder to the table. She brought a goddamn warning!  She told me the orbital manifest I’m sitting on isn't just a log of drops, it’s a countdown. Renraku isn't just dropping tech; they’re seeding "Red Samurai" sleeper cells into the Barrens, and my data grab tripped the silent alarm on the whole fragging operation.

We had to bolt through the kitchen when a trio of suits in heavy reinforced armor kicked in the front door. My new Fuchi deck (that Cyber-6 I mentioned) started screaming at me, its fans whirring like a banshee as it fought off a localized jammer signal. We scrambled through the stinking rainy alleys of Redmond, my smartlink painting targeting reticles on every shadow that moved. Mouse led me to a reinforced safehouse, which was a literal bunker buried under an old soy processing plant and told me I’m officially too hot for any standard fixer to handle. She didn't geek me for the bounty, which is a start, but she’s demanding a fifty-percent cut just to keep my head from being blown off by a corporate sniper.

The budget chrome in my jaw was vibrating so hard I can’t even chew my stimulus patches. I’m currently staring at the decrypted sub-layers of the manifest, and the map is lighting up like a Christmas tree. There are twelve drop-sites, all centered around the Seattle sprawl’s power nodes. If I leak this to the right underground BBS, I’m a dead man walking, however if I keep it, I’m just waiting for the strike team to find the right frequency to melt my brain. Mouse is currently in the other room, burning through five different comm-links to find a buyer who has the stones to take on a Megacorp in a shooting war.

I’m sitting here, checking the seals on my Ares Predator and watching the static on the monitors. My SIN for 'Elias Thorne' just hit the global blacklists, which means the suits finally stopped playing nice and started the burn. I’m back to being a ghost, a glitch in the system that they can't quite squash. The "gas leak" story has been replaced by reports of "gang violence" in Redmond, but we both know what that really means: the cleanup crew is here. It’s time to stop running and start making these corporate bastards pay for every volt of bio-feedback they shoved down my throat.

Gotta hold my chips to see what shows, or what Mouse has on an offer.