Shadows: Paying with your Blood

 

Like I said before, this is a world dominated by the megacorporations. They like things a certain way, and that way requires a docile population, a world of people who do whatever work they’re told, build anything, carry anything, sacrifice anything for the mega, then
spend all their money in the company store and be glad they got it so good. Sheep. That’s how megacorps see metahumanity: a flock of sheep they have to keep in line to serve their purposes.

Which means the rest of us face a stark choice: Accept their shit. Or not. There are lots of ways to sell out in this world and find a  corporate master who will order you around. There’s garbage to be collected, floors to be swept, numbers to be added. The megas have literal mountains of menial labor to be performed in a never-ending series of twelve- or sixteen-hour shifts. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but you’ll have time off occasionally, and there’s a whole slew of corporate-approved entertainments.

You can even have relationships with other people, as long as you don’t associate with anyone your beloved parent megacorporation might consider in any way unsuitable. You will never be required to be creative or inspired. You will never have to take risks. You could
live, potentially, for a long time (if you’re lucky enough not to contract any diseases on the corporate Do Not Treat list), and you will have approximately the same quality of life as a worker bee.

For some of us, that’s not enough. That’s not a life.

The megacorps own enough in the world. They don’t need to own us. So we drop out, stay away from the life of a corp drone, and find another way to be. We do the jobs corps don’t want their regular employees to do, the things they don’t want connected back to them. Espionage missions; missions of theft, sabotage, and assault—maybe assassination if you swing that way. That’s the kind of work that drifts down into the shadows of the world, and that’s what we pick up. That’s how we survive. We still have to dance to the corporate tune to some degree—who doesn’t?—but we get to live on our terms, in our way, and if we do it right and build up our skills, we can become the best at what we do and get paid what we deserve. Then, maybe, instead of being one of us, scrambling under the heels of the powerful, we can be one of them, and remake a small part of the world in our image.

No matter how each of us got into the shadows, we’re here now. If we’re going to survive, we have to find work. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of jobs out there. You can make money off of them, but each one will cost you something. You’ll get a scar from
a bullet that should have killed you. A leg that aches in the cold because you broke it crashing your motorcycle on one of your less stylish getaways. A missing arm because you were standing just a bit too close to a bomb going off and a working cyber model is pricy. And that’s just what will happen to your body. You’ll be double-crossed, betrayed, and abandoned. You’ll see trusted friends turn on you and watch others die. You’ll have every last bit of you tested in ways you can’t imagine just to see how much you can endure.

And if you succeed? If you stay alive? Money, first of all, but more. You become a legend. You join the ranks of the people we tell stories about, the shadowrunners whose names we all know. Dirk Montgomery. FastJack. Sally Tsung. The Smiling Bandit. You’ll have lived your own life, survived, and even thrived. You’ll have stuck it to every man the Sixth World has to offer.

 

As long as you can pay the price.