by Breach

Aztlan now possesses technology capable of killing the Great Dragons, and some of you might be wondering “why didn’t the Dragon Council do anything about this?” Well, they were a little busy with a problem of their own.

I don’t think any metahuman could possibly claim to understand just how the Dragon Council works, but what we do know is that it is headed by a position called “Lorekeeper”, who has traditionally been the dragon that possesses the Jewel of Memory, a record of the collective history of dragonkind. Dunkelzahn possessed this artifact until his death, when his Will bestowed it upon the Great Dragon Lofwyr (perhaps hoping to teach the ambitious golden wyrm some wisdom?) Lofwyr held the title of Lorekeeper from that point on – until recently.

The Dragon Civil War is complicated, and scholars debate over when it actually started, but I’m going to cover only the most important parts. Sirrug’s attacks on Aztlan were one opening salvo, which was followed by Hestaby’s address to the UN on July 23, 2073 in a speech where she spoke of things dragons do not speak to metahumans of, and condemned Sirrug’s actions as war crimes, which helped lead to his condemnation and escalation of the Amazonia/Aztlan war.

Hestaby’s speech contained a lot of suggestions, both on the part of dragons and metahumanity, but few listened to the whole and chose to focus on only the parts that most enraged them; for the dragons, it was her concessions to metahumanity – most of dragonkind, particularly the Great Dragons, view metahumanity as pawns and playthings, pets at best, unworthy of a seat at the negotiation table. Her condemnation of Sirrug was a betrayal of dragonkind.

The strife between Hestaby and Lofwyr was the greatest; I’ve heard rumours that Hestaby actually defeated Lofwyr in some sort of draconic test of strength and would have claimed the Jewel of Memory for herself, but she rejected the continuation of dragonkind’s old ways and allowed Lofwyr to keep the Jewel and the title. If this rumour is true, Lofwyr has been stewing over the humiliation for years; there’s nothing more dangerous than a humiliated dragon.

Immediately after her speech, the head of Hestaby’s Shasta Shamans, Elliot Eyes-of-Wyrm, was killed by a sniper. While no one is sure who called the hit, Lofwyr was a prime suspect, and clearly the one Hestaby blamed; a week later, Hestaby and a veritable army of spirits appeared in Dubai over Saeder-Krupp’s Middle-Eastern headquarters and disassembled the entire complex – without a single metahuman fatality and only a few minor injuries to the staff there.

This led to a year of shadow warfare between the Great Dragons, with alliances being fostered and formed and attention being focused away from other affairs; Saeder-Krupp’s businesses have suffered for Lofwyr’s distraction, and in the wake of the chaos, a greater threat would emerge when Lofwyr’s brother, Alamais, seized the GeMiTo sprawl as his personal demesne. Believing dragons the true rulers of Earth, Alamais and his followers turned GeMiTo into a feeding ground, beginning a year of terror for all those metahumans unable to flee.

Despite his disagreements with Hestaby, open warfare with metahumanity was not part of Lofwyr’s agenda, and the Lorekeeper’s attention switched instead to the predation of his brother; gathering an alliance of dragons and metahumans to oppose Alamais. As typical in draconic battles, they started with his hordes, raiding the wealth of Alamais with the help of most of the Dragon Council. Attacks against the allies of the Loremaster escalated in response.

In early November, 2074, it was reported by magical experts that a great accumulation of magical power was detected around Mount Shasta; at 0139 on November 3rd, the energies released; at the same time, a massive explosion occurred in Alamais’s GeMiTo compound, though the Great Dragon himself survived. Shortly the same day, Alamais’s loyalists descended upon GeMiTo; what had been hunting for sustenance became retaliation as the dragons wreaked wanton destruction upon the life and property of GeMiTo’s residents.

This was the final straw for Lofwyr, who had to bring his brother to heel. Gathering an army of mercenaries and shadowrunners, as well as the efforts of several dragons including, reportedly, the Great Dragons Lung and Arleesh, Lofwyr descended upon GeMiTo. In a battle spanning two days (November 5 and 6), Lofwyr’s forces made their way towards Alamais’s lair, where the two brothers engaged in open battle above their gathered loyalists. Lofwyr came out triumphant, tearing his brother’s heart from his chest and securing his place in the hearts and minds of the world. Lofwyr had saved the world from Alamais.

The aftershocks were largely political; for two months the Dragon Council met in secret and the world was free of draconic meddling. The repercussions of this assembly are still being felt: Sirrug was imprisoned away from the world as punishment for his open warfare on metahumanity; Hestaby was banished from the affairs of dragonkind, her horde forfeit, as punishment for defying the traditions of dragonkind; and the Black Lodge, a secret society in Germany, was unanimously condemned and its destruction vowed by the Council.

The hordes of Hestaby and Alamais were divided among the Council, with Lofwyr’s loyalists receiving the bulk of the largess and Hestaby’s friends receiving the least. But one more shock was left – Lofwyr surrendered the position of Loremaster (though not, as best I can tell, the Jewel of Memory), recommending Celedyr as his replacement. The Council, eventually, agreed.

Celedyr’s first act was to call a truce upon violence between dragonkind and metahumanity; giving a year for affairs to be settled (and a bloody year it was), since December 26, 2075, the dragons of the world have been forbidden by the power of the Loremaster and the Council from waging open warfare upon metahumanity.

By decree of the Council, dragonkind has no further conflict with metahumanity, and the Great Dragon Civil War is behind us. Hestaby has not been seen since January 9, 2074, when she was spotted conducting one final survey of Mount Shasta, now empty and lifeless.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! breach.ssn@gmail.com

by Breach

War is a complicated thing, and the more recent the war, the harder it is to break down, especially in the space I have here at SSN. JackPoint compiled a 26-page dossier on the event and it still doesn’t cover everything, but the fallout of this one is big enough that I think we all need to understand it, even as removed as we are from the battleground here in Seattle.

The official declarations came in early 2072, though tensions had been building long before – Aztlan has ever been an expansionist empire, and has been long-stymied to the north by the mutual defense agreement between the CAS and PCC, so south it has looked, swallowing up the nations of Central America until it became once again stymied in South America by the Awakened State of Amazonia; the combined power of Hualpa and Sirrug was enough to curb even the mighty Aztechnology – for a time.

I’m going to leave out most of the details – get your hands on JackPoint’s Storm Front data file if you want those – but to give a broad overview, the war was between not just two nations, but two megacorporations as well; Aztlan and Aztechnology are virtually inseparable, the welfare of one being intrinsically tied to the other, but Amazonia had Corporate aid as well, from Aztechnology’s decade-long PR rival, Horizon.

The war was an actual war, have no doubt of that, but it was not fought solely in the jungles and streets of South America; it was fought also on the global stage, in the hearts and minds of the world.

Horizon won early victories, casting Aztlan as the villains and sullying the good press Aztechnology usually enjoys with the masses, leading to painful UN sanctions that still affect us all to this day (ever wonder why the price of soycaf went up? This is why.) But in the end, Aztechnology’s PR branch won out, because when you can trumpet the defeat of a Great Dragon, it’s pretty easy to get the people on your side.

The fact that Horizon couldn’t find any real evidence and had to trump up their charges instead – and that AZ could prove that – didn’t hurt either.

Sirrug. The Destroyer. A dragon so powerful he almost single-handedly crippled the Aztlan military and turned what might have been a brief border-conflict into an all-out guerrilla war – and the first Great Dragon since the alleged death of Feuerschwinge to be felled by metahumanity (perhaps the actual first, if some of the whispers I hear in the shadows are true.)

Sure, there were some border changes (the Free City of Bogota is no longer quite so free, Aztlan enjoys a few hundred kilometres more of Amazonian jungle, and Aztlan Texas belongs to the Pueblos now, giving Aztlan only one northern neighbour instead of two), but Sirrug’s the major fallout of the war, the big takeaway – the Great Dragons might actually be killable. Now, there’s debate over whether Sirrug is actually dead – his body was never retrieved – but he has not been seen since, and was at the very least severely wounded.

Aztlan may possess the technology to rival the Great Dragons themselves, and that’s going to have lasting effect on the world.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! breach.ssn@gmail.com

by Breach

We come now to living memory for most of you, but in case you’ve been off-the-grid a while, let’s review.

Emergence is what Technomancers call the process of awakening to their power. It’s similar to Awakening, I am told, but altogether different at the same time. Resonance, like Magic, is tied to Essence, the theoretical measure of a person’s “wholeness”, but the two are incompatible; there are no examples of an Awakened Technomancer – in fact, Technomancers who have become infected by HMHVV and become Awakened have all reported the loss of their connection to Resonance – the are no Infected Technomancers. It’s one or the other, it seems.

2070 could be called the Year of Emergence; it’s not like Technomancers just suddenly appeared, but after MIT&T’s paper, the public finally knew about them and started seeing them everywhere, even where they were not. A hospital in Hong Kong explodes in June, and Mitsuhama blames it on terrorist Technomancers, introducing the idea of virtuakinetics to the public and spreading fear of their abilities. Mitsuhama would seize the opportunity to become the world’s leader in Technomancer research – research that was fueled largely by hefty bounties being paid on any Technomancers brought to the corporation for dissection or autopsy.

The dissections were not always done on deceased subjects.

Before Crash 2.0, “AI” was a rarely heard phrase, and the only true AIs in the Matrix were god-like entities capable of reshaping entire networks. The battle between the three seems to have wiped them all out, however, and there has been no sign of Deus, Megaera or Mirage since. However, within the distributed wireless Matrix, a new breed of AIs have developed – truly sentient, sapient programs with personalities and lives all their own. Their battle for rights closely mirrors that of Technomancers – a fight to be recognised as people, and as people deserving the same life, liberty and happiness the rest of us enjoy.

In 2071, the Pueblo Corporate Council granted the first SIN to a “Digital Intelligence”, and Evo and Horizon both quickly followed on their heels. These entities also remain the best refuge for virtuakinetics, even despite Horizon’s bad press after the Las Vegas incident (a protest turned riot turned deadly).

2071 also saw the rise and fall of Tempo, a horribly addictive street-drug that plagued most of the world (it hit Seattle especially hard). It took a coordinated effort from the Corporate Court and strategic strikes into Columbia and Amazonia to destroy the drug’s source, and LoneStar’s inability to keep the drug off the streets of Seattle cost them their contract for law enforcement in the metroplex.

The strikes into Bogota were very likely the ultimate root of one of the biggest stories of the 2070s: the Aztlan/Amazonia war – but we’ll get into that next week.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! breach.ssn@gmail.com

by Breach

In the aftermath of Crash 2.0, the world changed.

An assassin’s bullet made Nadja Daviar President of UCAS as a coup attempt by the terrorist group Alamos 20,000 is bloodily thwarted. The Tsmishian nation falls in a civil war and Sioux forces are required to stabilize the country, which becomes a protectorate of the Salish-Sidhe Council. Tir Tairngire’s government capitulates before collapsing into full anarchy, making the Council of Princes elected positions for the first time; Larry Zincan, a Tir Ork, is the first elected High Prince.

At a corporate level, Novatech merges with Transys-Erika to become NeoNET – once again, despite decades of disaster surrounding him, Villiers manages to save his seat on the Corporate Court. The Great Dragon Celedyr, major shareholder of Transys Neuronet, is named head of R&D at the new megacorp. NeoNET even manages to secure the bulk of the work to set up the Wireless Matrix Initiative, whose need was hastened by Crash 2.0.

Lucien Cross, CEO of Cross Applied Technologies – at the time a member of the Corporate Court – died in Crash 2.0, and his death sent ripples that destroyed the company; by March of 2065, CAT had lost its AAA status and his Court seat. Months later, Horizon, a media group formed after PCC’s takeover of Los Angeles, is granted the tenth and final seat on the Corporate Court. Two years later, Yamatetsu restructures, renaming itself Evo and giving us the Corporate Court we all know and loathe today.

By 2066, the Wireless Matrix is in place, and commlinks hit the market, forming the backbone of the Matrix we all inhabit today. AR becomes more pervasive than ever, with AR glasses and gloves becoming all-but-a-necessity for modern life (for those without implanted DNI, anyway).

The NAN thumb their noses at the Corporations in late 2066, with the Gaeatronics Geothermal Power Plant Network coming online, making the PCC, the Sioux nation, and the Salish-Sidhe Council completely energy-independent. Representing the vast bulk of native power, the move sparks protests throughout the NAN as corporate-run power plants are decommissioned and disassembled. The PCC would even go as far as to ban Aztechnology from its territory altogether, as tensions with Aztlan grow. (The absorption of the Ute nation into the PCC in early 2067 only further exacerbated tensions, as Aztlan for the first time began to worry about its northern border.)

2069 brings more destruction to Los Angeles as the earth quakes twice, while near Seattle, Mount Rainier erupts once more, making regular ashfall a common occurrence. NAN efforts focus on maintaining order in and rebuilding the beleaguered city.

The end of 2069 also brings MIT&T’s “Virtuakinetic Phenomenon”, a paper revealing the existence of Technomancers. Their “Patient V” disappears soon thereafter. Knowledge is power.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! breach.ssn@gmail.com

by Breach

Although Renraku had claimed to have SCIRE under control by mid-2061, in 2063 the UCAS military seizes control of the arcology and declares it “officially” liberated of the AI’s influence. But while the arcology was cleared, the world was not.

Official history will never tell you the story I am about to.

Deus survived Renraku’s assault and even the UCAS “cleansing”; somehow, in its experimentation on the arcology’s residents, the AI had discovered a way to write its source code into the minds of people, and engineered its escape through a thousand of these meat-drones, who would be numbered among the “otaku” who could connect to the Matrix without need for cyberdecks to process the sensory input.

Unfortunately for Deus, and fortunately for the rest of us, a second AI named Megaera, which Renraku had employed to combat Deus, was uploaded into the Network as well. The two factions of the Network fought a years-long shadow war among each other, each side recruiting more otaku into its ranks to replace losses.

Pax, one of the leading figures in Deus’s faction, made an alliance with the terrorist group Winternight, and plots were hatched. Winternight, with the aid of Deus’s Network, secured weapons of mass destruction both biological and nuclear; Sioux military forces foiled what appeared to be a nuclear attack, but it takes many months for a Corporate Court-sponsored team of counter-intelligence and shadowrunners to fully bring Winternight to heel.

And it was all too late.

Early in 2064, Novatech – Villiers’ megacorp du jure – announced an IPO of 20% of their stock for public sale to commence on November 2. The UCAS stock exchange undertook a massive upgrade project to prepare for the IPO – and this all played into Deus’s plans, which was to upload himself across the entire Matrix, taking over every connected device on the planet. And he very nearly succeeded.

Fortunately, Megaera had known of this plot and together with the Matrix’s first AI, the program Mirage (part of the Echo Mirage team from the first Crash, if you remember) they managed to stop Deus and thwart his plans – but the fallout of their struggle would ruin the entirety of the Matrix, bringing down the entire world network in what would come to be called Crash 2.0.

This time, it was not just networks, however – because Winternight was part of the plot as well. The Winter of ‘64, which started in August, was later proven to be the result of Winternight rituals, meant to cripple the world. As the three AIs battled in the IPO launch, Winternight launched its own attacks, unleashing a Crash-like virus named Jormungand that trapped many in the Matrix (some of whom would go on to become e-Ghosts), and killing many more.

The second prong of the Winternight strike is in the physical realm, as EMPs were set off to further cripple the worldwide network, and nuclear warheads detonated at fault-lines around the world in an attempt to tear the very land itself apart. The warheads, however, fail to detonate with the force science would expect, and the damage and fallout is largely contrained locally.

Someone is responsible for saving the world that day – it could have been much worse. I hope they know our gratitude.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! breach.ssn@gmail.com

by Breach

2060 opens with a quarantine around Renraku’s SCIRE arcology in Seattle as the AI Deus gets the decade going with a bang. Official reports give other reasons, but the Shadowlands reports have spread and most of us know the truth now – especially after Crash 2.0. Deus’s legacy is one of death and despair, and we still live with its aftershocks.

But the 60s weren’t satisfied to leave us with AIs and Matrix terror; 2061 brought the return of Halley’s Comet and what the UN dubbed “The Year of the Comet” – not knowing at the time what their appellation would come to mean. By the end of the year, global mana levels spiked higher than ever before as the comet becomes visible to the naked eye, punctuated by devastating mana storms and the advent of SURGE – SUdden Recessive Genetic Expression.

While SURGE was nowhere near the scale of Goblinization, the diversity and complexity of the changes it caused were greater than ever before. Anthropomorphic beings of all stripes were born or transformed during this period, and brought with it a trend of gene-tailoring that we still see today; one local megacorporation branch even has what appears to be a walking, talking teddy bear on its board! (I don’t even know if this individual is SURGE or gene-tailored.)

SURGE took many forms, not just animalistic; in India, thousands were transformed into the subrace now known as “Nartaki”, four-armed people resembling the Hindu god Vishnu (complete with unusual skin tones, typically blue or gold). Around the Mediterranean, hundreds of trolls transformed into one-eyed Cyclopses, while in the Amazon, SURGE proved to affect more than metahumanity as the grotesque Sangre del Diablo trees are born.

SURGE was not the only side-effect of spiking mana levels; as with all mana spikes (including the Awakening), the earth itself moved, quite literally – volcanoes erupted around the world, including the Pacific Ring of Fire; casualties of the many eruptions throughout the Pacific include the entire Japanese Imperial family except for the young Yasuhito, who would be officially crowned in 2062. In the wake of the devastation in Japan, Yasuhito would rescind the Yomi Island Decree, ending nearly 40 years of metahuman segregation. The aid of Japanese metahumans in the rebuilding would do much of the work to end 40 years of prejudice as well, but bigotry never truly dies.

In North America, the mana-spikes had two major political effects; an earthquake devastated Los Angeles in early December, and lack of response from the California Free State led the rioting city to turn to the Pueblo Corporate Council for support – nearly doubling the population of what was already the NAN’s super-power, and forever changing the racial mix in the PCC as well. In DeeCee, the Great Dragon Ghostwalker emerges from the astral rift left behind by Dunkelzahn’s death, and soon claims the Treaty City of Denver as its personal fiefdom.

The comet finally passed on April 1, 2062, and mana levels returned to normal, but the changes that came in its wake remain.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! breach.ssn@gmail.com

by Breach

2050 saw the rise of what we would really recognize as shadowrunners, when the truly portable cyberdeck was introduced to the market. Before then, cyberterminals were bulky and hard to transport – ranging from desk-sized cocoons down to bulky desktop tower units – but in 2050 the keyboard-sized cyberdeck was released and deckers hit the streets. Corporate warfare had always been a shadowy affair, but the ability to carry your hacking tools with you changed the rules of the game.

The early 2050s also saw the spread of the Universal Brotherhood and other neo-communist movements, preaching a philosophy of unity, equality, and belonging. They opened their doors to the SINless, and the SINless flocked to them like flies to honey – and in the end, it turns out that’s not a metaphor.

By 2055, the hives were widespread and the problem came to a head. The first obvious outbreak was in Chicago, where insect spirits moved boldly and openly and swarmed the city, leading the UCAS government to quarantine the city (citing “a new strain of VITAS” as the official reason.) In the shadows, we know that Seattle almost had a similar outbreak a few months earlier, but a team of shadowrunners investigating a seemingly unrelated murder managed to destroy the hive before its queen got started – the news reported the camps closed for “health reasons”.

Chicago was bad. I was there.

The city was cut off from the Matrix (nominally – some entrepreneurs set up illegal satellite hubs), and the world. Relief goods had to be shipped in from outside as access to food and medical supplies quickly dwindled. Gangs took over entire neighbourhoods and Knight Errant set checkpoints and roadblocks across the city. They even tried to nuke the hive, to no avail – the bomb didn’t even explode properly, contained somehow by who-knows-what. When the nuke didn’t work, they walled us in, and left us largely to fend for ourselves – fights over relief drops were common, and sometimes complete shipments were hijacked and sold off to the highest bidder by whatever corp or gang managed to get ahold of it.

Fortunately, we managed to get the word out and expose the cover-up. Once the world knew about the bugs, it was harder to write off the city as another disease outbreak and action was actually taken, though not often to the benefit of the people trapped there. The quarantine was lifted in 2058 after Strain III, an engineered bacterium that targeted the spirit-infected, was released. While the bugs were stopped, HMHVV-infected individuals were killed by the bacteria as well, and it never saw widespread use.

Chicago remains “Bug-Town”, a shell of its former self and still largely cut off from the world.

Next week we take a pit-stop to talk about the election of 2057. There’s a lot to unpack there.

Questions about history? Ask Breach! breach.ssn@gmail.com