Stephen Kenson
Technobabel

Prologue

The year is 2059… Magic has returned to the world after an absence of thousands of years. What the Mayan calendar called the Fifth World has given way to the Sixth, a new cycle of magic, marked by the waking of the great dragon Ryumyo in the year 2011. The Sixth World is an age of magic and high technology. The age of Shadowrun. The rising magic has caused the Earth to Awaken. The ancient races have re-emerged, throwing off their human guises. First came the elves and dwarfs, born to human parents. Then came the orks and the trolls, some born different like the elves and dwarfs, others transformed, twisted from human form into their true selves as the rising magic activated their DNA. Dragons and other creatures out of fantasy appeared in the skies and in the wilderness. Unknown to the people of the twenty-first century, some of these folk and creatures out of fantasy recall an earlier world where magic reigned supreme, long before the earliest of recorded history. They know secrets that make them powerful in this new Age of Magic. The Sixth World is a strange blend of the arcane and the technological. The march of technology has become a race. The distinction between man and machine is blurred by the power of cybertechnology. Machine and computer implants are commonplace, a mating of flesh and machine. People of the Sixth World are a new breed; stronger, smarter, faster. Less human. The Matrix has emerged like a phoenix from the ashes of the old global computer network. A virtual world of computer-generated reality, a universe of electrons controlled and manipulated by those with the fastest cyberdecks and the hottest new code. In this world is stored all of the information hidden behind powerful data fortresses just waiting to be liberated by pirate computer users, deckers, who glide like shadows through the corporate and governmental databases. It is an era where information is power, where data and money are one and the same. Multinational megacorporations have replaced governments as the true superpowers. In a world where cities have grown together in sprawling maga-plexes of concrete and steel, walled-off corporate enclaves and arcologies are the modern castles from which corporate executives control masses of wageslaves for the profit of a lucky and ruthless few. But in the shadows of the corporate giants there are the SINless. Those without System Identification Numbers are not recognized by the machinery of society, by the bureaucracy so massive and complex that nobody understands it completely. Among the SINless are the shadowrunners, traffickers in stolen data and hot information, mercenaries of the street-discreet, effective, and untraceable. They are the agents of the corporations that battle for power and control in the concrete jungles. In the depths of the Matrix, strange new forces stir, beyond the knowing of any of the millions of people who access the vast network each day. The dealings of a powerful inventor from a forgotten age of magic and a multinational corporation with dreams of domination over the world market draw the attention of powers unknown to either. A new faction has entered the struggle of the Sixth World that is neither magic nor machine, but something else entirely…

The Matrix is a computer-generated, symbolic representation of the grid, the world information network. Instead of dealing with messy manual commands and procedures, the cyberdeck lets the user perform apparently real actions in cyberspace and then translates them into system operations. A person in the Matrix reaches out and touches the symbol representing a file. The deck's software knows the user wants to open that file. The machine performs all of the operations, freeing the user from the tedious task of having to enter those commands manually. Matrix imagery is imposed on the user by the grid in a "consensual hallucination," to use Dr. Hikita 's term. It's no more an ultimate reality than an animated vid-chip. These are computer-generated, graphic images. The systems and the functions those images represent are real, but the images are just that. They have no reality. -Dr. William Spheris, noted expert on Matrix design, from a tridcast interview on People to People, June 12, 2049. Not real? Not real!? Looks to me like the doc's never done a run. I'm tellin'you, when you're dartin' through the peaks of Mitsuhama's L.A. mainframe shaggin' combat systems that are doin' their bangest to roast you alive, plus you 're prayin' to Ghost your deck doesn't melt in your lap cause you got stupid, and you looks up and there in front a you is Death himself jacked in by the corp to rip your soul… babes, that's reality. -Decker "Sandman" commenting on Spheris' statement in the People to People interview