Life in the Sixth World

by waywardshepherd

This is a series of short in-character responses to various aspects of life in the Sixth World that were discussed on our Shadowrun group's mailing list. The character doing all the talking here is Rake, a 50-year-old elf sharpshooter/face-man with a law degree and a checkered past. Standard disclaimer: Shadowrun ain't mine, Rake is.

7. Chapter 7 - NERPS!

Everybody loves their Nerps! Even a couple of decades down the road, I still find this whole business with nerps to be pretty amusing. I also have a relevant story to share, which is perhaps no surprise to you chummers by now. Anyways, between my time with Ares and my contract with the Vory, I managed a few years as a half-successful attorney who catered to the "don't ask us lots of questions" crowd. One of the nuttiest cases I ever took involved a civil suit between two deckers (we still called them that back then in the pre-wireless Matrix days) who were running some kind of convoluted financial scheme based on "nerps futures".

These were able to convince a bunch of poorly-informed slots that this ill-defined nerps thing was really going to take off, and built up a sort of Ponzi-style investment fraud around that. Turns our these two were also trying to stick it to each other the whole time, hoping to walk away with all the nuyen and leave the other holding the debt and the blame. Of course, the court wasn't privy to much of that: as far as the judge was concerned, this was a straightforward breech-of-contract suit between two former business partners.

The whole situation rapidly became an omnishambles, and I found myself wrapped up in it, looking for an an exit that wouldn't cost me too much. My client and I eventually got lucky: we found out the other party in the case had a bit of an addiction to BTL dreamchips and liked to frequent this one bunraku parlor while tripping on them. How did we find that out, you ask? Lawyer-client privilege, omae.

Long story short: we paid off an employee at the parlor to slip a customized personafix to the poor slot fighting us in court. My client had applied his wiz programming skills to make sure the software was both difficult to detect and had an expiration date so that it left little trace. The next court session, the other counsel was blindsided by their client who was suddenly over-sharing on the witness stand and unraveling their side of the case in the process. The jury took all of about a nanosecond to decide in our favor. Brilliant, smooth, and lucrative, like the best of plans.

Lessons learned, kiddos: don't be a beetlehead and be careful who you trust when your tripping/jacked in/gone astral.

-Rake