| The Denver SRMUX Megaplot Informational Webpage Welcome! |
| This is a small novella I am writing in conjuction with the runs, scenes and news posts I make on Denver SRMUX. It is not meant for IC information, but does provide some hooks and items of interest for other players, and well, it helps everyone follow the story. And yes, if you cant tell, this is my first attempt. |
| Chapter 1
Scrolling through his list of emails, Pierre, AKA Jean-Paul, looked past the corporate memos and the budget listings for this quarter, looking for a very specific email. He deleted several, and then found it. "Planning for Financial Success!!" Spam-email was still around, although automatic filters were quite good. This email, though, was specially allowed to get through his spam mail filters. He opened it. He was greeted with the standard spiel about saving money and earning $$$, as if anyone wanted to earn American dollars anymore. It was quite bland. Pierre didn’t even read it, he instead copied one section of text, a paragraph, over to another program. It was one of the oldest kinds of code, hiding something inside something else, the real message behind a seemingly benign note, letter, or in this case, spam email. It didn’t rely on complicated keys or encryption algorithms, in its simplicity and obviousness was its security. He decoded it inside a few seconds using the special program brought from Quebec. "S to increase activity in D. + to use intermediates. Ut Cnl 1. NA wants lcl assts blt. JM." JM. That was Jean-Marie. So, an order from the top. To Pierre/Jean-Paul, this message made sense. S was always Seraphim. D, Ut and Cnl were context abbreviations. To someone working on another of CATCo's 'strategic outlooks', they might have meant something different, but to Jean-Paul, D was Denver, Ut was Ute, and Cnl was Council. The number 1 signified priority. And NA - that was Nicholaus Aurelius - wanted a cadre of local runners to be built up. + was obvious, that was Cross Applied, or sometimes Lucien himself. But probably not this time. Jean-Paul ran the cleaner program through the message and the original email. It was deleted permanently, the small sector of the memory ruined. A small price to pay for message security, and in the off chance Jean-Paul ever ran out of room, it was a simple task to get the memory replaced. He now had the go ahead to take an aggressive intelligence stance against Ute. Before he was flown into Denver, working for Cross Advanced Electronics, he'd been briefed about his particular overview. Ute was the target of Cross now, a whole nation that, deep down, didn’t want to use UCAS or CAS technology or products. Quebec might not be a big step away from UCAS, but the language was different, Quebec didn’t get involved in the wars, and most importantly, Quebec was a brother in arms against the economic and political battle with the overbearing drunken Uncle Sam. So Ute was ripe for the picking. Cross just has to get there before Aztlan or the Nippon Corps do. With the current turmoil inside the country, there would be a lot of people trying to back different parties in the hope they would come out on top. Sir Nick wants local shadow runners, does he? Jean-Paul wasn’t sure where he stood on Mr. Aurelius. As a long-term Seraphim, Jean-Paul was fiercely loyal to Lucien Cross, and Jean-Marie. Aurelius swaggering in with his bags of money and his insider knowledge of Ares, not to mention a number of Ares subsidiaries and noteworthy personnel was quite useful for the company. On the other hand, Aurelius brought...unsavory methods, perhaps was the best way to describe them. And the man didn’t know how to speak French, he used a chip. It really was almost a dilution of the ... Well that was isolationism talking, wasn’t it? And shadow runner assets could be quite useful. But they would have to be located, tested, groomed...Jean-Paul wouldn’t want them in on something as delicate as the Ute deal without knowing they were both capable, trustworthy and above all, discreet. |