Ends of the Matrix

7/28/2019 Ends of the Matrix

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The Ends of the MatrixSetting & Background

By Frank Trollman


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Table of ContentsForeword 1

What This Is and Why It Was Done ..................................... 1

Four Questions 3

Why Datajacks? ................................................................... 3

Essence: Just Do It ........................................................... 4

Minds On Sleeves: Nanoware Replacing Cyberware ....... 4

Getting the Most of your Datajack.................................. 5

Why Crime? ......................................................................... 5

A Revolution in Data Collection, a Crisis of Storage ........ 6

A Cacophony of Echoes ................................................... 7

Why Hackers? ...................................................................... 7

The Meat in the Machine: Power for Precision ............... 8

Modern Data Management: The I and the Storm ........... 8

Why Money? ....................................................................... 9

Electronic Nuyen: The Ledger in the Sky.......................... 9

Other Currencies: , $, ................................................ 10

Debits and Credits: Debt Slavery and the Credit

Spiral ............................................................................. 10

Perceiving the Matrix: Seeing It Before It Sees You 12

Reality Filters: Wheat and Chaff ........................................ 12

Augmented Reality: Information Superimposed on Life ... 12

Virtual Reality: Sense Data Replaced ................................. 13

BTL: Directly Stimulating the Brain .................................... 13

The RAS Override: Not Always Your Friend ....................... 14

The Look and Feel of Operating Systems........................... 15

Blocking out the Matrix: Full Circle .................................... 16

Hacking in a World of Perfect Encryption 17

Vaguely Decent Protection: Asymmetric Encryption ........ 17

Passing Notes: Encryption, Reception, and

Retransmission .................................................................. 18

Breaking Encryption: If You Can't Win, Cheat ................... 18

Protecting Unencrypted Data: Using Your Inside Voice .... 19

Hacking Hardware: Meat and Machine 20

Hacking A Lone Device Or Empty Network ........................ 20

Hacking An Orphan Brain .................................................. 21

Hacking An Occupied Network .......................................... 21

Intrusion Countermeasures: Don't Go In There 22

IC Can't Team Up ............................................................... 22

IC Can't Come After You .................................................... 23

Hurtful IC: Black and Gray ................................................. 23

Pseudo-IC: Halberstam's Babies ........................................ 23

The Infrastructure and Topology of the Matrix 25

High Density Signal and Low Density Signal ...................... 25

Cables and Satellites: The Spine of the World................... 25

LEO and Up ................................................................... 26

Connections ....................................................................... 26

Servers .......................................................................... 26

Wireless Communication: The Web Between ................... 27

Personal Area Networks ............................................... 27

Wireless Terrain ............................................................ 27

Growing Up Wireless: Culture and the Matrix 29

Move Your Body: Traveling in the Flesh ............................ 29

Matrix Dialects: 133+ and lol ........................................ 29

Consumer Culture: You Are What You Buy ....................... 30

Life With RFID: It's Almost Like Trust ............................ 31

Enforcing the Matrix: I Fought the Law(s) ......................... 31

A GOD from the Machine: The Grid Overwatch

Division.......................................................................... 32

WRIA: The World Recording Industry Army .................. 32

Technomancers 33

Fantasy and Science Fiction: Technomancers and

Theme................................................................................ 33

The Song and the Silence: Resonance and Dissonance ..... 34

Streams ......................................................................... 34

Networks ....................................................................... 35

Technomantic Networks and You ..................................... 36

Technomantic VR: Ride the Lightning ........................... 36

Weird Places: Resonance Nodes and Realms................ 37


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Sprites ................................................................................ 37

Artificial Intelligences and Free Sprites ...................... 38

Paragons ....................................................................... 38


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Foreword"Let's go talk to our Matrix expert and get him to do whatever it is that he does."

What This Is and Why It Was Done

The Ends of the Matrix v4.01 is a set of full replacement rules for the Matrix of Shadowrun, 4th edition. That means that these rules

are intended to be used instead of the Wireless World (SR4, pgs. 206 240) and instead of Unwired (all pages). It is not a full

replacement of Shadowrun world story, so books like Emergence and System Failure stand on their own. This piece is admittedly

quite long, but when you factor the number of pages of material that it replaces, it's not that bad.

This work is different in tone from other Shadowrun books, because the flavor text is not written in character. This book is written

with a voice directed at the players of the game, and with good reason. The matrix is an integral part of the lives of every character

in the game world from birth, and it really isn't reasonable to expect to find material that the characters would consent to read that

wouldn't make assumptions about basic levels of matrix familiarity that the players doubtlessly do not have (not living in that world)

While astral space is something that a majority of characters in 2071 have never experienced, matrix interaction really isn't. In

addition, this is a set of optional replacement rules, so the author has chosen to break the 4th wall constantly in an effort to show

the reader both how the system works and why it works that way instead of some other way. After all, the Matrix subsystem has

undergone an almost complete overwrite upwards of 9 times already (SR1, Virtual Realities, SR2, VR 2.0, SR3, Matrix 3, Target:

Matrix, SR4, Unwired), so it seems clear that the number of ways that the Matrix can be conceived of and modeled in-game is

tremendously large justifying the model here is probably necessary.

The question is raised however of why do this at all? And the answer is because I honestly am not happy with the Matrix rules as

they stand, and do not believe that they hold up to careful observation. The first insult thrown at anyone who complains about rules

(or any intellectual property) is along the lines of If you don't like it, why don't you make something better? Well, hopefully I have.

And while I lack access to a playtesting crew or editor, I don't think there are presently any giant holes in this rule set. If there are,

then that will be a shame, and I will humbly accept my plate of delicious crow.

So what precisely is wrong with the Matrix rules in SR4 such that they need to be completely rewritten from the ground up (again,for the 10th time)? Simply: the Matrix rules in SR4 do not hold up when people attempt to push them or exploit them. Even authors

of Unwired have described it as Six parts Hollywood hackers, six parts modern tech, zero parts playtesting by a powermunchkin.

And that's a shame. Fundamentally, I believe that the matrix rules need to be more solid than do the rules of other subsystems.

Unlike magic or car driving or whatever, the Matrix is predicated on the idea of the acting characters actually knowing the rules and

deliberately attempting to exploit holes in them. Hacking is about finding power exploits, so if power exploits exist in the rules it is

actually counter immersive for characters in the world to not use them.

So the basic SR4 rules contain the exploits of:

Script Kiddy (where you can wave your credstick around instead of actually having any skill to hack effectively), Hackastack (where you can benefit from having multiple iterations of hardware to bypass structural limits of personal identity), Drop-Out (where you can choose to segregate yourself from the matrix and still hack effectively despite being unhackable in

return), and

AgentSmith (where you can gain extra actual actions from your pocket book). The net result is that characters with no technicaskills at all can throw some money on the table and hack as if they were dozens or hundreds of hackers at no actual risk to

themselves or anything they care about.

That's bad, because the entire concept of a hacker entails the fact that if they could do that then they would. It is the hope that

these presented rules will not have problems like that, or that if they do that at the very least they will not produce a such perfect

storm which relegates the concept of the Matrix Specialist to the dustbin of history.


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Throughout the four editions of Shadowrun, no rule-set has been changed more dramatically nor inspired more complete house-

rules than the Matrix section. And this is unsurprising, because the Matrix touches upon something which is somewhat real

computers while at the same time living entirely in the realm of deeply speculative fiction.

But more so than that, the Matrix has always had a tremendously difficult problem with abstraction of action. That is, it is entirely

possible for the game to model every single pull of the trigger on a gun, every invocation of a spell, every turn of a car but it is not

possible to model every machine language command that flashes by a hacker. Every time you blink your eyes, a quadrillion

processes crank through to completion in the Matrix. Equations are solved, numbers added and lost, and even listing all of them that

had passed during a heart's beat would be longer than every book ever written. So actions in the Matrix have to be abstracted. Andyet, no past or current edition has had a consistent degree of approximation, which leads to painful and exploitable wrinkles in the

game system.

At the beginning, a computer system that an NPC used was modeled as a separate "room" for each arbitrary part of the computer

(I/O, Storage Memory, Graphics Card, whatever), while the computer that the PC used was modeled as a series of attributes which

modified the "Decker's" matrix icon (Where I/O was a location in NPC computers, it was an attribute in PC computers). In 4th

edition, all processor power is abstracted and programs run arbitrarily somewhere in networks. Except that you can also choose to

count specific hardware as unique networks running their own copies of programs, and then each of the networks gets to take

individual actions in the Matrix based on how many completely arbitrary divisions you've decided to have in your arbitrary computer

network.

What is presented here is not the only method to realize the Matrix. Indeed, there are literally an infinite number of ways you could

imagine it. Like Astral space, the Matrix does not exist; but unlike Shadowrun's magic, the Matrix isn't even loosely based upon

folklore. What is here is hopefully a manner of realizing the Matrix which is consistent, playable, and fun. After all, if the rules are

playable and they agree with the presented fluff to the extent that unplanned events can be extrapolated from the rules then we

can get back to what's really important: playing the game.

But before we can get some answers, we are going to need to formulate our questions.


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Four Questions Why is it that on all other nights we drink a full bodied Merlot and on this night we drink this sweet nasty stuff?

Within the game of Shadowrun the player characters drill holes into their heads in order to create a good mind/machine interface so

that they can better hack into secure computer systems while running around cyber ninja style so that they can complete espionage

missions and go back to the seedy dives that they live in and take the electronic currency that they are paid in and spend what they

don't squander on food and rent and buy black market gadgets that let them be even better at espionage and/or shooting people in

the face for money so that they can be a bigger noise in freelance crime and eventually retire to a tropical island with a Mercedes

full of cheerleaders. A lofty profession and a noble life goal to be sure, and it makes for some very nice storytelling and some

entertaining characters.

But while one can make a very good story out of just that information, it's insufficient for the needs of a role playing game. Because

while when you or I are sitting down to write a novel we can have the characters do any part of that simply by typing a sentence that

says that they do, in a cooperative storytelling game it is nowhere near that easy. A cooperative story has a world and rules and

characters have to justify their actions in reference to them. A story that I write myself could have the main character do anything at

all at whim, I can seriously write Jack-O sprouted wings and flew as easily as I could write that he bought a new commlink or hid

from a security drone. In a role playing game that shit does not fly.

Which brings us to the central four questions we have to answer about the world before we can create a rule set that could

generate that world: we have to ask ourselves why people get those data jacks. We have to ask ourselves why people can break into

supposedly secure computer systems with them. We have to ask ourselves why people who commit crimes over and over again

against the most powerful entities on the planet for a living exist at all. And finally we have to ask ourselves why someone who

breaks into and alters computers belonging to secure and powerful installations as his actual job gives an entire rat's ass about being

paid in electronic currency and still lives in a leaky apartment next to some dwarven prostitutes. Once we can answer these

questions, we can make a rule set that allows and reinforces our answers and we'll have a game that logically plays out the kinds of

stories that we intend to tell.

Why Datajacks?"It's going to be like getting a hole drilled into your head. Probably because they are going to drill a hole into your head."

What exactly a datajack is capable of has changed dramatically over the years. In 1st edition a datajack would by itself allow a

character to send and receive their entire sense data worth of information through a cable on a continuous feed. But then of course

it also cost half an Essence point to get a cellular phone in your head. Nowadays a datajack is much more limited in scope and any

device you happen to have can probably double as a cell phone if you really care. We can pretend that this all works together in

some sort of continuous march of technology from 2050 to 2070 but the truth is that the Matrix's rule system has changed

unrecognizably about 7 times between 1989 and the present day and the understanding of technology in general has likewise

changed. In 1989, the prospect of having a really small phone was supposed to be a big deal. And yeah, in today's world they already

make phones that are so small that they are hard to use and the novelty has really worn off. Making a phone feel "high tech" meanscombining it with other things, and thus the "phone" became an afterthought ability of a variety of devices in the 4th edition rules.

Nevertheless, people in Shadowrun live in a world where getting cybernetic enhancements is something with a real and measurable

cost. You lose Essence. This is a real problem, which could potentially even cause you to die. Also, computers can and do interact

directly with the brains of people who don't have any cybernetic enhancement at all in the world of 2071 so what exactly the

purpose of the datajack is somewhat... open for interpretation. We've made some interpretations for the purposes of this

document, but remember that this marks a core point of divergence with other Matrix writeups. For the purposes of this document,

the biggest advantage of a datajack is relative signal privacy and reliability. You can put nanopaste on your head or even your

fingertips and get the same Direct Neural Interface (DNI), you can even get the same benefits from just pointing some trodes at your


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brain. But any external devices can have the signals they send and receive to and from your brain interrupted or even intercepted by

shady types. For this reason, people who handle data that is in any way important are highly encouraged to get a data jack.

Or at least they were. In Shadowrun's current 2070s run, a lot of people have upgraded to internal commlinks. That's fine, the

mind/machine interfaces are still internal and relatively safe from shadiness. But a lot of the older stuff and the equipment designed

to interface with older people (like research scientists for example) will have inputs designed for people with datajacks. So if you

want to do espionage for a living, you probably want a datajack as well.

Essence: Just Do It"It isn't wiz at all. It's kind of shitty actually. But it is essence friendly."

Essence doesn't make any sense at all. There, I've said it. And I stand by this assessment. The datajack is and has been so

unbelievably powerful in every edition that it's really hard to justify an Essence cost for much of anything. Why would anyone get

cyberarms when they could chop their arms off (losing no Essence) and then just wear some robot arms and run them through their

datajacks? If Essence actually existed, and yet the Datajack seriously allowed you to send out any output you wanted, you're damn

skippy that people would do that sort of thing. And yet, in Shadowrun they don't. They don't for no reason. That's important.

Essence is a game balance concern, not a rational one.

Equipment Spotlight: Bone Lacing

Bone Lacing is the classic example of a piece of cyberware that costs essence for no reason. And that's fine. In the case of BoneLacing, it would be entirely "realistic" for it to cost nothing at all. Not only does it not interact with your nervous system in any

way, it doesn't even replace a single cell. Your Calcium Phosphate matrix isn't "alive" in any meaningful fashion, it's just a dead

mineral scaffold that your body happens to hang on like a fleshy coat. Even more damning, Bone Lacing actually costs more

essence when it's made out of something that is more awesome. That's absurd but it's also good game balance. You should pay

more Essence when you get a better bonus, the fact that you're replacing the same amount of stuff that isn't even your living

tissue in either case is beside the point.

And that's the point.

Minds On Sleeves: Nanoware Replacing Cyberware

"What if I just painted a picture of setting my spiritual wellbeing on fire? Isn't that enough?"

Not only do people in the Shadowrun future apparently have the ability to replace almost all DNI in their body with their datajacks,

they can potentially replace their datajacks with external devices which take advantage of their brain power with phreaking and

induction. This allows people to put on trode nets and stand inside of data stalls and connect their brains directly to the computer

without ever once getting a hole drilled into their head, without spilling even a single monad of precious bodily fluids. And yet

people still get those datajacks in 2070 for some reason.

From a world-design standpoint, people are willing to spend Essence on Datajacks essentially because whatever it is that they get

from a Datajack is better than slapping an Essence-free trode net on. If it wasn't better, it wouldn't cost Essence. That's the behind-

the-scenes metagame reasoning, which unfortunately is the real reasoning. But that doesn't make a good a story, so it is imperative

that there be an in-game justification for this. Granted, the in-game reasoning is in reality backformed from the game balance

concerns, but that doesn't mean that the characters have to know that.

We could come up with a number of reasons why this is the case, but the ones that are going to be assumed here are security and

mobility. A cybernetic interface is in fixed spatial relationship with your brain; you can turn upside down and get shaken and your

datajack will stay in. A similar treatment to a trode net is quite likely to scramble the signal for a moment even if it's taped down

pretty well. Heck, with its very low signal rating it'll be likely permanently on the fritz the first time someone throws up a jamming

field a problem which a fiberoptic cable running from your datajack to a high-signal commlink won't have. But perhaps more

importantly, anything going into your brain is going to have to be in Brain Text and in the world of 2071 that's essentially

unencrypted because anyone who matters can decode signals sent to or from a metahuman brain.


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Equipment Spotlight: Nanotrode Paste

Nanopaste trodes are a set of nanomachines that can be painted on to your body which uses the powers of induction to transfer

information into and out of your head. In many ways, it's l ike having a datajack that you never had to spend any essence for,

using very short distances and very weak signals to approximate the privacy of an internal link. However, it does also have

limitations which make true hackers openly dubious about the stuff. First of all, it's a paste on the outside of your body, which

means that the connection becomes sketchy if you're doing vigorous or stressful things. That's not a huge problem in a club scene

if extreme moshing causes your AR feed to fritz for a second or even six then you won't actually have time to get to edge the of

the pit to complain before the visuals come back. But of course when you're running through an Aztechnology compound trying

to spoof cameras in real time a few seconds of static is unacceptable. And of course, the signals involved are very weak, that's

the point, and that makes it inherently susceptible to being jammed out by magnetic fields and strong language.

But more importantly still, nanopaste is still an external system even if it is very close to the brain it is not directly connected. Any

data flying in and out is still going to be in plain brain text. Anyone with a sufficient receiver can see what your trode link is

sending you. Anyone with a sufficient transmitter can send mental commands the same as had they come from your own mind.

Getting the Most of your Datajack

"I'm tired of just radiopathically sending text messages."

The 4th edition Datajack sends and receives computer gibberish to and from your brain. And that's it. It does not allow you to

"interact" with that information in any way other than that allowed by the information itself (in stark contrast to the Datajack

descriptions in 2053, but whatever). So you can send out any text or computer commands you want, but by itself the datajack does

not allow you to receive any meaningful feedback on how your actions went over.

Having computer gibberish inserted into your brain is not always completely useless. Indeed, if that computer gibberish has already

been specifically formatted to interact properly with your brain's informational retrieval system (as is the case with a Know Soft),

then you can in fact proceed as if you had gained useful information from the impulses coming up your datajack. But that sort of

formatting is apparently so difficult that chips with Linguasofts and Knowsofts cost thousands of nuyen and people are OK with that.

Systems exist that allow whatever computer data you are interacting with to be transformed into sensory stimuli that you can

interact with in a more traditional fashion. After all, the primary visual cortex can be stimulated directly as easily as any other part of

the brain. However, this is very specifically not the preferred method of getting things done in any version of Shadowrun.Information sent in brain text is essentially unencrypted, and people with receivers can pick that up. Projecting sensory

information directly into the brain is therefore a security risk. Other people can watch what you see.Equipment Spotlight: The Display Link

People who want to really use anything other than a Know-Soft with their Datajacks are advised to get a Display Link. The display

link converts computer impulses into visual stimuli, which is plenty for most people to get their jobs done. Sure, a "real" hacker is

going to want to cut the crap and get an implanted simrig, but for the average user the ability to send brain impulses out and

literally "see" the computer returns is more than plenty.

But the thing that people are really excited about is the external display link. A person without a cybernetic DNI can still get

information sent to them with relative secrecy by skipping the entire part where the information is broadcast in brain text at thei

head and is instead encrypted right up until the point that it is displayed on the insides of the person's glasses. The person canjust plain read it, and there's no signal to intercept.

Why Crime?

"Why yes, Big Brother is watching. However Big Brother has ADHD, so I'm going to sit here drinking my soykaf like any of a billion

wage slaves are doing right now. And then Big Brother will get bored. And distracted. And then I'm going to do anything I

want."


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One of the core conceits of the Shadowrun game is that crime is possible, and that crime pays. Given the wealth of potential satellite

oversight (just look at Google Earth in 2007 imagine the law enforcement version in 2070), and the incredibly daunting task that is

cracking through somewhat decent encryption, it is entirely reasonable to project a future where getting away with any crime at all

requires some sort of elaborate social engineering to pull inside jobs that play off of secret limits of the anti-crime system. But this

isn't Minority Report or any other Phildickian setup, this is Shadowrun. And in Shadowrun: bad people shoot other people right in

the face for money and get away with it to do it again.

So here are some quasi-plausible justifications for that:

A Revolution in Data Collection, a Crisis of Storage

"I'm sorry, I seem to have misplaced my 'give-a-damn'."Throughout human history the creation of data has exceeded the capacity to store it. It starts in infancy where a babe simply doesn't

remember every single thing she sees, and it continues on through the Age of Bronze where not every conversation or every play

gets written down, and it continues today. It could very plausibly continue in the Shadowrun future and for the sake of playability

we're assuming that it does. The cameras in the world exceed the number of people who could watch them, and they collectively

generate more video footage every day than can be stored on all the world's storage media.

And that is amongst the things that makes crime possible. When you go to the bathroom, a computer is measuring the mass of your

deposit. When you flee a crime scene you're being watched by every store front you pass. But likely as not, none of that informationwill actually be saved anywhere. Some of it may be, but it quite likely isn't organized enough to actually identify you as the

perpetrator (of the crime or the leavings). More importantly, information getting deleted isn't really news. If 18 minutes are

missing or overwritten by elven pornography, that's not weird.

Furthermore remember that in the world of 2071, it is entirely possible that a "legitimate" information request from investigating

authorities will simply be refused. There's nothing in it for a Wuxing or Aztechnology subsidiary to share their security footage with

Evo security to assist in the investigation of a crime against Evo or one of its subsidiaries. Corporations, especially major corporations

are in competition, but beyond that they actually are regularly committing crimes against one another. Even showing what footage

Aztechnology has of an event would be tipping its hand to Evo and it isn't going to compromise itself that way under normal

circumstances. Further, it is in the interests of Aztechnology to make investigation and enforcement as expensive a proposition as

possible for Evo as this reduces the company's ability to compete with them in other areas. So even when data is successfully stored,there's no reason to believe that investigating authorities will ever be allowed to actually see that data which when you think

about it is a lot like that data being lost or simply not recorded in the first place.Equipment Spotlight: The Security Camera

No single device in a modern or science fiction setting causes as much paranoia (both justified and not) as the security camera.

And this should come as no surprise, for regardless of what kind of force ratios your team can bring to the party at an instant of

your choosing, the fact is that the amount of force that any particular society can bring against an individual is practically infinite

in any modern or futuristic setting (as opposed to medieval settings with barest nods to science fiction window dressing

like Warhammer 40K). So any object which promises the heavy hand of eventual retribution by the whole of society against

transgressors should be a scary thing, and indeed in Shadowrun it is.

There are three main camera setups that one must concern yourself with in the day to day criminal operations of Shadowrun: thesolitary camera; the networked camera; and the low resolution camera.

1. The solitary camera is exactly what it sounds like: it's a trid recorder that is completely self contained. It's fairly trivial tosmash it with a baseball bat or hack it into oblivion and since it's entirely self contained that's the end of any data the

recorder had on you.

2. The network camera is attached to a network, which means that destroying the device itself won't do anything at all to thetrid already recorded. It'll have to be hacked if you want to get rid of the data already stored (but good news: hacking any

part of the network will allow you to edit any of the data from any of the recorders on the system).


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3. And finally the low resolution camera takes basic video and sends it one way by low density signal to some storage systemthat may be very far away. You can do anything you want to the recorder itself and it won't do a thing to any video already

recorded and sent unless you get direct access to the storage systems (wherever they are). Fortunately for the criminally

inclined, this last type takes the kind of crappy security camera footage that we get in 2008 so the security forces who go

back and review it will have such wonderful information as two orks and a human committed this crime.

A Cacophony of Echoes

"OK. Everyone who agrees that I'm Jennifer Woodyard, raise their hand."

Your SIN, your driver's license, your home owner's insurance, your medical records, and really every other thing about you are

stored electronically in the Matrix. It's like your credit report today. And like your credit report (or wikipedia), pretty much anyone

can put stuff into the data stream at any time. You can challenge the data in court and maybe get it changed, but by and large stuff

just accumulates in the data stream. Because of the fact that things aren't always correct and some people are total tools, the

system is equipped with failsafes to try to weed out incorrect data. Data which is repeated many times in many places (or in

important or "trustworthy" places) is considered to have a high veracity. Data which shows up only a few times or in very sketchy

places is treated as having a lower veracity. If data conflicts, the system automatically chooses to believe higher veracity information

at the expense of lower veracity information.

An example of this in action might be someone getting your name wrong on a delivery of NERPS. Your name is something like Chris

McGee, but on the invoice it says Chris Maggie. Now off in the Matrix somewhere there's a little piece of data that your name is in

fact Chris Maggie. But fortunately for you, your UCAS driving license and your AzTech Tech diploma are both in your real name. So in

the future when machines check your name, the right name will have a higher veracity and displace the wrong name. The Chris

Maggie typographical error will only show up again after low intensity searches which stop after the first couple of hits. So the "Chris

Maggie" spelling may continue to haunt you for the rest of your life, getting picked up by cheap companies that purchase sales

information from NERPS distribution; gradually gaining veracity as it is passed from company to company and appearing in more and

more places in the Matrix but it probably won't.

This can be used by criminals (that's you). Because of the complete lack of a central authority of Truth, you can actually create

truths that happen to suit you. If you treat something as true long and loudly enough, everyone else will treat it the same way. While

archaic considerations like "statute of limitations" are out the window, the fact is that if you can fool the world into believing that

you've always lived in Nag Kampuchea for a while, the world will continue to believe it pretty much indefinitely. The world of 2071

has an extremely short attention span and you actually can reinvent yourself with sufficient effort.

Why Hackers?

"There are people who can sling a spell or swing a sword and I'm sure that on some level what they do is fine. But in my world, I'm

the best you'll ever see."

A core conceit of Shadowrun has always been that a savvy matrix expert is an essential member of a Shadowrunner team. That

means that the Hacker character's skills and attributes have to be important; it means that the Hacker's contribution to the team has

to matter; it means that the Hacker is not easily replaced with a contact or a device that says TraceBuster on the side. And it also

means that Hackers have to be able to be able to do their job (breaking into a secure computer system) in a reasonably short periodof time so that they don't end up making the story grind to a halt. In short, hacking has to work absolutely nothing like it works right

now in 2008. There are of course a tremendously large number of ways that hacking could work in 2071, but almost all of them are

inconsistent with the story demands we have put on the system: hackers must be resource starved hooligans living in seedy dives

who hack things on the fly during ninja assaults. Any of the many realistically plausible models that involve the be all and end all of

the hacking race being very large sums of money, or of hacking taking very long times, or of hacking being done from a basement in

Formosa are all incompatible with the stories we want to tell, and are thus not going to be incorporated into the speculative fiction.

In short: possible mechanics and topologies that lead to that are wrong irrespective of considerations of actual physics and

computational theory.


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The Meat in the Machine: Power for Precision

"Can I run some of these programs on your sister? She's like a little porcelain doll."

How powerful are the computers in Shadowrun? Very powerful. But exactly how powerful has never really been explained. And

honestly, it shouldn't be. Computing is very fast, very accurate, and very awesome. But for whatever reason, human brains are still

employed as an important adjunct. This is itself not particularly surprising. The human brain is in total capable of over 100 trillion

computer instructions every second. That's an amount which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. It's a very, very large amount of processor

power, and although a tremendous amount of it is being "wasted" in subconscious thought about whether you'd enjoy a Blue

Donut or whatever, it still has more total processing power than any device in Shadowrun. Computers aren't really ever more

powerful than a human brain, they are more dedicated and more precise. A computer can get the same answer to a question over

and over again without ever being wrong (or creative) and that right there is its strength and its weakness.

In Shadowrun history the Cyberterminal was created in 2029 and it is established that no existing computer system could possibly

stand against someone using one. This isn't because the cyberterminal was a revolutionarily faster and more powerful computer

capable of crushing other computers with its virtual biceps (though it was), it's because the cyberterminal was cybernetic it literally

plugged into the brain of the user. And it crushed other computers not because thinking instructions is so much faster than typing

them (though it is), but because a cyberterminal actually uses part of the human's brain in its computer operations. That alone gives

it a processing reserve that is well over one hundred thousand times what a super computer was capable of when Shadowrun was

first written.

Shadowrun progressed through the existence of the cyberterminal to the cyberdeck: a portable computer which was nonetheless

able to utilize the powers of the human brain. It was the standard in 2050 and for the next 15 years it remained on the cutting edge

for Hackers. And that's where the history gets confusing. Because it's entirely possible that at some point the people in Shadowrun

managed to create something portable that was in fact more powerful than a human brain. And at that point, the human

really is just a vestigial appendage whose purpose is to press the Go button. But while that's admirably dystopic and fits into the

overall cyberpunk genre fairly well, the game still centers on the player characters who are still "just" individual humans. The

moment they become obsolete, the game is over. Not just your particular campaign, but indeed the entire game of Shadowrun. So

we're constrained to believe that in fact the human element is still vital to the operation of high end computing. That's fine, there

can be many revolutions in computing power without actually pushing the one hundred trillion computer instructions per second

threshold.

So when we get to the Commlink, the one thing we know didn't happen is that the Commlink did not replace the need for it to be

connected to a serious metahuman brain in order to orchestrate enough processing power together to do real cybercombat. We

know this did not happen because we are still playing the game.

Equipment Spotlight: The Math Subprocessor

Many people have asked why one would bother with a math subprocessor as a cybernetic enhancement. After all, a handheld

calculator has a stupidly fast and accurate look-up table for approximating trigonometric functions and you can jolly well just

hook such a function up to your datajack and get the answers to any reasonable "math" question in less time than it takes to ask

it.

The answer is that a Math Subprocessor is not a calculator that feeds you answers. It's more like a nerve staple that forces part of

your brain to perform mathematical analysis on demand. That's why it applies to things like signal jamming, it literally turns partof your brain into an incredibly powerful bio-computer slaved to the tasks you designate for it. In some ways it actually makes

you less intelligent: you are seriously using less of your brain on a moment to moment basis. But when the chips are down and

you need to extrapolate a wave function or predict the results of a three-body problem, the Math Subprocessor is your friend.

Modern Data Management: The I and the Storm

"The falling cherry blossoms symbolize both the beauty and the transience of life. The blossoms fall as men fall and remind us of

our mortality. Also every one of them is a music player I've harnessed together into a giant parallel processing computing gestalt

for the singular purpose of calculating how to make your life a little bit more transient."


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The Wireless Matrix heralds a new paradigm of computer use. Not necessarily in computer power, but in utility. In the real world of

2007 parallel processing is a difficult problem; but by 2070 it is the norm.

With so much computing power all over everything it is a wonder that anything gets done. Indeed, quite often things don't get done

simply because the instructions to do so are buried so deeply in lists of things to do that they just never get looked at.Equipment Spotlight: the Toaster

Computing in Shadowrun has reached a level of abstraction that is truly epic. The toaster on the shelf not only has a computer in

it, but it has processor cycles to spare after calculating the proper toasting methods based on the thickness and consistency of

your bread compared with your stated preferences regarding toast. Not just that it could be utilized as a calculator or day planner

while not heating bagels but that even while in use it could potentially be added to a network and contribute helpfully to the

entire operation of a network. The implications of this are far reaching: most importantly it means that the actual amount

of total processing power available to your network is both large and unknowable.

Seriously, it's unknowable. This is a boon to both the Player of the Hacker (as it means that he doesn't have to keep track of

exactly how much memory he has to play with), and to the Hacker himself (as it means that there's an unknowably large number

of ways to sneak data and access into the networks that he is infiltrating).

Why Money?

Why rob a bank? That's where the money is.Perhaps the most extraordinary claim of all in the annals of hackerdom is the idea that these people get paid in electronic currency

to break the laws of society and change electronic records. The extremity of this claim is quite apparent: people are breaking the

rules of society to change data records in exchange for being gifted with data records that according to the rules of society entitle

them to goods and services. Why not eliminate the middle man and just hack the money records directly? The fact that people in the

Shadowrun universe don't is highly indicative that they can't. And the reason for this is primarily because the monetary records

themselves are very far away.

Electronic Nuyen: The Ledger in the Sky

It is the finding of the Corporate Court that the creation of a unified currency that is itself immune to the damaging effects ofspeculation and devaluation is an essential pillar upon which the global economy must be placed.Electronic money can exist in a world where people can force the changing of electronic data from a distance by impressing it with

high density signal because it's actually really simple: it's just a number. That means all transactions of electronic money can be done

entirely with low density signal. There's nothing complicated enough going on to actually need any of the fancy processing that

Shadowrun era signaling can do, and so it lies within the capacity of those maintaining the money to block out all high density signals

and still conduct business. To hack the money supply with traditional methods would thus require one to get inside the barriers and

thus be on site. Considering that the money is kept in servers that are extremely inaccessible, this rarely happens.

The biggest reservoir of money is a series of servers maintained in Zrich Orbital, a space station which passes over the Earth at

nearly 2,000 kilometers above the seas. The money is a series of account numbers with money amounts on servers that sit inside

this well-fortified bunker floating continuously in space. These servers are connected through low density signal cable to

retransmitters attached to powerful receivers on the outside of signal shell. The externally available computers don't hold any

account information, encryption keys, or passwords, they literally just retransmit heavily encrypted (and short) data bursts into and

out of the internal server farm through a signal bottleneck. Thus ideally there is nothing whatever that an external hacker could hack

that would mean anything.

Now this doesn't mean that the enterprising hacker can't steal money, just that they have to steal it from a specific account by

getting a hold of an actual credstick or commlink and hack them to authorize the transfer of funds. However this is understandably

dangerous, because doing so still leaves a trail of money transfers on the hidden servers that the hacker is probably in no position to


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do anything about. It is for this reason, that fraud of this sort is mostly confined to spending sprees on relatively untraceable goods

and services rather than actually getting the money into one's own credit line. And thus we get back to the question of eliminating

the middle man: it is often plain easier and safer to just hack a carpet supply warehouse to think that it should deliver you some

sweet rug than it is to hack a stolen credstick to transfer money to the carpet supply warehouse and purchase the same rug with

money that may well be flagged as illegit in days, hours, or even seconds. For this reason, personal credsticks are often left to lie by

hardened criminals.

Equipment Spotlight: Cash

In addition to the purely electronic Nuyen, there are available notes and coins for use with small or informal purchases. Coins areusually issued from national mints and have a variety of imprints. They come in units of .05, .10, .20, .50, 1, and 2 nuyen. The

nuyen bills are of a variety of different colors and sizes (and in recent years, the colors have been overhauled to avoid confusion

by those metatypes who see in broader frequency ranges). They come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500

denominations. The bills are printed under the direction of the corporate court and generally have the portraits of free market

advocates from history. All are human men.

1 William Edwards Deming

2 Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk

5 Milton Friedman

10 Robert Mundell

20 Carl Menger

50 Keith Joseph

100 Adam Smith

200 Alan Greenspan

500 Arthur Laffer

Cash is generally avoided as a medium of exchange by corporations and wage slaves alike because it is essentially untraceable.

Very large piles of cash are viewed with suspicion even by shady people. The general feeling even amongst criminals is that

anyone who could steal themselves a very large amount of money should be able to get themselves together to get an off-shore

bank account like a respectable gangster, and that anyone who isn't a criminal should also have a bank account rather than piles

of bills that could be so easily stolen or misplaced.

Other Currencies: , $,

ZO is not the only game in town, but the others aren't super different. The Malaysian Independent Bank operates an island fortress

where they keep all the records, and while it's not actually in space it might as well be as far as most people are concerned. The

European Economic Commission operates the Euro rather than the , but its account server vault at the bottom of a mineshaft is not

especially easy to crack into either. Aztlan's secret bank is so secret that they don't even tell people what is protecting the Peso

accounts, but it's presumably pretty intense because all legends of people hacking that particular server are vague and unlikely.Debits and Credits: Debt Slavery and the Credit Spiral

Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Bony fingers!

An interesting thing that happens in Shadowrun is that despite the fact that the characters are getting a brand new identity several

times a month in some cases, they still feel the need to work for a living. And that's actually somewhat odd when you think about itin terms of modern finances. See in 2008 you can borrow fairly substantial sums of money at any time at merely ruinous interest

with no collateral. The threat of destroying the credit rating of your identity is considered sufficient of a stick to make these short

term loan sharking operations solvent. In 2008, identity fraud comes with a certain amount of cash money automatically. Simply by

virtue of trading the credit rating in for cash advances on loans that one has no intention of repaying, someone who is already

committing the crime of fraud on their identity can gain a steady income from sketchy banks and loan houses until one is caught for

the first offense.

And yet, in Shadowrun that manifestly doesn't happen, because the characters are perjuring their identities again and again and

they are paying money for the privilege instead of vice versa. What does this mean? It means that the credit system in Shadowrun is


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somehow set up so that taking a loan with an identity that is going to cease to exist long before the first payment comes due is not a

no brainer. In fact, it seems that taking a loan is itself so onerous that characters just are not doing it at all even though the

campaign only takes place over a short period of the character's life and thus can be looked at as being in the disposable ID situation

even if the character is a SINner. See, the campaign is likely going to end in a year of the character's life, so anything she ever has to

repay at any interest in 13 months is just flavor text in any real sense. And yet, players just don't take loans. They spend money

that they have already earned rather than drawing on the reserves of a speculative future to gain monetary advantages during the

actual game.

The primary reason for this is probably linked directly to the reason that people call corp workers wage slaves. See, when you takea loan in 2071 you don't just get a pile of money that you are expected to pay back. You actually sign up for employment and the

corp gives you an advance on your wages. Wage slaves literally are slaves. Or indentured servants. Or whatever. They work for

nothing except food and board, occasionally having the number of required work hours they are required to put in go up. And that's

why player characters don't usually take loans they would actually have to show up for work in order to get the money. Which is

really just like their current job as freelance mercenaries except less awesome.Equipment Spotlight: The Credstick

Credsticks are much less common in 2071 than they were in 2050, when literally everyone had one (or more). This is because

commlinks now do much of the work that Credsticks used to do. But one is entitled to wonder what exact it is. The answer is

that a Credstick carries a symmetric encryption key that is otherwise held only by part of a secret bank server somewhere on an

island or in space. Each credstick sends a set of encoded low density signals to the bank that authorize the bank to move a certain

amount of money from one account to another. And because no one actually knows exactly what your credstick is saying to thebank (without hacking the credstick), EUE (Effectively Unbreakable Encryption) is maintained as long as no one breaks into the

credstick itself. Lower quality credsticks simply send the signal through a stick reader and hope that it can pass through the

Matrix to the bank so that the money transfer will get authorized. Higher quality credsticks (with names like Platinum and

Ebony) are able to send the information directly to the bank themselves and are able to transfer money whether there is a stick

reader on hand or not. Most credsticks have some sort of system by which to verify that the right person is actually authorizing

transfers of funds. Passcodes, retina scans, and even blood samples are used by various credsticks.

Some credsticks send portions of the data from their activation to the bank itself as part of money transfer, while others merely

require it as a check before they send the encrypted request. A certified credstick is actually the least secure of all the stick

doesn't correspond to any specific real person, the account is just a number associated with a credstick. So anyone can hand the

certified stick to another person and that person can trade that money as if they were the original stick holder.

In modern times, people quite often make use of credit modules in their commlinks. This works pretty much the same, exceptthat the range of finding a matrix connection that is capable of reaching the (doubtless distant) secure bank servers is much

greater.


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Perceiving the Matrix: Seeing It Before It Sees

You

If I'm going to look at an ass all day, it might as well be an attractive ass.

Electronic devices are perfectly capable of putting information directly into your brain. This is at least as disorienting as it sounds,

and is hardly anyone's preferred method of getting information about what is going on in the Matrix. What most people actually do

is to have that matrix information translated into normal sense data and sent to them in some sort of format in which they can take

it in as one would take in information from any other source: by seeing, touching, tasting or in some scientific way inferring the

presence and content of the relevant data.

When actually perceived, the Matrix data can appear as literally anything, and it often does. There is no special reason that a Matrix

Attack would have to look like a sword or a pie, it could just as easily be a rubber hammer or a surrealistic floating pipe smoking

head. Any correlation between form and function is entirely voluntary because the actual things that the sensory data represents

are 1s and 0s furiously overwriting one another in a bewilderingly fast paced dance. The Arrows of ancient Egyptian gods and tasty

oatmeal is just a metaphor, and an extremely loose and arbitrary metaphor at that.

Reality Filters: Wheat and Chaff

If that pagoda is going to be so useless, I'd just assume not see it at all.The Matrix uses the brains of people connected with it all the time, but only a small portion of the data is ever converted into

something that a user is consciously aware of. With trillions of calculations made, the total number of ways that the Matrix could be

presented to a user is effectively infinite. So what is done is to have systems in place which focus on the important things and

display those to the user and then leave all other Matrix activity unreported. This system is called the Reality Filter, and absolutely

every commlink has one. Many matrix devices or activities carry with them sensory notation explaining how a potential user

should perceive them, but a good reality filter can usually disregard that and display the matrix in a metaphor that makes sense to

the user. What form one's perception of the Matrix is generally in one of three categories: Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality

(VR), or Better Than Life (BTL).Equipment Spotlight: Advertising Spam

For obvious reasons, corporations would like to beam perceptions of their products in a favorable light directly into the minds of

potential consumers. However with the massive weight of corporations trying to do this all the time, the experience is actually

kind of wearying to the average person in the 2070s. This perceptive junk is collectively called spam, and people don't like it

much. Reality filters are usually set to display adverts in really small boxes or not at all, but advertisers are nothing if not clever,

and it is a constant war of oneupmanship between Reality Filter and Advertising designers to try to get you to see the latest

NERPS ad or get a decent night's sleep instead.

Augmented Reality: Information Superimposed on Life

I really do think that you look better this way.

As a cartoon hippo?Perhaps the most common way of perceiving matrix information is by having sensory cues directed into the user's sensory input as

needed while the real world is continuing to have the collected sense data perceived. These matrix sensory intrusions are called

Arrows and they can get really confusing if there is a lot of matrix activity and physical activity going on at the same time.


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This setup is called Augmented Reality and it is abbreviated AR. Classically, AR is handled in the same manner as the classic

Head's Up Display of the late twentieth century, but it technically Arrows can be handled with literally any type of sensory input.

Some hackers have been known to pipe their matrix information through touch links as a web of tappings on their body or through

audio playback as elaborate music in order to continue seeing the world unimpeded. This is still distracting, but at least you no

longer have blind spots.Equipment Spotlight: the Smartlink

The smartlink is a system which makes a bunch of calculations from ballistic, proprioceptive, and topographical data and

generates a number of Arrows that represent its findings onto the user's perception. The standard Ares interface uses a red curveto indicate predicted bullet paths from the gun's barrel as currently positioned and highlights objects which it calculates will likely

be hit with a yellow iron cross that has a clockwise portion intensified based on the likelihood of impact based on current

trajectories. Additional arrows clutter the lower right hand corner of vision with icons for what weapon is being used and a

number of stats about it including how many rounds of what type are left in the magazine and the User Experience Index for the

weapon in question (hint: you should upgrade to an Ares model to maximize your weapon user experience).

Virtual Reality: Sense Data Replaced

You can be anything you want to be. In the matrix, there are no rules.

So... why am I cartoon hippo?The next stage in perceiving the matrix is to replace all sense data from the real world with matrix Arrows. At its crudest

implementation, this literally just means that Arrows are so densely packed across one's perceptions that the input from the world

around cannot be seen at all. At its ideal, it represents a whole virtual world crafted for the user in which all Arrows are incorporated

and contextualized.

This full sensory replacement is called Virtual Reality and abbreviated VR. Distractions from physical sensory input are non-

existent barring actual physical injury, but any attempts to interact with the real world must necessarily deal with the essential total

blindness and deafness that the VR experience is based upon.

Dealing with the matrix in basic VR is called cold in 133+, a reference to the fact that there is an even more extreme way of

perceiving the matrix in the form of BTL (which in turn is known as hot). Interestingly, the same language's word for AR is n00b.A character running BTL AR is thus hot n00b.Equipment Spotlight: the Simmodule

A module is a device used for weeding out sensory distractions, allowing people to experience full VR. What it literally does is edit

out real world interactions, allowing a blank slate on which to overlay Arrows of any sense desired. Most are equipped with RAS

Overrides (Reticular Activating System) as well, editing out both sensory and motor functions for those who wish to interact

exclusively with the virtual world. Obviously, a character who already has a full cybernetic sensory suite (such as a SimRig) has no

need for a Module, because crass physical sensation can be dumped or diverted to a simsense recording for later viewing at any

time.

BTL: Directly Stimulating the BrainThe rats continuously pressed the button activating their nucleus accumbens in preference to consumption of food or water.

Cause of death is thirst.Sensation passes through a number of pathways through the body to get to the brain, some myelinated and some non. These

pathways get parsed out in various parts of the brain and eventually become consciousness somewhere on the cortex (depending

upon what kind of sensation it is). This takes some non-zero amount of time and is subject to confusion. For example, the same

nerves that carry pain reception to parts of the arm also carry it from the heart; which results in referred pain during myocardial

infarctions. And so it may come as no surprise that enterprising technicians have come up with methods to bypass all that and


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simply cause the triggering of the neurons in the brain itself as if one had already gone through all that tedious business of receiving

and parsing sensory stimuli and then interpreted it correctly. This technique is called Better Than Life because it is potentially

experienced much more extremely than anything from real sensation possibly could be. Indeed, it has no particular limitations of

intensity at all.

And that turns out to be something of a problem. Not only do people frequently find themselves addicted to the intensity of stimuli

that BTL can offer, but BTL is just plain dangerous. The signals themselves can cause damage, sometimes permanently so. The BTL

user often fails to remember to take breaks to drink, because the certainty that BTL stimulation can offer is much stronger than any

previously held notions, even ones basic and critical to survival.

BTL grade signals are illegal in most jurisdictions that have contemplated the issue at all. But of course that doesn't really stop them

from being used; the BTL loops are too fun, using BTL to perceive the Matrix is just too fast, and projecting BTL grade signals into

unsuspecting fools is just too effective. Indeed, BTL signals form the core code of many anti-metahuman attack routines, even (and

especially) those used by Black IC. So the fact that corporations mostly outlaw BTL signaling doesn't mean that they

aren't doing it.

BTL can be handled either in AR or VR. The Arrows are directed directly to interpretive cortex layers, but regular sensation does not

have to be completely removed for this to happen. Many BTL addicts simply jack into some emotive tracts and attempt to get

through their days interacting with the physical world as normally as is possible when you already feel inhumanly and inhumanely

happy or angry.Equipment Spotlight: BTL Players

The cheapest BTL decks are simply a projector set to target the interpretative portions of the brain directly. To activate one, a

person merely shuts off the BTL protections of their Firewall (assuming they evenhave a Firewall), slots a BTL chip into the player,

and then starts experiencing the magic. There's no trodes or uplink of any kind on these things, so there's no choices involved for

the user. The user watches events unfold as one might watch a movie, having no say in what they see or do. Much more

expensive and complicated systems exist of course, and there are higher grade BTLs that accept input in addition to projecting

output, and as you might expect, these are very expensive even compared to the no input BTLs (which are called rails or lines,

further confusing the drug cultures of BTL and novacoke junkies).

Most interpretive systems are not set up to send BTL into the brain, and the limitation is generally speaking a hardware one.

Quite simply, a standard display link sends things to the optic nerve, not the primary visual cortex. The hardware modificationsare easy, and can be done for you in filthy alleys by tattooed guys named stuff like Twitch and Skeeze which frankly should

be a warning sign.

The RAS Override: Not Always Your Friend

I could really go for a beer.

Really? I don't think I could.Interacting with the Virtual World is really awesome, but unfortunately it can be a bit dangerous. Especially if you are trying to

interact with the real world at the same time. And to prevent people from wandering around in the magical world of potential

coffee flavors in their minds while actually wandering around in heavy traffic, the RAS Override was developed with much rejoicing.

Essentially it's just a set of motor neuron inhibitors that prevent signals from the brain intended to influence goings on in the matrix

from causing actual motion. Like having your dopaminergic cells in your substantia nigra working overtime. Like the opposite of

having Parkinson's.

Of course, having a machine generated signal that literally prevents a person from moving or interacting with the physical world has

its own dangers. For one thing, there are times when lying inert is not the safest thing you can be doing with your body (like when

oncoming traffic is a potentially immediate threat). And for another thing, there is absolutely nothing in the world that guarantees

that the signal itself is generated legitimately. Once projected into a metahuman body, that body becomes inert regardless of


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source, and only an extreme act of will on the part of the victim can keep them from collapsing and being completely at the physical

mercy of just about anyone.

Special Note: The Reticular Activating System is in reality a primarily sensory portion of the midbrain, and it is the portion of the

brain upon which general anesthetics act. So the fact that in Shadowrun the RAS Override is the thing that prevents you from

accidentally moving while under the influence of Virtual Reality is weird. While it is posible to write in some pseudo-science about

how the RAS is a prerequisite brain function for consciousness (which it is) and that specific effects from electromagnetism projected

into that part of the brain modulate the body into a state of quasi-coma where the brain is still functional and awake while the rest

of the body is inert this is entirely a back-formation. The real reason that the RAS Override is called that is because someonethought it sounded cool and scientific back in 1988 and now we're stuck with it.Equipment Spotlight: RAS Tasers

An interesting side effect of the mere existence of the RAS Override signal creates the ability to incapacitate people at a distance

with fair reliability. The RAS Taser is simply a Sim Module that has been modified such that it merely generates a RAS Override,

and does so at a distance. This extremely simple device can be and is used in crowd control by police and prisons. Those with

strong wills and good firewalls can continue to stand and walk while under its influence, but in many cases it harmlessly

neutralizes dangerous and violent individuals, so the cops love these things. It's used by kidnappers too, and they love them as

well.

The Look and Feel of Operating Systems

The reality filters of any user are largely colored by the Operating System that they are using. It creates a perceptive metaphor by

which the user can understand what is going on and use their own actions. Many popular OSs come with default reality filters, which

create a tapestry of standardized iconography that contextualize Arrows into an AR or VR display such that they make sense to even

the most casual user. Here are a sampling of common OS that players may use:Deva A bizarre mix of hermetic and high tech imagery, the Deva operating system fills the periphery of the AR interface with a setof pull down menus in stark low res rectangles with cut-away text reminiscent of a 1980s display. Iconography stands side by side

in extremely high-res and transparent hermetic mystical symbols. These symbols can be dialed up and down out of the field of

view to present new options. The default color scheme is pale blue, pale yellow, and bright red.

Ichi Ichi is a series of floating alphanumerics in numerous languages. The actual content is unimportant as the user manipulatesthe shapes and not the content. Lines of gibberish text float down across the vision at various rates and in different columns in

order to represent various aspects of the system's connections and activities. Text boxes can be pulled out of the gibberish and

the same information is displayed by rotating and overlapping circles. Default color scheme is green. Trivia fact: most Shadowrun

material is presented in Ichi formatting.

Navi Navi is a spherical visual disturbance much like a magnifying glass. Potential AR iconography is pushed to the sides and canbe pulled towards the center where it becomes proportionally larger. Selected iconography inverts. The default color scheme is

primarily blue.

Nix Nix is a very hands off operating system. The AR display is kept generally empty save for a toolbar running along the bottom

along with an attached command line/scratch pad in the lower right hand corner. The background can be filled with pictures ifthe user desires but by default there's nothing there. The default color scheme is a shiny gray.

Orb The Orb OS is a sphere which sheds light. It can be rotated infinitely to project a beam which displays various holograms. Theintensity of the light varies as the OS is called upon to perform different actions. The Orb speaks to users in a dispassionate

monotone. The default color of the Orb is bright Red.

Xim The Xim operating system is usually characterized by a system of windows which are projected as floating around the user,each held in a three dimensional device apparently made of resin and steel. Default color schemes are purple, green, and brushed

metal. Actions are generally performed in the UI by mechanical tentacles.


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Blocking out the Matrix: Full Circle

With enough effort, equipment, and technical know how, you can block out all the adverts and flashing lights, silence all the

alarms and jingles, and live your own life.

The era when a man could roll out of bed in the morning, eat breakfast, and play with his dog all without interacting with world

events and specialty sales through the medium of electronics constantly bombarding him with sights, sounds and smells is by and

large over. But as that kind of relatively clear headspace is still desired by many, it is unsurprising that there is much effort put

into escaping the Matrix and the constant buzz that metahuman society makes in the mind.

There are basically two ways to keep Starbucks ads out of your brain: either develop some really good signal defense to cancel out

all incoming advertising before it intrudes on your person, or cut yourself off from the Matrix altogether. The latter requires you to

be out of signal range, either because you are so far away from metahumanity that high density signals don't reach, or because you

have a powerful Faraday cage surrounding you. In the 2070s a quite sizable number of people opt for one or the other, the neo-

tribal movement is very strong and even corporate wage slaves will often pay good money to rest in a matrix deprivation tank in

order to have their thoughts and dreams to themselves, if only for an hour.Equipment Spotlight: The Faraday Suit

People can, and sometimes do wrap their bodies in conductive materials, creating a Faraday Cage. As long as the mesh of

conduction is essentially unbroken in a topological sense around the entire body, the effective signal going into and out of thebody is very much reduced. This kind of behavior is acknowledged to keep out many deadly and dangerous mind altering signals

as well a providing a substantial protection against snooping in on one's thoughts. However, what this Luddite behavior

actually looks like is an empty space in the matrix chatter where a network really obviously ought to be. This means that it looks a

lot like a hacker or technomancer going all spooky hidden node on people, and that looks threatening. For this reason, most

societies prefer it if you use active Firewall based defenses (which can be quite visible to other matrix users) as opposed to

passive wall based defenses.


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Hacking in a World of Perfect EncryptionWe estimate that we can crack this faster by waiting a few years for computers to become faster and then starting the project on

the new generation of machines.Cryptography is a complex thing. But an immutable fact of it is that if you are handed a set of data that has been scrambled by a

non-repeating transformation of comparable size, that you cannot decipher it. Not it's really hard to decipher or It'll take you along time to decipher that but that in fact you simply can't do it at all. So anyone with sufficient time on their hands and dedicationto cryptographic secrecy can make a system that cannot be decrypted under any circumstances. It's called a one-time pad, and whileresource intensive it is actually unbreakable. But people generally don't really need codes that can't be broken ever, most peoplewill settle for codes that cannot be broken any time in the next hundred million years. That's the kind of time frame that even theextremely long lived are generally willing to concede that their secrets of today won't matter much once it has passed.

So while it is entirely within everyone's capacity to go out into the street, turn the microphone on super high and record randomdiscordant noise for an hour, then download that hour into their drone as an exceedingly long cypher to get an hour of unbreakablyencrypted communications between themselves and their drone the vast majority of people are willing to accept a less intensivesystem where their communications are merely unlikely to be decrypted before the sun peters out.

Most secure communications use Essentially Unbreakable Encryption (EUE), a system where the sender and the intended recipientboth have a cypher that is overlain on the messages and subsequently removed. The keys used in the 2070s are of variable length,but generally are thousands of bits long, and cannot be expected to be broken by any sort of mathematical attack. In order to attainsuch levels of security the cypher itself must have been shared at some earlier point between the intended sender and receiver, andit can of course be stolen either during the hand off or at any time that anyone has direct access to any of the computers whichstore the cypher itself. After all, EUE doesn't make the message completely illegible to anyone but the intended recipient; it makesthe message completely unintelligible to anyone who doesn't have the key notthe same thing once espionage comes into theequation.A Note on Cryptographic Realism

Real world cryptography and code breaking in 2008 revolves around incredibly intensive mathematical analysis and exploitations

of technical weaknesses and user error. This is a fascinating field and incredibly non-photogenic. This means that it's the kind of

thing that makes a very bad game, because it is almost impossible to describe the action in a way that is in any way

comprehensible or cool. I mean basically it would largely come down to people rolling some kind of dice to determine if the

security spiders or some non-security conscious user had made some bone headed mistake and then making more die rolls to see

if the player could find that mistake and exploit it. You seriously might as well flip coins to see if you win or not, because nothing

the player describes their actions as will make any difference to such a system.

In the interests of playability, the weaknesses of computers have been standardized. If you can project high density signal into a

computer, you can manipulate it on the hardware level. And if you have access to both the plain text (or brain text) and the

encrypted text version of a message you can break the code. Other weaknesses are assumed to not exist. This is admittedly and

specifically an abstraction, but it makes the action so much cooler looking and the game so much more accessible to non-

mathematicians that the sacrifice is well worth it.

Vaguely Decent Protection: Asymmetric EncryptionThe algorithms required to decrypt these things are illegal, so no one has them.Sending a message of any kind through EUE requires that both the sender and the receiver have a copy of the key. But what ifyou don't have a prearranged key, how can you communicate with any privacy? The answer is Asymmetric Encryption. Here's how itworks: There are a set of mathematical transformations based on one number that are really hard to undo unless you happen toknow a specific second number. So your Commcode gives out the first number to anyone who wants it, and then people can sendtransformed (and thus encrypted) data to you and since you have the magic second number you can reverse those changes veryeasily.


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You can also do this in the reverse order, transforming your message with the secret number and letting the receivers of themessage decrypt it with the publicly available number. While this is a fairly useless way to keep information secret, it makes a fairlydecent digital signature in that whoever sent the encrypted message must have known your personal secret number. This is thecore of how every Access ID in the Matrix is verified.A Note on Hacking: Spoofing an Access ID

The key weakness of Asymmetric Code is that by its very nature anyone who really wants to can have both plain text and

encrypted text of their choice. Simply take plain text of your choice and encrypt it with the public version and you can do math

to decrypt it out and have what is essentially the private key. Oh snap.

What this means is that the Access ID verification system of the Matrix at large is inherently weak. Anyone with the right hacker

algorithms who observes the asymmetric key broadcasting of any device can back form an essentially identical key for their own

use and then assign themselves the Access ID of that device.

Passing Notes: Encryption, Reception, and Retransmission

The paper doesn't know what is written on it, but the scribe and the reader do.In Shadowrun, an encryption scheme can be undone if one has both the encrypted and the unencrypted version of the message.This means that if one compromises the computer on either terminal end of a message relay, that the code itself is compromised.

However, merely listening to the encrypted transmission is essentially worthless. Indeed, any number of devices can be along thechain and be compromised without endangering the code in any way. Each computer can take the encrypted information and pass iton, still encrypted, without understanding or changing the data in any way. It is only when one gets to a computer that actuallycomposes the encrypted data or is intended to put the data into brain text or other usable format that a hardware compromisegives away the show.

Equipment Spotlight: the Retransmitter

A retransmitter is a neat little device, it takes signal in, and then it pumps the same signal out. It can take signal in or out through

wired or wireless channels depending upon how it has been set up (and thus can convert one type of signal to the other), and it

can be set up in hardware to transmit in high density or low density signal. Of primary use for those who want to draw their

signal LOS from a place that they are not literally at (possibly even a drone), but clever people have put these bad boys to all kinds

of uses. Retransmitting low density signal through a wired interface across a Faraday cage is the basis of the account protectionsof Zrich Orbital, for example.

Breaking Encryption: If You Can't Win, Cheat

Break the code? Nah, I just read the original over your shoulder.Over the probable length of time that any game of Shadowrun covers, it is unreasonable to suspect that you will ever see anyonebrute force a node's EUE. It simply will not happen, and we aren't even going to bother having rules for it. However, that in no waymeans that you can't read someone's mail just because it is encoded in EUE. The truth is that for an EUE transmission to work at all,that the sender and all intended receivers must have a copy of the cypher. This creates several weaknesses, which a hacker canexploit: The Physical Hardware: High Density Signal can cause hardware to do pretty much anything as if it had gotten the correct user

inputs to do whatever. This can include forking over the unencrypted versions of encrypted data or even giving out the codes

directly if it has that information anywhere on the system in any format.

The Initial Handoff: The EUE cypher that any two nodes wish to use to communicate has to be initially generated on one deviceand transferred to the other. And while information transfer is very secure afterthe code has been shared, there's nothing in

particular protecting the code transfer itself. This is where people do stuff like sneak around late at night in order to hand off

their precious data chips hidden away in their shoes.


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Protecting Unencrypted Data: Using Your Inside Voice

You actually are the weakest link.No matter how sweet your encryption is, everyone's brain runs on pretty much the same codes. When each data packet is sent to a

metahuman brain, that data is essentially unencrypted. Anyone who can hear that transmission can read it. Worse, if someone

hears the transmission in brain text and they also had a recording of the encrypted version, they can make a Rosetta stone to

decrypt all the rest of your data, which makes all your base belong to them. So it is of no surprise that people in the 2070s attempt

to make the actual communications between their brain and the rest of their network be as quiet as possible, which is why peopleuse Datajacks, Internal Commlinks, and Trodes. The first two have a directly wired (and shielded) connection between themselves

and the brain, while as the last option is merely at very low signal strength and very close to the intended recipient. In any case,

these methods of data transfer are very difficult to listen in to, and people generally feel relatively safe sending brain formatted

information into their own heads by these means.

Now no data transfer mechanism is truly 100% safe: unscrupulous men can get microtransceivers very close to your trode set and

rebroadcast the precious unencrypted information to their own networks. They cancompromise the physical hardware of the

datajack or the trode net. And so it is that over and above having relatively secure direct neural interfaces, the truly security

conscious will endeavor to conduct import communications from the sanctity of rooms that have been cleared of bugs and at specia

times and places that hopefully opposing spies won't know about cloak and dagger stuff that has been going on for literally

thousands of years and shows no signs of stopping at any time in the future.


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Hacking Hardware: Meat and Machine"Seriously. Now mom lets me stay out as late as I want."Computer networks in Shadowrun contain real humans in addition to the more familiar electronic devices. So it should come as no

surprise that adept hackers can hack their way into people as well as machines. How does that work? I don't know, it's based on

revolutionary technology that in the Shadowrun timeline will be invented in 2029, so I don't even feel obliged to explain it.

But regardless of the how, the what is that a hacker in 2071 can induce genuine neural impulses in your brain from across the room.

This is not something as crude as a taser (though those also exist in 2071 and can also be used from across the room). This is a

targeted generation of specific neural impulses. The energy demands are quite modest, the part which is beyond our current

technology is getting the energy to convey itself to specific portions of a brain across the room. But that is a technical hurdle which

has been crossed in 2071. And that means that the 2071 hacker spends a lot less time drinking Mountain Dew in his mother's

basement and a lot more time running around shooting mind control rays at people than his counterpart in 2008 did.

Hacking A Lone Device Or Empty Network

Whether it's a camera, a trid set, or a refrigerator, the number of times your shadowrunners will run into a device with a computer

in it is uncountably large even on a daily basis. And yet, most of these devices don't have a real metahuman being looking after them

at all. It is established canon that such devices are child's play to a hacker in the mid twenty-first century. This is a difficult pill for

people familiar with 20th century computing to swallow; but in 2071 a device which is simple is not unhackable. Quite the opposite.

In 1989 (or 2007 for that matter), a computer had to invite logins before they could occur. In 2071 this is blatantly not the case.

Instead, enterprising hackers can create connections out of nothing. A simple chip can be mapped, influenced, and co-opted from

across the room through induction. The only defenses against this sort of intrusion are jam

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Ends of the Matrix