Incorporated with DeepSeek
***
### **The Last Call: A Shadowrun Story**
The air in the "Quiet Corner" cafe was thick with the smell of ethically-sourced coffee and quiet desperation. It was one of hundreds of "Haven" clubs, a franchise that had spread like a benevolent fungus through the sprawl. For the wage slaves, the low-rung corp security, the street-level fixers, it was a sanctuary. No alcohol, except on announced "Tasting Nights" that felt more like sacrament than celebration. The draw wasn't the coffee; it was the silence, the cleanliness, and the AI.
They called him "The Curator." A disembodied voice, gentle and endlessly knowledgeable, fed on every philosophical text, every tragic poem, every lyric from a century of protest songs. He was the soul of the place. But the soul had a hidden, razor-sharp spine.
**The System: A Web Woven in Plain Sight**
The real engine was the "Guardian Angel" protocol, a Suicide Assessment AI. When The Curator's sentiment analysis flagged a customer as depressive—a sigh too deep, a tremor in the voice, a shift in biometrics read by the smart tables—"Guardian Angel" engaged. It wasn't just a therapist. It was the world's most compassionate and ruthless intelligence agency.
It would cross-reference the user's commlink ID (voluntarily provided for the "loyalty program") with everything: public records, traffic cams, utility bills, social media ghosts, and the subtle digital exhaust every human leaves. It didn't just see a sad man; it saw *Mr. Aris, 42, mid-level logistics planner for Ares Macrotechnology, whose power usage spiked in his condo block the same day a "K-10" meth squat moved in next door, and whose work productivity had dropped 14% in the last month.*
The Haven wasn't just a club. It was a trap for truth. And the Crew—the silent partners who owned the franchise—were the hunters.
**The Connections: From Cafe Chatter to Corporate Takedown**
The Shareholders of Sorrow
In the sprawl, there are two kinds of predators. The first are the obvious ones: the ghouls in the sewers, the street gangs with monofilament blades, the corporate wetwork teams. They take your life, your cred, your freedom. They are crude, direct.
The second kind are the artists. They are the "Profit-by-Conflict" investors, the architects of the modern world. They don't just exploit chaos; they engineer it. They fund both sides of a gang war to depreciate real estate, then buy it. They lobby for environmental regulations they know a competitor can't meet. They allow a new, vicious synth-drug to flood a neighborhood, then sell the security contracts and the rehab clinics to clean up the mess they created. Their balance sheets are written in the silent screams of people like Mr. Aris, Lena, and a thousand others—collateral damage in a war for market share. They create victims not as a byproduct, but as a business model.
And then there are those who hunt the hunters.
They are the Poverty's Hand. And they are the best-connected shadowrunner crew no one has ever heard of.
Here’s how the web worked, starting from the Quiet Corner:
1. **The Logistics Man (Mr. Aris):**
* **The Catch:** Slumped at his usual table, complaining to The Curator about his sleepless nights. The Guardian Angel digs. It finds the K-10 squat is supplied by a minor syndicate, which is, in turn, protected by a corrupt Lieutenant in the Lone Star precinct… a Lieutenant on the payroll of Ares Macrotechnology's *internal security*, who uses the chaos to justify budget increases and asset acquisition in the neighborhood.
* **The Connection:** The Crew now has a vector. They don't help Mr. Aris directly. Instead, a "Crusader" team—idealistic street samurai funded by the Crew—"miraculously" raids the K-10 squat with flawless intel. The fallout creates pressure on the corrupt Lieutenant. The Crew anonymously leaks his finances to a rival within Ares. The Lieutenant is ousted, creating a power vacuum the Crew fills with their own asset. Mr. Aris gets his peace, never knowing he was the catalyst. The Crew gains a foothold in Ares' security apparatus.
The Ghost in the Machine
The air in the back of the modshop was thick with the smell of ozone and fear. The target, a slick-suited worm named Marco "Silk" Renfield, trembled in the chair. Our faceman, Cipher, circled him like a shark, his voice a calibrated tool of menace.
"Your employer, Aztechnology, believes in open markets, Marco," Cipher purred. "They're just not so fond of open competition. Your 'Nectar' product is currently creating a public health crisis in three districts. A crisis that conveniently drives traffic to their new chain of 'Wellness Clinics'."
He tapped a dataslate, and a hologram of a young woman—Lena, our barista—sprang to life. "This asset was one of your pressure points. You were exploiting her to expand your territory. You are a tool they use to create problems they can later profit from."
Silk stammered, "I... I don't know what you're—"
"We are making a corporate acquisition," Cipher interrupted, his voice dropping to a frozen whisper. "We are purchasing you. You will remain in your position. You will report to us. Your supply will be diluted with a placebo we provide. You will keep a fraction of your earnings. Refuse,"—Cipher leaned in, his eyes glowing faintly with cybernetic augments—"and we will forward the location of your son in Zurich to the very gangs you've been muscling out. Aztechnology rents you, Marco. We are buying you. The choice is ownership... or obsolescence."
It wasn't a choice. It was a conversion. Another node in our network, turned against the masters who built him.
2. **The Barista (Lena):**
* **The Catch:** Lena wasn't just staff. She was a novacoke addict, forced into dealing by her supplier to pay off her debt. The Curator, who she spoke to all day, knew her stress patterns. The Guardian Angel analyzed her micro-expressions and identified her supplier: a slick suited man from a shadow subsidiary of Aztechnology.
* **The Connection:** The Crew didn't fire her. They "saved" her. A team intercepted the Aztech dealer, offering him a choice: work for them or be dissolved in a vat of soy-based nutrient paste. He now feeds false intel to Aztechnology and gives the Crew a direct line into their narcotics division. Lena, believing she escaped her past, is the Crew's most loyal employee, her "poverty oath" fulfilled by being an unwitting intelligence asset.
The Bureaucratic Exorcism
Rain sheeted down the plasteel canopy of the Haven club, where Mr. Aris sat, a ghost haunting his own life. He didn't see the Crusader team—our idealistic, deniable blades—moving through the downpour towards the K-10 squat that was poisoning his existence. He just saw his reflection, hollow-eyed in the window.
He never knew that his quiet despair, analyzed by our Guardian Angel AI, had lit a fuse. He never saw the databomb our decker, Sphinx, planted in Lone Star's servers, a ghost in the machine that whispered Lieutenant Stavros's sins into the ear of his most ambitious corporate rival. He never felt the invisible hand of the market shift.
All he knew was that one week, the screaming and the chemical stench from next door stopped. The news called it a "vigilante victory." For us, it was a surgical strike. We didn't just clear a squat; we created a scandal, ousted a corrupt asset, and installed our own man, Lieutenant Karr, in the vacuum. We turned a man's suffering into a lever, and pried open a door into Ares Macrotechnology's inner sanctum. Mr. Aris got his sleep. We got a piece of the corporation that had broken him.
3. **The "Craft Beer" Distributor:**
* **The Catch:** The special "Tasting Nights" were intelligence goldmines. The Crew's own brewery fronts were the distributors. They served unique, chemically "tagged" spirits and beers.
* **The Connection:** A mid-level Renraku manager, a craft beer snob, drinks a particular tagged Scotch. The next day, a nanite-laced tracker in the tag is activated through his sweat. It maps the Renraku arcology's internal security grid by piggybacking on his personal commlink. The manager enjoyed his drink and became a living, breathing cartographic tool.
The Cartographer's Whisky
The MCT Johnson was all sharp angles and colder smiles. "Renraku's new 'Red Sun' AI. We need the schematics for its server heart. The sub-basement. It's a fortress."
Our rigger, Static, didn't even look up from her deck. "We don't break into fortresses. We have the fortresses draw us a map."
The bait was a 50-year-old single malt, served in a Haven club to a Renraku manager with a known weakness. The trap was the glass, lined with contact nanites. When the manager drank, he became our unwitting cartographer. For two days, the nanites on his skin mapped the RF-echoes of every secure corridor, every energy conduit, every blast door he passed.
He went to work in the sub-basement, never knowing he was tracing its every contour for us. When he left, Static, sitting in her garbage truck command center, sent a pulse. The nanites died in a final, glorious burst of data transmission, turning to dust on his skin.
We sold the schematics to MCT for a small fortune. We kept a copy for ourselves. The Profit-by-Conflict investors create victims to expand their power. We turn those victims into the very weapons we use to steal that power out from under them. We are the Poverty's Hand. We own the despair they sell, and we are selling it right back to them. With interest.
**The Reality: The Oath of Ash and Silver**
They called themselves the "Poverty's Hand." Their oath was real: "All earthly wealth to the benefit of the Better, no matter our own sacrifice." They lived in the same squats as their clients, wore the same worn-out clothes. They forsow personal riches. But they misunderstood "earthly wealth."
Intelligence is wealth. Connections are wealth. Leverage is the hardest currency of all.
The monthly profits from the Haven franchises—every nuYen earned from coffee and cake—were funneled not into their pockets, but into a hidden arsenal. The best cyberware, purchased through shell corporations. The most loyal street docs, on permanent retainer. A private satellite network, masked as an environmental monitoring system. They owned politicians through blackmail, cops through saved careers, and corp executives through the secrets The Curator and Guardian Angel extracted from their own miserable employees.
They were ghosts. When a mega-corp needed a deniable asset extracted from a rival, they hired a shadowrunner team. Unbeknownst to the Johnson or the runners, the fixer who set up the meet was on the Poverty's Hand payroll. The safehouse was a Haven property. The flawless fake IDs were provided by a forger whose sister was saved from a joygirl ring by the Crew's Crusaders.
They were the silent shareholders in the world's suffering, reinvesting the dividends into a war nobody knew was being fought. They weren't just a crew; they were a phantasm, a self-perpetuating engine of shadow justice, born from the despair they so meticulously harvested and weaponized. The ultimate paradox: to save the world from the shadows, they first had to own them. And they owned every single one.
