Incorporated with DeepSeek
**The Scent of the Dark Side**
Let me buy you a soykaf, chummer. No, I don’t drink anything stronger, and I sure as drek don’t smoke. I’m the most boring shadowrunner you’ll ever meet: all sober, all clean, no BTLs, no simsense junk, not even a drop of synthetic schnapps. Some say that’s why I’m still alive. I say it’s because I’ve learned to avoid one thing above all else—bodybuilders who run counterfeit cyber-labs in the basements of anonymous Berlin high-rises. You think I’m joking. You haven’t smelled what I’ve smelled. This is a story about a Plattenbau in Siemensstadt, a route between Paris and Warsaw that I used to love, and the absolute nightmare that was Murat Özdemir’s “Wolf Wear” underground workshop. It’s dark, it’s satirical, and if you ever hear someone shout “Unterschätz niemals die dunkle Seite der Macht!” in four different languages, run.
Berlin. The year is 2076, give or take a corporate calendar. I work the shadows of Central Europe as a smuggler. Not the flashy kind with a tricked-out truck full of guns. I move data, cyberdecks, prototype chips, and occasionally a shackled AI that’s too paranoid to travel via the Matrix. My route is simple: Paris start, Warsaw finish, and Berlin is the perfect pit stop—right on the way between the two, filled with enough forgotten concrete to lose yourself in. I’m a rigger first, decker second, and if things go loud, a street samurai third. That means I’ve got drones, a top-shelf cyberdeck jacked into my skull, and wired reflexes that’ll make your eyes water. I don’t stand out. I look like a mid-level corp drone on a bad day: grey armored longcoat, tired eyes, no chrome you can see except the datajack behind my ear. I like anonymity. That’s why I picked Block 47, Siemensstadt—a twenty-three-storey monster of stained prefab concrete, patched with spray-on insulation and neglect. The building had a thousand identical flats, eleven broken elevators, and a permanent smell of boiled cabbage and despair. Perfect cover.
I kept a small unit on the seventeenth floor: two rooms, ballistic windows overlooking the Spree’s toxic shimmer, no neighbour closer than three doors down. The rent was paid in untraceable corp scrip. The building’s Matrix node was a sieve, so I ran my own satellite uplink hidden behind a false ceiling panel. I’d arrive after midnight in a nondescript Eurocar, carry my package up the emergency stairs (the lifts were a death trap, and I needed the exercise), and lock myself in for however many days the handoff required. I’d deploy a couple of microdrones to monitor the hallways, check the newsfeed for Knight Errant patrols, and wait. Quiet. Clean. Professional.
Then the smell came.
It started as a faint acrid tickle, something between burned resistor and cheap depilatory cream. I blamed the building’s garbage chutes at first. But within a week, the entire north stairwell reeked like a nail salon that had been set on fire inside a plastics factory. At the same time, the building’s tenant profile underwent a drastic change. Suddenly there were people in the lobby wearing fake leather dusters so new they squeaked, sporting cyberlimbs that were clearly last season’s Ares knockoffs, and speaking to each other in the kind of loud, nervous corporate English you hear when someone is trying very hard to sound dangerous. Tourists. Shadowrunner tourists.
I did some quiet recon with a Fly-Spy drone, and found the source. In the sub-basement, behind a firewall door that now had a hand-painted sign reading “Wolf Wear – Custom Augmentation & Tactical Gear,” a full-blown underground laboratory was churning out counterfeit cyberware. And the man in charge was Murat Özdemir.
Murat was a bodybuilder of the old school, a mountain of muscle and synthetic testosterone wrapped in a sweat-stained tank top that said “Schwergewicht.” He had a thick Berlin-Turkish accent, a meticulously waxed moustache, and the unnerving habit of referring to his deliberately terrible products as “masterpieces of the dark side.” He worked for a shadowy outfit called Mr. Wolf Industry—ostensibly a legitimate fixer network—but Murat, like many of his colleagues, had decided that he hated the tourists who bought his gear. And so, with a perverse, almost philosophical dedication, he put all his effort into producing the lousiest, worst, most shoddy counterfeit chrome imaginable. His gear wasn’t just bad; it was aggressively, hilariously, maliciously awful. And he charged double what the real versions cost.
You might think that’s a terrible business model. You’d be wrong. The tourists—poseurs, wannabe-runners, corp kids slumming for street cred—lapped it up. They’d walk out of that basement with a new cyberarm that had the heft and shine of a Saeder-Krupp Diamond Claw, but would randomly open and close to the rhythm of Europop, or a set of smartgoggles that, instead of tactical overlays, would display motivational quotes from ancient philosophers in Comic Sans. I once saw a guy in the elevator whose brand-new “ninja spurs” retracted every time he said the word “please”. Murat was an artist of sabotage. His laboratory, a cramped bunker filled with illegal 3D-printers, barrels of cheap resin, and stacks of recycled chipboard, was a temple to what he called *die dunkle Seite der Macht*.
I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I am a professional. My cargo—a prototype Renraku cyberdeck holding a semi-sentient logistics AI destined for a data haven in Warsaw—was far too hot to risk around amateurs who thought a faulty smartgun was “street authentic.” So I did what any sensible runner would do: I avoided them. I mapped the stairwells that the tourists never used, hacked the building’s maintenance system to keep the freight elevator permanently “out of order” on my floor, and rigged a silent alarm through my drones. I timed my exits for the dead hours of 3 a.m. when the Wolf Wear crowd was either passed out or trying to make their fake optic camouflage work (it only rendered them invisible to themselves). For two weeks, it worked. I was a ghost, and Murat’s circus was just white noise.
But Berlin doesn’t let you stay invisible forever. Especially when a Turkish bodybuilder with a grudge against consumers starts selling cyber-limbs laced with self-replicating malware.
The incident that broke my cover started on a Tuesday. I was in my flat, running a diagnostic on the AI’s containment protocols, when my drone caught a commotion in the lobby. Five very angry-looking individuals in authentic Ares Firewatch gear—actual, real, military-grade armour—had kicked in the front door and were dragging a screaming tourist by his counterfeit cyberleg. The leg had, apparently, decided to walk him to the nearest Stuffer Shack and force him to buy forty-six soyburgers. He’d tried to sue Wolf Wear for a refund, and instead, Ares Macrotechnology’s brand protection division had traced the knockoff component back to Block 47. Now a full corporate strike team was flooding the building, determined to make an example of the operation.
I swore, killed the lights, and started packing my gear. My first instinct was to ghost out through the roof access, but my drone showed a pair of Ares rotor-drones circling the block. The basement would be a trap, and the stairwells were already echoing with jackboots. I needed a new plan, and I needed it before the corps started floor-by-floor scans. That’s when someone pounded on my door.
“Bruder! Open up! I know you’re in there, Mister Spick-and-Span Runner-Man.” Murat’s voice was a bellow disguised as a whisper. “I’ve seen you on the cameras. You’re the only one in this building who isn’t an idiot. I need your help.”
I didn’t open the door. I spoke through the intercom. “Murat. Go away. I’m not involved in your disaster.”
“You are involved because you breathe my air, ha? Also, I have a thing you want: the old maintenance tunnel under the garbage depot. It goes straight to the U-Bahn line. The Ares dogs don’t know about it. I give you the keycode, you help me teach these corporate tourists a little lesson about the dark side.”
The logic was flawed, but the escape route was real. My own scans hadn’t detected that tunnel—it must have been physically air-gapped. Drek. I opened the door a crack. Murat stood there, flanked by his crew: a scrawny, bespectacled tech named Vincenzo from Naples who wore a shirt reading “Non Sottovalutare,” and a hulking troll enforcer called Knut who smelled of cheap protein powder. Murat grinned, gold tooth catching the emergency light. “I knew you were a professional. So clean. So sober. So boring. But even a boring man needs to survive, ja? Let’s make a deal.”
The deal was simple: I’d use my rigger skills to hijack the building’s ancient maintenance drones—a small army of rusted cleaning bots and one half-functional welding unit—and create diversions while Murat and his crew evacuated their “inventory” (which meant barrels of toxic resin and boxes of soon-to-explode prototype chips). Once clear, we’d all escape through the U-Bahn tunnel. In exchange, Murat would never speak to me again, and I’d get the tunnel access.
I didn’t trust him, but I had an AI to save. “Fine. Give me five minutes to set up my command rig.”
What followed was the most absurd firefight of my career. I sat cross-legged in the stinking stairwell, my deck jacked directly into the building’s primitive maintenance system, and directed a swarm of cleaning drones to engage corporate security. The bots weren’t armed, but they were numerous and, thanks to years of neglect, essentially rolling biohazards. One particularly filthy unit I programmed to aggressively mop the crotches of the Ares team as they ascended the west stairs; another launched a compressed ball of chemical residue directly into the intake of their tactical drone, causing it to cough and veer into a wall. Meanwhile, Murat and Vincenzo handed out “experimental” weapons to the tourists who hadn’t fled—including a shock glove that only shocked the wielder, and a flash-pak that would only flash after a lengthy negotiation prompt.
“Gücün karanlık tarafını asla küçümseme!” Murat roared, throwing a grenade that turned out to be filled with glitter and a speaker that started playing a tinny version of “The Imperial March.” The Ares squad leader’s helmet cam later sent that footage viral across the corporate Matrix. It bought us seconds, and I used those seconds to put a monofilament whip through a squad drone’s sensor array, the razor-thin line hissing in the chemical haze. I don’t enjoy violence, but when street samurai work calls, my wired reflexes answer before my conscience does.
The real problem came when Murat’s bad batch of counterfeit thermite paste—a product he’d labeled “Darth Burn”—decided to activate in the storage lockers. The basement laboratory started to melt. Acrid smoke, laced with whatever unholy polymers they’d been cooking, poured through the ventilation shafts. The building’s fire alarm triggered, releasing a torrent of chemically-tainted sprinkler water that smelled like a thousand burning hakarl pizzas. I was half-blind, dragging the cyberdeck case containing the AI, and my drones were all pinging “system critical.” The Ares team, now thoroughly coated in glitter and cleaning fluid, made a tactical withdrawal to call in hazmat backup.
In the chaos, Vincenzo grabbed my arm. His accent was thick Neapolitan panic. “Nun suttavalutà maje 'a parte scura d''a forza! The tunnel, schnell!” He shoved a datachip into my hand—the keycode—then sprinted to help Murat, who was carrying an unconscious Knut under one massive arm. I didn’t look back.
The garbage depot tunnel was as disgusting as promised, but it led to an abandoned U8 maintenance spur. I emerged near Hermannplatz, covered in soot, glitter, and the psychic residue of having worked with an unhinged bodybuilder. I made it to my concealed vehicle, and drove straight to Warsaw without stopping. The AI was safe. The payment cleared. But that building, that smell, and that infernal catchphrase followed me for months.
So why am I telling you this in a dingy Kneipe near Warschauer Straße, buying you a soykaf? Because you just laughed at that Star Wars tag on the newsfeed and asked me if I’d ever met a real “runner.” You pointed at that image of a glitter-coated Ares officer and said, “What kind of idiot would work with someone who deliberately makes terrible counterfeit gear?” And I saw in your eyes the same clean, naive, rational light I used to have. So I’m telling you: don’t underestimate the dark side. The shadows are full of Murat Özdemirs—people who hate the tourists so much they’ll burn their own world down, and take you with it. The high-riser in Siemensstadt is still standing, by the way. I hear he’s reopened the lab under the name “Vader’s Vault.” The smell is supposed to be even worse now.
Drink your soykaf. And if you ever need to move something from Paris to Warsaw, find a different route. Me? I’m clean, I’m sober, and I’m never stepping foot in a Berlin Plattenbau again.
*Tu carî kêm lê binêre li hêla tarî ya hêzê.* That’s Kurdish, Vincenzo’s friend taught him. It means exactly what you think it means. Learn it. You might need it.
