It has been a few months since the Glitch run took place. Swede has been hovering over the comatose netrunner now that Jazz has placed him and the hybrid netrunner, Sharkey, on retainer. Swede has been tasked with observing and administering to Glitch's vitals. As a "side project" to pass the time, the doctor has been experimenting with creating his own beer. Better Than Life Meanwhile, Killeroo finds that his adopted son, Spade, has been home much more infrequently than he has in the past. Something is amiss. Confronting the youth in their squalid home, Roo discovers that Spade has been acting as a courier for illegal simsense--often called better than life (BTL) chips. Roo destroys a backpack full of the chips, which causes Spade to storm out of the home exclaiming how "we're dead! He's going to kill us both!" Employing his own brand of "tough love", Roo places Spade in a sleeper hold, ties him to a vid console and realizes that he has missed a series of messages from Jazz. Time to get to work. New Blood With Barret busy trying to repair Doc, Jazz reached out to some other runners to bring into the fold. Among them was V3ct0r, a self proclaimed hacktivist who many consider to be too young (and too smart) for her own good. Having corporate citizenship that stems from her parents, V3ct0r has a serial identification number, or SIN, that allows for the tracking of her activities--something most runners are loathe to have, given the nature of their covert activities. Despite this, V3ct0r risks life and limb to reveal the dirty truths in a very dirty world. One of those truths recently came to her attention recently through the Freedom Mission's online library; Yokono Corporation has been spending tens of millions of dollars on a secret project titled Aiko. Note: Freedom Mission being a group of anonymous netrunners whose main goal is to make all information available for free on the matrix.Special thanks to player Paresh M for his contribution of this organization. Meeting for a drink and a short conversation at the Kid Afrika bar in downtown, Jazz looks at the information V3ct0r has come across and cross references with the data that was recovered from Glitch's damaged cyberbrain and confirms that its the same. Apparently, one of the netrunners who sold Glitch out after the Yokono run, Gray Fox, had been the one to have uploaded the information online after presumably being paid for delivering it to his client. Jazz calls a cab and they head to Sharkey's to prepare for a run. The Yokono Run The team then had to choose from either a (potentially) big payoff job that involved a risky break in at Yokono Corporation to steal whatever Project Aiko is and sell it or a semi-straightforward courier job for a lot less potential money. They chose the former. As the first order of business, V3ct0r created some fake accounts and very publicly discredited Fox on the runner forums. So much so that he didn't bother to protect his info dumping. Shortly after this, she received a private message from an anonymous user formally thanking her for what she did. Realizing that the user was likely someone from Yokono's PR division, V3ct0r was able to compel some information from them about possible employees at Yokono whose jobs were on the cutting board. The user agreed to a name drop as a "thanks" for the online cover-up and gave her details of a nighttime security guard with substance abuse problems. The team quickly tracked down his information and attempted to convince him, through a comm call, into thinking that he was speaking to a four star general, interested in hiring him for some super secret special ops mission that he couldn't tell anyone about. Also, they asserted that because of the mission's sensitivity someone else would be taking his place at work while he was gone. This ultimately plan ultimately failed to pan out and he instead agreed to meet some other day months from then since he was already late for work. Switching to plan B, V3ct0r used her netrunning skills to hack the city's public access system and play around with traffic lights, slowing down and even throwing the guard's automated taxi down a dead end street. Waiting at the dead end was Killeroo and Doc Swede. Roo not-so-gently pulled the guard through the back window and narrowly avoided being shot at close range. Next, he crushed the pistol right before the man's eyes. Swede promptly put the guard to sleep with a sedative. Stripping him of his armor and biometric access card, the team dropped him off at a rehab clinic before proceeding to Yokono Corporation. They used the card to access the underground parking garage located across from the Yokono Corporation grounds around the time when most of their employees were heading home. Swede donned the security outfit and successfully managed to gain entry into the lobby, past a pair of security guards and to a public computer terminal where he introduced a nasty virus of V3ct0r's design to cause the fire alarm and sensors to go off on another floor. Roo and V3ct0r waited for the doctor to go into the building first before utilizing the emergency stairways to enter the building. When security went to check out the disturbance, they found nothing. Chalking it up to faulty wiring or a glitch in the sensors, they wrote up a service ticket for IT to take a look at the problem tomorrow morning when they would return. Getting the go ahead to proceed, Swede checked the directory in the lobby and found that some of the floors were not labeled at all. Taking the elevator to the 10th floor, he discovered the "Special Activities" area was now perfectly empty and began to look around. Luckily, he found a still active terminal that an employee had forgotten to log off from. Poking around, he found that the office consisted of artists and programmers that were contributing their talents for the development of a super sophisticated VR sim. Reading emails and memos between the artist and his supervisor revealed that there were problems with some of the geometry and textures disappearing altogether. The artist noted that this bug was potentially "dangerous" for any of the testers. The notes also made mention of someone named Hunter and the Shogun, with the latter being noted being at 70% efficiency but suffering from the same problems as the bugged out geometries. After a long climb up the stairs, Roo and V3ct0r arrive at the Special Activities floor. Interfacing a device to the terminal that allows for a limited signal to broadcast out from that location, V3ct0r has Swede forward all the information on the terminal to the security guard's email account and informs Sharkey to snatch it from online, which she does with ease. Searching the abandoned office space, they find an emergency exit map that lists where the server room is located and head there. Using a code randomizer and her Subway club card, V3ct0r bypasses the server room's maglock door. Entering the large room, the team find monolith sized servers that are connected and slaved to a smaller, sleeker master server. In addition to this they discover four cyberterminals, one in each corner of the chilled room, only one of which has recently been utilized. V3ct0r discerns which keys were hit and tries to log herself into the closed network on two different stations. The attempt fails and one of the cyberterminals gets locked out. Sharkey contacts the team for an update and agrees to meet with V3ct0r in the intranet's VR sim. Utilizing the interfacing device she used previously, V3ct0r provides a sufficient broadcast signal for the hybrid netrunner to jack into the normally closed off internal network that houses the Project Aiko node. While Roo and the Swede wait inside the server room for the netrunners to finish, they prepare themselves for the worst case scenario. The netrunners arrive in an all white hallway with a single door at the end. They proceed to open the door and step through into a blinding white light. Hyper Real On the other side is a seemingly infinite world of staggering complexity and ultra realism. Rolling hills, fields of tall grass, overcast skies, a forest of bamboo trees, the smell of seawater in the air...the sound of hoofs clomping on wet dirt. On a hill overlooking their position, they watched a samurai in covered in red battle armor riding atop a horse, heading towards a single feudal Japanese style tower nearby. Circling the upper spire of the tower like a buzzard was some kind of flying creature, seemingly keeping watch around the area. Sharkey warns V3ct0r that a silent alarm of sorts went out when she failed to log into the other cyberterminal. As a result, it appears as if there is another netrunner somehow connected to the internal network. It's possible, she says, that Yokono has their own in house netrunner and is aware of their intrusion into the sim. They're not alone.