DaiJob's First Run

The stairwell was too quiet. It was starting to freak me out. Nothing but the sound of my breathing and the echoing sound my drone's rotors. In communication we learned about harmonics: how the echoes phase-shifted the rotor sound so it was a chorus of echoes ranging in pitch from 'waterfall' to 'power drill.' I was too keyed up- couldn't focus. I kept drifting back to thoughts of my classes and my bills and my drones and Showbiz.... God damn Showbiz.

From the first glint of that cheesy gold tooth, I should have known better.

Showbiz was a very special kind of Johnson. Showbiz had flair. If an ordinary Johnson needed to knock over a liquor store, he'd send a Street Sam with a shotgun and a hundred nuyen. Showbiz would send five Sams with flamethrowers and one with a videocamera. Showbiz had impact. Runners find fame in the lining of a bodybag- unless they work for Showbiz. I heard he sells tapes of his runners to news, corporate securities, SWAT... anybody who can owe him a favor and a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. He pays almost twice what any other Johnson will, too. That's the part I heard first. That's the part I cared about.

If I weren't so scared, I might find it funny how much my priorities have changed in just half an hour.

I'm a pretty average guy- well, maybe below average. I'm smart. I'm stubborn. I'm not incredibly lazy. I've got a 2-year degree and I'm working on a Bachelor's in Aeronautics (Space Flight.) It's not as hard as it sounds and the pay is great. Well, the pay will be great if I can convince anyone to hire me. Aeronautics is a funny thing. A spacecraft gets built by a team of people who specialize in something the others are pretty much awful at. One guy does the wiring, one guy does the computer, one guy does the rockets.... It's kind of like a run, really.

Good runs come from good runners-
but there are no good runners here.

Maybe it's a side-effect of living in the UCAS but everyone here clings to each other. Day one, groups within groups formed. Day seven, the metahumans, the funny-looking, and the uncharismatic were forced out of the program because, without the support of your group you just can't keep up. It's week 7 and, even without the support of my group, I remain. I remain miserable. I remain chock-full of stimulants. I remain worse-off than any of contemporaries- but I remain. Now, after struggling and sacrificing for 7 weeks, I may yet be forced to withdraw from the program over something so insignificant as a couple thousand Nuyen. It is custom, apparently, to pay lab fees both at the start of the semester and in the middle of the semester. It provides a respite for those dropping the program early.

I think it's bullshit- but nobody cares what I think.

¥3.000 isn't, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of money. If I had time for a real job I'd just get one but my free time each day lasts just long enough for a shower, a snort of kickstart, and a few minutes of bitching to my roommate.

In fact, I suppose you could say it's his fault I'm huddled in a stairwell.

He had the terrible-good idea of playing shadowrunner for a day. Picking up an easy job for some easy cred. ¥3.000 isn't, apparently, easy cred. ¥3.000 in a single job requires a steady and skilled team and the disposition to assassinate someone. ¥3.000 in a single job is a huge investment for an ordinary Johnson- but not Showbiz.
“5K,” he said, 5K was my personal take. Up to this point, I hadn't even considered that the prices I had been talking about were for an entire team. “All you have to do,” he said, “is point a camera and watch a door.”
In my fear, the bottom of the stairwell is getting crowded with thoughts of Calculus and Wien's Law and a single phrase from a song I don't think I ever knew the name of: “and, O, the paths of peace and toil how precious are they now.”

Nothing clears the mind like slamming doors.

As I, through my drone, saw the door swing open and the alarms sound, my mind was instantly vapid. I turned to mush, figuratively speaking. I feel the need to point out that I'm speaking figuratively because the first man through the door, a fat, balding security guard training his gun at the other side of the door, turned to mush in a literal sense as the Sam of our team demonstrated that a fully automatic hail of armor-piercing rounds need not be applied solely where armor is. I vomit quietly at the bottom of the staircase.
I thought I was being clever, attaching the camera to a drone. I'm not a rigger, I hope you understand. I've been driving a standard transmission for two years now and still stall at every light. I don't know the first thing about guns or how I would strap one to my tiny little rotor-drone. I control the thing with a radio and fairly poorly at that. I just needed to be where the shooting was and didn't want to.
As I get my pay, apparently a measly sum compared to the rest of the team, they congratulate me. They tell me I did great for a first run. They mock me for not having been shot even once. They buy me drinks and laugh at my bad jokes. We talk about explosives and space and money and women and drugs and how we ended up like this. I falter a moment, completely dumbfounded when our decker says, “You're alright, kid. What's your name, anyway?”
He wanted my handle. I had to respond with something cool. All the greatest runners have cool-sounding names: Steelflight, Fastjack, Chromed Archivist.... I said the first thing that came to my mind, “Day Job.”

Over the next few years I put the 'I' back in DaiJob and I've been me ever since.