Devi

Devi

She makes it her business to know. That's her gimmick. She's one of the Emerged, apparently, and my sources say she comes from New York. Manhattan, specifically, where every inch of that place is monitored. You'd think that her kind wouldn't like that, but she says she prefers it that way - what someone else knows is available for her to know, too. And when you know what the enemy knows, it's as good as never being picked up by them in the first place. Knowledge isn't power, she says. Control of knowledge is, and she means to be one powerful bitch.
-- Nataraja, BrahmaNet admin to XXX, fixer in Dayton, Ohio.

History

Childhood

I was born in 2051, and grew up in Manhattan, a spoiled little corp princess. My father was a midlevel executive for Saeder-Krupp North America, running one of the bigger departments in their Orbital Dynamics subsidiary, providing communications towers and orbital satellites. It paid well, and he was well-kept. My mother was the love of his life, so he claimed, and I believe it. He worked far too much, yes, but she was always there waiting for him when he came home. The other executive's wives were jealous of her, and found her standoffish. She wasn't interested in the things they were: shopping, beauty treatments and plastic surgery, vacations, more shopping, affairs with much younger men and occasionally whose child had scored better in which social event.

My mother is a Hindi woman from a Brahmin-caste family, and she took her dignity and integrity very seriously. Don't get me wrong - she wasn't some super-enlightened being. She simply had very different priorities and ideals. She was very severe to me, insisting that I make good grades, and comport myself with the dignity she expected of someone of her blood. I was jealous of the other kids, honestly. It seemed like they had it easy, with mothers who didn't pay much attention to them, who lavished them with spending money instead of discipline.

Considering what my father did, it should be no surprise that I grew up on the Matrix. It was my one true escape, as my mother didn't know enough about its ins and outs, its hundred little secrets, to know the difference between me studying and me wasting time in a chat room talking about the latest fads or my favorite trideo shows (which I also watched via the Matrix, as my mother did not approve of such time-wasting entertainments).

There were some things about my mother that fascinated me, however. One room in our house was set aside for her sole use, and I was not permitted in there. I was eight when I finally managed to sneak into that room, and it was a place filled with wonder. She'd set it up as a shrine, and the wonderful brass statues of the strange (to me, at least) gods of India were everywhere, along with candles, incense holders, strings of beads and a thousand-thousand other delights to the senses. I don't know how long I stood there, just soaking it all in, wandering from shelf to table to little box shaped like a house for the statues, just looking at everything. I finally realized my mother was standing in the doorway, simply watching me with a slight smile on her face.

"These are not for you, Lilian," she told me. I thought she sounded somewhat sad. "These are the things of my religion, of the religion of my family in India. Your father wants you to fit in with your peers, and to not bother with such things."

She then ushered me from the room, closing and locking the door behind us. She was very firm, but also strangely kind. I think she did it on purpose, because from that day, I wanted nothing more than to know everything about that world. The Matrix provided me a wide variety of sources of information, from ancient, traditional Vedic texts to Hindu history to message boards and chatrooms describing the latest innovations, sects and theologies.

What struck me most was the incredibly egalitarian nature of the practices. Because all the world was Maya - the great illusion - every manifestation of the gods was valid. There was no such thing as "heretical." If humanity could bend its imagination in any direction and see the gods there, that was a true manifestation of those gods.

BrahmaNet

It was, of course, only inevitable that I should eventually find BrahmaNet, a vast and beautifully sculpted network of virtual temples, with rites and teachings occurring at all times. At the tender age of thirteen, I submitted my application to become one of its postulates, and was accepted immediately. My father, of course, noticed the change in me. I was spending more and more time in the Matrix, and less and less time being his little girl. It was nothing for him to investigate my online activities and find out what I was up to.

I can still remember the fight that broke out between my parents as a result of that. My father blamed my mother, of course, accusing her of inspiring "that nonsense" in me. My mother denied it, of course, and even told him that she'd forbidden me access to her temple, and never spoke to me of it. But I was a daughter of a Brahmin's daughter, and our souls seek out the Ancient Truths no matter where we live or who our fathers are.

I was forbidden from continuing my devotions and education at BrahmaNet. All this did, of course, was force me to find ways of accessing it that my father did not know. A place like BrahmaNet - very nontraditional, of course - attracted all sorts of fringe people, including more than a few deckers in that day. I contacted them, and they guided me in fooling the security precautions my father put in place to keep me from being there.

The Crash 2.0

I was, predictably, logged on to BrahmaNet when the Crash happened in 2065. Even though I was only fourteen, I'd already had a real datajack for two years - no one in my peer group entered middle school without one. So, I was among those who probably should have died when it happened.

I have only vague memories of it. I can recall what seemed to be the whole world unraveling, and the pain was excruciating. But then, I realized that there was something behind the false world that was being torn apart - a Truth behind the Maya, if you will - and suddenly I was immersed in it, like being submerged in a river of infinitely cool and healing water.

It completed me somehow. More than that. It whispered to me. I could sense the vast interconnectedness of all information, of the ancient and eternally unfolding patterns that looped in on themselves over and over, repeating in vastly diverse cycles. I was aware that somehow, my body was elsewhere, and the thread that connected the meat and the persona were gone. Instead, my persona was connected not to the electrochemistry of my physical brain, but directly to my soul, somehow, and it was a soul that had gone through many incarnations seeking this moment of Emergence. I don't know how long I floated there, though it seemed like ages.

I woke in a hospital, on fairly primitive life-support equipment. Everything that was connected to the Matrix originally was useless, and this included lots and lots of medical equipment. Still, I'd been in a coma for a week, and that was something that didn't need advanced medicine to tend to. I was awake and lucid. I also discovered that my coma wasn't the biggest change the Crash had wrought on my family. My father was in an air taxi when it happened, and he died in the crash. My mother was inconsolable and heavily sedated. She wasn't even there when I came out of my coma.

Discontent

My life changed dramatically. We were forced to move to much more moderate corporate housing, as my father's insurance settlement was nowhere near enough to keep us in the style that his income had. My mother spent her days in a stupor, on a variety of prescription pills, and I...well, I checked out.

The real world had ceased to have any real meaning for me, because the Matrix offered me so much more. I was a kid from a now-broken family, with no control over my life at all in the meat-world. In the Matrix, however, I discovered I was basically a goddess, anointed in the fires of the Crash and sanctified to wield the power that was the very lifesblood of the Matrix: information.

I could feel that there was something out there, in the echoing depths of the Matrix I still can't reach yet. I call her the Mahadevi, because she is to me what I am to my shaktis, my little goddesses (or sprites, in common Technomancer slang) are to me. They emanate from within me, as I emanate from the Mahadevi.

Eventually, I fell in with other technomancers in the Matrix, of course. The first of them I met was Agni, brash and sexy. He taught me about the Resonance, and found my Emergence story and philosophy on our nature interesting. He'd apparently been Emerged even before the Crash - he called himself an "otaku," and he had a lot to teach me. He was also my first lover - virtually, of course. He taught me a lot, but I never met him in person.

Except on the day he died.

Runner

Devi

It was 2067 and was seventeen. The day started normally, the way most terrifying, life-changing days do, I suppose. Well, that's not true. I'd had some...bad feelings. Things I saw on the Matrix, buried in the code, just under the surface. I'd been seeing it for a week, and I was on edge. Understand that our paths, our dharma, are laid out before us, and fighting it is the source of so much misery in the world. For some reason, I'd packed a bag in a fit of fear three days before - I told myself afterwards that just picking out the things that were important to me was calming.

I was coming home from school. As usual, I was alone, but I was also afraid. I couldn't tell you why, except that I kept seeing things. Omens, I suppose, in the Matrix. I crept up to the door of my family's home, and stopped. There was a slight smear of blood on the door, just below the maglock controls. Checking quickly, I saw that it had been hacked two hours earlier - a sloppy job, but there it was.

Reaching out further, I found the household node, welcoming as usual, and my mother's PAN. The biomonitors installed in it told me she was unconscious again - probably thanks to her sedatives. But that's when I noticed, just beneath the surface, a third node, running in passive mode. I probed it, and found it familiar: Agni.

I threw open the door and rushed into the house, closing and locking the door behind me. My mother was asleep on the sofa, and a trail of blood droplets - invisible on the dark tile outside in the hall, but very obvious in our immaculate house - led past the living room, down the hall to my bedroom.

I found him there, his blood soaking the sheets of my bed. He'd tried to use strips torn from my comforter to staunch his wounds, but he was too badly injured. He lay there, curled up in a ball around his stomach wounds, the pain written clearly on his face, frozen in death. His eyes stared at the distance. A gun lay in his hand, too, pointed towards the door.

Throwing caution to the wind, I tried to hack his comlink, only to find that he'd programmed a file dump on it for me the instant his node detected me trying to access it. His last words came to me in the form of his burning avatar, and I wept real tears while I listened to him.

He was a shadowrunner, and things had gone horribly wrong on his latest run against S-K North America. He didn't have any other options but to find me and hope I could help him. If I was hearing this message, however, he was dead. He gave me the access codes to his com, and apologized - he hoped I could find a way to get out of this, but he'd likely endangered me. If they searched, they would find out that he and I knew one another, and would assume I was an accomplice.

I accessed his com, and found - to my horror - an S-K Trace running in it. They were coming for him. And now, me.

I snatched up his com, credsticks and gun, as well as my bag, and fled. In a small maintenance room, I accessed the passive security of my residential building, and found S-K soldiers on their way in. Knowing I didn't have much time, and knowing that they were likely following the Trace without really knowing exactly where they were going, I hacked the resident profile of our household node, switching out my identification shot with that of another girl I went to school with. In short order, I'd wiped all photos of me from my household. I knew I couldn't touch my official S-K records, but they would probably access our household identification before bothering to get that info - at least at first.

Then, I shut down Agni's com, stowed it all away in my bag, and walked past them, rolling my eyes in irritation like any other schoolgirl might, the AR icon of a well-known teen chatroom blazing over my head. They shouldered past me on their way to the elevator while I walked out of the building, and my old life, forever.

The Streets

Devi

The next several weeks were hard. Really hard. I didn't have anywhere to go or anyone to get help from. For a while, I just focused on survival, finding alleys to sleep in, dumpsters to eat from and avoiding SK corp territory, just in case they were still looking for me. In many cities, you can go your entire life accomplishing those things pretty easily - but not Manhattan. "Information City," we like to call it, and that's true. Every alley has closed-circuit TV and heat monitors that trigger police patrol alarms if someone remains in them for longer than fifteen minutes. Dumpsters are fixed with cheap electronic access locks. And corporate territory is everywhere in Manhattan. I'd never really realized it before, but there is nothing but corporate territory.

In short order, after not sleeping for about three days, being rousted from every alley and park I settled in for more than an hour, I was finally pursued. SK corporate cops found their way to me. Which, I admit, was unexpected - I was in the food court of a mall owned by Aztechnology when it happened. The crew was made up of three SK cops, accompanied by an Aztech liaison. I found out later that many of the corps in Manhattan have "extradition procedures" that can be implemented through the Council's membership. It takes a few days of bureaucracy, but once someone is added to the list, the corp that is pursuing them need only get a liaison with them and they can pursue wanted criminals into other corporate territories.

Of course, these guys were just one grade above rent-a-cops, and I skipped out on them. The next couple day was even crazier, as those cops seemed to be everywhere. So, I eventually ended up in the one place I knew they wouldn't pursue me: the Pits. The closest thing Manhattan has to a Barrens, the Pits is gang and squatter territory. Though it was squalid, I finally managed to get some sleep in the top-most landing of a stairwell in an old building that had been abandoned since the Quake.

When I finally woke up something like ten hours later, I was hungry and afraid. So, I did what I usually do when the real work was too much for me to deal with - I logged onto BrahmaNet. It was weird, though. My login immediately ushered me into one of the private back rooms that hold only two people. I found this room was not only private, but not listed in the main 'Net directory, and Nataraja was there waiting for me.

He told me that SK had sent hackers to check out and monitor my account here. He'd spotted them and once they'd left (leaving behind monitoring frames to check up on the account occasionally), he re-routed the account, changing its registry details so that the frames were watching a defunct account of a banned user, and making sure I'd be re-routed into a private, discreet back-channel when I logged on. He asked me what was going on, and I told him everything. Especially what had happened to Agni.

Nataraja saved my life. Literally. He taught me everything I needed to know about living SINless. For a while, that meant living in the Pits. Eventually, SK figured out where I was, and hired bully-boys from the Pit to come looking for me. The first ones to do so were a pair of chip-heads who occasionally worked breaking legs for some of the local heavies.

It was probably two weeks after I first arrived in the Pit, and was still unsure of myself. I was carrying a knife around by this time, but not much else. I escaped them by pure luck, honestly. Well, pure luck and being willing to use that knife. I buried it to the hilt in the orc's collarbone and took off running. Normally, I would have gone after the dwarf chick who was with him, but it was the orc who'd caught me in a chase earlier. So, I had to take out the orc, and I'd be able to outrun the dwarf, which is just what I did. Didn't kill him, by any means, just shocked him and kept him from giving chase. I've seen them around since, and they avoid me these days.

The Underground

After Nataraja put me in contact with Keystone, things changed dramatically. Keystone was my mentor. He was another technomancer (I learned that term from him, in fact). He took me with him into the Underground, where he squatted. By his admission, he did so hesitantly, but he said that he owed Nataraja, and helping me out was his way of repaying him. Keystone wasn't as good of a hacker as Nataraja was, but he knew Manhattan's information systems. He usually avoided going topside, because he knew just how much was recorded of every movement everyone made.

Where Keystone avoided the Manhattan InfoSphere, I loved it. Once I learned how it worked - and most importantly, how to make it work for me - I was in my element. I stopped worrying about being tracked up there: anyone who is doing any tracking is going to be tracked themselves. Once I learned how to clue in to those channels of communication, I was a ghost. I was steps ahead of anyone looking for me; I knew someone was looking for me very nearly the minute they started a search.

Between Keystone and Nataraja, it was a short period of time before I felt like I wanted to do something else with my skills. The next step, of course, was shadowrunning - something neither Keystone nor Nataraja had ever done themselves, but they knew people. Keystone helped me get my hands on some decent gear, and Nataraja hooked me up with a Brooklyn fixer. In short order, I got my first small job. My brand-new shiny gun didn't do me a lick of good, because I did it all from the Matrix nodes in the Underground. Easy money, and the thrill of peoples' lives in my hands without the danger of not actually having to be there in person? I was hooked.

As with all things, of course, it eventually went bad. I was stupid, and it cost some good people their lives. I let my fixer know that I knew the interior of the SK corporate facility really well, and he hooked me up with a job to take advantage of that. I learned that day that the information you learn isn't pure. It's tainted by who you are when you learn it. The information that you learn as the mild daughter of a corporate sarariman is very different from the information you need as a shadowrunner.

In short, my intel was all but useless, and two really good friends died in a hail of corporate gunfire. I, on the other hand, could do nothing but listen to their screams over the com - SK hackers were ready for some upstart like me, and shut my ass out of their system so fast that I got a nosebleed. I wept all night, and in the morning logged onto BrahmaNet to see if Nataraja knew any fixers anywhere else. Preferably somewhere less intense than Manhattan. And somewhere that I could afford to pay a smuggler to get me to.

As a result, here I am in Dayton, Ohio, in the middle of the UCAS. We'll see what life has to offer me out here, and what I intend to take from it.

Stats

Devi's Matrix Icon

• Technomancer
• Stream: Networker (Charisma + Resonance; Code, Courier, Crack, Data and Sleuth Sprites)
• Paragon: Delphi (+2 to Analyze tests, +1 to Data Sprites)