Read shadowrun 40 The Burning Time for Free Online Page A

engine and rested his hands on the steering wheel, letting his head fall back. He still hadn’t recovered from his meeting with the chip dealer last night. It had really shaken him up.
    After leaving the Avalon, he’d gone by subway to where he’d left his car. He kept looking around the train, thinking that any minute an undercover cop would arrest him or that one of the dealer’s cronies would jump him. It had taken a couple of hours of simming to calm his nerves when he got home. By the time the chip shut down, it was very late, but Dan still had trouble getting to sleep. His head was filled with images of himself as a sim hero, but he was no Ethan Hunt in the encounter with the ork at the Avalon. He’d been nothing more than Dan Otabi, someone who could never take on a powerful, cyber-enhanced metahuman.
    He’d had trouble waking up today when his internal alarm clock gently but relentlessly chipped away at his sleep, bringing him back to consciousness and the harsh realities of a cold Monday morning in December. For about the hundredth time, Dan wished there was a chip that would let his body go through the motions of getting up, eating, showering, driving, and working while his mind was off getting some rest and enjoying itself. Maybe that was the kind of chip Novatech or Truman Systems should come out with next. Dan would be first in line to buy one—assuming they weren’t outlawed like the California-hot chip he’d tried to score last night. Why was the best stuff always illegal?
    He knew he couldn’t sit here all day, so he got out of the car. He slung the case he used to carry his chips and other work items over one shoulder. The bag also contained a few chips that weren’t work-related, just in case he found a few spare minutes around lunchtime for a short break.
    He keyed the alarm system on his car. The company lot was secure enough, but he thought it was a good habit to keep up. He walked toward the entrance, slipping the lanyard of the laminated ID over his head with practiced ease. The imbedded chip in the ID spoke silently with the main computer system of the building, confirming Dan’s identity and his authorization to be in the facility at this time of day. Security cross-checks had taken place invisibly before he ever reached the front door, of course. The lobby was decorated for the Christmas season with fake plastic wreaths, holly boughs, blinking Christmas lights, and some red and green ribbon and shiny little ornaments. It all looked so fake to Dan, so flat compared to when he was simming. That looked real.
    "Hey, Dan, how’s it goin’? Looks like you had a busy weekend!"
    "Yeah, you could say that, Lou," Dan said to the security guard on duty. Most days, he liked Lou well enough, but today he wasn’t in the mood to chat. The old guy was getting near retirement age, and he liked to talk. Dan had heard all about how Lou had turned ork as a teenager back in the twenties. Apparently, people who’d goblinized into orks and trolls lived a lot longer than the ones who were actually born that way later on.
    He knew that Lou had been married for more than thirty years to another ork. He was a great-grandfather already, and his kids were in their thirties, which for orks made them seem at least as old as Lou, if not older. Odds were halfway decent that Lou and his wife would outlive their grandchildren and become great-great-grandparents before they died. Dan wondered how Lou kept his sunny disposition day in and day out. It must be hard enough just being an ork, but the idea of outliving your kids and grandkids really seemed unfair to Dan.
    "You kids and yer parties," Lou said. "Well, I hope you had fun."
    "Not nearly enough," Dan said with a wan smile. Lou chuckled and shook his head as Dan took the hall down to the "gopher farm."
    That was what his co-workers called the maze of cubicles that occupied most of the main floor where he worked. They were standard-issue corporate gray, set off by