Twenty-two years ago I had no life. Twenty-two years ago I had no job. Twenty-two years ago I had no family. Twenty-two years ago I had no future. Twenty-two years ago I was a shadowrunner.

It was a dead-end existance. I was going to die on the streets and no one was going to know that I ever existed, not really. I had contacts, a fixer, a decker, and a razorguy who did runs with me, but none of them really knew me. I was just the magic guy. I didn't need a name. I could easily be replaced by any other magic guy. I was going to die on the streets and no one would care. And then I saw my way out.

The extraction went perfectly. I was aloe but that didn't matter. It only took a chloroform-soaked rag and some duck tape. Joe Schmoe was a nobody too. He was just a nobody who heard or saw the wrong thing. I took him to the Johnson and no one esle in the whole wide world knew about it. It dawned on me that this was my big chance. Joe Schmoe had no family. There was no one to miss him. More importantly, there was no one to find out an imposter. He looked remarkably like me. We had the same height, same build, same metatype, same tradition, and same general features. The rest could be worked out with cosmetic surgery and gene therapy.

My fixer had set up a meet with the same Johnson for latter that week. He had another job for me. I was still in bandages when the day of the meet arrived. The doc who changed my face was in my car, except for his brain. That had been extracted with a .45 slug and washed down a drain on his operating room floor. I put the doc's corpse in the driver's seat and brick on the gas. The car crashed through the resturant and the C-12 did the rest of the work. I was dead. It was ruled a suicide. The Johnson was dead. Joe Schmoe reported to work the next day as if nothing had happened.

Joe Schmoe came home two months ago, the real Jeo Schmoe. It seems that he had been alive all of this time, kept against his will in some sort of research facility. He had finaly had enough and decided to escape. Lucky him caught a burst of lead with his chest. He projected, hoping to break through the wards and get help before his body died. Instead he was clobbered by an elemental. When projecting magicians are disrupted we return to our bodies. Joe's body was dead at the time, but he had another aiting for him. I woke up that morning to screaming in my head.

At first I thought that I was possessed. The best awakened practitioners that money can rent told me otherwise. There were no astral forms anywhere near me. I wasn't Percieving, I dared not for fear that this ghost would take control of my meat, so I cannot be certain, but have no reason not to trust them. Astral forms can be masked, but only a god could hide from my doctors. There had to be some other explination.

I searched day and night for the past two months, exhausting every resource I had at my disposal. Finally, a friend put my in touch with this guy with creepy face paint. He taked about the power of Names and some such nonsense.

As the days pass by I have less and less control of this body. Joe Schmoe is quickly taking over. I can't fight him. If I percieved I would be kicked out of this body, and even then it would be pointless because he isn't astrally present and isn't likely to make himself so. Most of the time I'm aware of everything that happens while he is in control, but I have started blacking out. I can feel myself fading away and I know of no way to stop it.

I have no future. I died twenty-two years ago. I have no life. Joe Schmoe has a life. I have been holding his place for him. Now he's taken it back.

This is a true story.
The names have been changed to protect the guilty and the damned.

Nice piece.

I guess there comes a time in every runners's life when he or she gets tired of looking over the shoulder all the time. This is kind of mindset Wiz Kid Leela went through before she finally decided to retire. Unlike the character portrayed here, she was more fortunate in that she always had a life waiting for her (as a concert soloist) if she ever decided she wanted it.

Creepy. Very well written, but creepy.

I read a Orsen Scott Card noven some time ago that had a little sideplot about an identity thief who killed her college roomate and stole her identity. After spending decades calling her body by the dead victim's name, she had accidently renamed her body without knowing it. When she came face to face with her victim's ghost her renamed body rejected her, and took in the dead woman's ghost.

It seems like this would be something interesting to explore in the context of Shadowrun. Normally, astrally projecting characters can't switch bodies, but what if someone immerses himself into someone else's identity so fully that he is indistinguishable from the original? Would even the body be able to tell the two apart?

Such a problem would be an interesting place to start a shadowrun.