Operation Toffler
An adventure for Shadowrun

Background

Data Haven Apeiron has had some fun with their new economist and are about ready to apply his theories. They’re going to do it by running a coup on the Principality of Morocco using shadowrunners, quietly demonstrating the power of information over force for those who watch behind the scenes carefully. If they’re successful, Data Haven Apeiron will have a very stable place to put a new headquarters, protected by a national military and international bureaucracy. As long as they can keep the Corporate Court from issuing an Omega Order against an entire country, they’ll be in an excellent position.

The offer will bring more shadowrunners into one place at one time than has ever probably happened before in history, or at least the last Concrete Dreams concert. They’re all getting paid with top-rating fake ID’s that will be created in the central Moroccan databases, along with the chance to go “shopping” in the military bases. Everyone will be issued skillsofts formatted for Moroccan Arabic, French, Spanish, and the various Berber dialects, and a knowledge of the country’s geography and city layouts. (After all, Apeiron has the intelligence information— for them, this is about as cheap as the chips to burn it onto.) They’ll also get map chips, intelligence reports, and vaccinations.

Before doing this, it will definitely be time to reread George Alec Effinger’s cyberpunk books, When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss.

The Plan

  1. Insert this incredible plethora of runners and their support hardware into Morocco in the first place. Toward this end, several shell corporations have been established, and runners with appropriate job skills will trickle in over a couple of months, being paid for Middle lifestyle and given the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the locale. Others may come in under tourist visas. The businesses themselves will be smuggling in a fair amount of communications equipment so the operation can be coordinated— it will later go into use in upgrading the Moroccan Matrix if the operation is successful.
  2. Take over the local Matrix and subvert communications. The central facilities are in Casablanca and the capital, Rabat; secondary centers are in Fes, Marrakech, Oujda, Tangier, and Tetouan. Once the central Matrix facilities in Rabat and Casablanca are taken care of, they’ll have control over the central network handling twenty million citizens. From there, overrides can be issued to the smaller facilities in Tangier, Casablanca, Marrakech, and Agadir; passes can be granted for “repairmen”; and the whole country’s communications network will be under the control of Data Haven Apeiron, which will have a number of mainframes bent to the task of supplying artificial personalities and synthesized digital “masks” for a large number of agents back at the main facility in the Pacific.
  3. Subvert the comm link to the king in his Leónization tank by slipping in a tap. The king will get his own version of reality, and the government will get Apeiron’s. (Gaining entry will be made much easier by access to the Matrix.)
  4. Gain access to the main military command centers and be ready to neutralize people in command. They need to deal with the Royal Army, Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, Royal Gendarmerie, and Auxiliary Forces.
  5. Call a cabinet meeting and take over the ministers with possession spells, mind control, and so on, with a view toward personality reprogramming or replacement with surgicially altered people wearing appropriate personafixes to make them very difficult to detect as substitutions. Some may simply be taken care of by slotting the right personafixes into their waiting omnijacks.

Opposition

There should be some things to go wrong with other aspects of the plan for the runners to troubleshoot.

Characters

Outcome

If the run is successful— and there are many actions that need to be successful beyond those of the runners— then Morocco will quietly undergo a governmental shake-up: it will go from a hereditary constitutional monarchy with a prime minister and legislature to the model demonstrated by the Pueblo Corporate Council, giving a share to each citizen. Rumors will fly about what really happened, but there will only be a few press releases about hardware problems at Moroccan Matrix Services causing a mild panic.

Internationally, commentators will express great surprise at the sudden, surprising dissolution of the Moroccan monarchy, but due to the peaceful nature of the takeover and excellent propaganda campaign on the part of Apeiron, the populace will be relatively accepting of the sudden change of power. The royalty will announce their retirement from power, and will turn up in other countries with enough wealth intact to live like exiled royalty, and some impressive conditioning to convince them that it’s too dangerous to try to get their old jobs back.

Morocco will quietly become involved in international black market trafficking, effectively nationalizing all internal criminal rackets behind a smokescreen; there will be a carefully planned system for “losing” military hardware from bases. “Legislation” will appear permitting governmental “review” of appropriate systems as part of “national Matrix security”, and the whole country will undergo a general upgrade in security... except for the holes left for the government to produce their own creations. Private banking laws will appear as it attempts to muscle in on some of the business of Switzerland and the Carib League.

Because the black market is effectively government-regulated, cash will definitely be digital there— the face banks operating there will have access to the national treasury and will be hooked up to Apeiron’s intelligence-gathering engines.