I recently finished the main campaign of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Don’t want to give too much away – the story is great, as every entry in this trilogy has been. I was bummed it was over, though, and was happy to see that they had included a “bonus mission” at the end which you can play through with your characters.
Lo and behold, a side-job pops up that entails breaking in to an underwater research lab and stealing the cure for a virus. Some corporate bigwig in a rival corporation was deliberately infected by Namazu and is being blackmailed – we’ll keep you alive as long as you betray your current company. The bigwig hires you to stop it.
So I break in to the lab, and mow down the corporate stooges. Along the way, I read about all the illegal human experimentation they’re doing down there – mind control that can overwrite personalities and create the perfect sleeper agents. Oh…and they’re cooking up deadly diseases, the likes of which could wipe out humanity.
The particular virus that infected the bigwig? They called it “SARS III”. I grab the cure, of course…and in a twinge of conscience let the scientists who developed it live. I also grabbed a sample of the stuff for myself.
You get the option to sell the SARS III sample on the Shadowland BBS black market once you get back to your home base. I know it’s just a game, but I can’t bring myself to do it…not with a real virus from the eastern hemisphere creating a global pandemic out there beyond the property line.