Bust-A-Move (second generation)

Source book: Stolen Souls

One drone that can be useful for extractions is the Bust-A-Move toys. These toys were sold on the market for some time until they were being re-appropriated by shadowrunners and gangers to carry out robberies. Of course, since being pulled off the shelves, the shadows have found another purpose for Bust-A-Move drones: intelligence gathering for extraction jobs. On the black market, you can find a second generation of Bust-A-Move toys built by runners that have been modified to take on the appearance of almost all of the popular toys on the market today, from Samurai Cyborgs and Captain Nova to the Firewatch Commandos. These toy drones are meant to be switched with toys that a child of a target is currently playing with. This switch can happen anywhere—the playground, school, a park, a grocery store, or the family vehicle when the family is in a restaurant eating. Basically, anywhere where a child may leave their toys behind, unattended. Once switched, the child will happily take the toy into their house, where the Bust-A-Move toy drone can then begin its intelligence work. The toy can record conversations (providing a quality recording that can fool most voice-print scanners), acquire security pass codes, obtain the full layout of the residence, make copies of maglock key data, note any pets that are present or any onsite security personnel, locate and identify any firearms in the house, and gather information on the schedules of every family member in the residence. This intelligence can be useful to extraction teams in deciding whether to hit the entire family when they’re at home, or whether it would be safer to do multiple extractions while the children are in transit heading off to school or extracurricular activities and the parents are heading off to work. This information could even present runner teams an opportunity to enter the residence when it’s empty and establish and ambush at an advantageous time. There are rumors that a third-generation Bust-A-Move toy is being developed by inventive runners, and that it will be capable of holding doses of a sedative (such as narcoject) as well as possess a means of administering said sedatives so that it can covertly incapacitate a number of targets in the household while they are sleeping. So far, there has been no luck with creating a workable Bust-A-Move drone that can succeed in this task. One problem is that a drone of that size only has a limited carrying capacity, and the more you try to stuff into it, the more you inhibit its movements, potentially making it clumsier, slower, and more susceptible to being caught. Secondly, children are naturally rough with their toys. Those that have attempted to put chemical reservoirs into these drones have found the reservoirs ending up being broken, with the result of most of the chemical leaking out of the toy before they could be used for their intended purpose. Nonetheless, even in their current form, Bust-A-Move toys have proven invaluable for the intel they harvest.