Compound CR-617, "Basilisk"

Written by: Null Kit

If you haven't heard of the so-called 'Hell Rain' incident that recently occured in the Concrete Forest, I can't fault you: Raleigh's city-council have paid a monstrous amount of NuYen to a Horizon PR-firm to erase any knowledge of the horror-show that occured that evening. But whistle-blowers and survivors, while rare, have managed to get the word out regardless, and so far all of them have paid dearly for it.
CR-617 ('Contact-Reactive,' if you've curious about the acronym) is a chemical mixture cooked up in the R&D facility of a Saeder-Krupp subsidiary by the name of Bouygues - the same corporation that constructed Raleigh's famous Downtown Elevated Plaza among many other things - and is made not directly from awakened substances but the by-product of such, which is evidentally more stable than the former. At least, that's what I was told by the underground chemist who procured a sample of it, amidst a lot of other things I had neither the expertise or patience to understand (such details will still be included in the attached files).
CR-617 is by itself harmless (relatively speaking) and can be safely carried in a treated polytetrafluoroethylene container. It's true nature emerges when it is exposed to specific strong base-chemicals, erupting in a violent reaction and produceing rapidly expanding clouds of corrosive gasses that can quickly chew through modern concrete composites and core structural alloys, given sufficient time. On paper, this would make the compound an excellent candidate for use in demolition, which is why Raleigh city-council authorised Bouygues to field-test it on select buildings in the Concrete Forest.

For those wondering why the council chose to blast an abandoned skyscraper with CR-617, it's kind of complicated: The way those towers were constructred, conventional demolition-methods are nigh-imposible to implement without risking catastrophic collateral damage, and working around those dangers simply isn't economical.
On top of that, Raleigh's suits are still so embarassed by the failure of the Forester Group's plans that getting caught actively trying to demolish the emptied buildings would hit their ego good and hard. CR-617 was not only economic and theoretically able to safely dismantle the tower from the top down, but with some chicanery the damage could be made to look like 'natural decay', so to speak, saving the city face. At least, that's the working theory...

— Doomstar

I also have it on good authority that Basilisk was the second choice of non-explosive demolition. Bouygues had settled on using a fuckton of nanite grists to grind the towers down one floor at a time and hopefully have the wind carry the dusted materials away from any place important. Then CFD happened and Bouygues didn't want to be attributed with dropping tons of nanites into the Concrete Forest during the headcase epidemic, so they switched over to CR-617 as the 'safer option'. Haha...

— Cracker-Toa

Tragically for Bouygues, when they covertly deployed CR-617 on top of one of the larger eyesores of the Concrete Forest, they failed to detect or take into consideration every last material other than concrete and rebar used in their construction, along with the materials of equipment erroneously left behind, the reactions of which on contact with the mixing demolition compounds were completely unplanned for: eighteen minutes into the deployment, one of the compound-admixtures spilled onto a panel of exposed fibreglass and caused an endothermic-reaction, which in turn caused the destruction of the tower's floors to proceed unevenly and cause a partial collapse of several floors.
The good news was that the tower's primary structure remained stable and didn't collapse in on itself completely, save for some debris falling from the floors that had caved-in at unexpected angles and landing around inhabited parts of the Concrete Forest. The bad news was that some of said debris included the remaining canisters of CR-617, which surprisingly, were never tested to see if they could survive impacts in the hundreds of meters.
The fallout was disasterous, but informative: the canisters were spread far and wide in their fall, and doused a large chunk of populated parts of the barrens where it dissolved through buildings, vehicles and SINless alike without discrimination, and gave the compound its nickname of 'Basilisk' by way of the grey, mottled corpses it left behind, petrified in their last agonised moments.
Covert groups of Saeder-Krupp overatives were able to recover and contain some of the canisters, but many of them would simply have to be waited out from the level of corrosive gasses they were spitting out, and so damage-control changed its priorities to containing the potential PR fallout alongside Raleigh city-council. CR-617 alone did a good job of silencing its victims by itself, as most people who survived the debris and initial exposure would certainly die off from various side-effects of inhaling and being splattered with the cocktail of chemicals spilling out from dissolved buildings.
The situation was succesfully hidden from the public for the time being, but it is as they say: No plan survives contact with the enemy. Whistleblowers involved in the project and the survivors of the disaster were able to get the word out as to what happened to parts of the Matrixs that weren't so heavily curated by the city and corps looking to erase the incident, and it wasn't long before Shadowrunners got involved and started bringing the existence of this compound and the disaster it caused into the public eye.
Bouygues's own short-sighted greed eventually played a part in their own downfall and liquidation, as they chose to keep the remaining canisters of CR-617 and arrange to have them brought back to SK's facilities for further research and development instead of having their contents neutralised on-site. Not only were these canisters found by third parties, but several of them were stolen mid-transit. One of them was discovered by locals and brought to the authorities, but at least seven others remain at large, and smaller volumes of the compound have been discovered in the hands of several criminal elements in and around the Raleigh area.

I wouldn't usually care about missing demolition compounds, but considering what this stuff did to the people in the Concrete Forest and what it could do if set off in a public area, I think it can be agreed that recovering the rest of these Basilisk canisters is a priority. Expect open bounties to get put up soon for each one found.

— Barkeep

Item type

Compound

Rarity

25F

Weight

748.9 kg/m³

Base Price

-