As a runner exits the warehouse carrying several grand worth of stolen merchandise he sees a man in a security uniform walking up the street. The man stops and, realizing what's going on, goes for his walkie-talkie. The runner cranks off a shot from his Warhawk, blowing a hole straight through the guard's chest, and knocking him backwards, blood splattered, onto the wet street. The runner checks around for additional security and, seeing none, dives into the Seattle shadows.

Marvin didn't want to be a dock security guard and neither was this a wish his wife or friends. The pay sucks, the benefits are nil, and the mortality rate is high. These and many other thoughts were running through their minds as Marvin was wheeled into the intensive care ward of Seattle General. The gun blast had severed his spine and stopped his heart for nearly fifteen minutes. Even if, miraculously, his brain was still fully functional, Marvin would never walk again. The surgeons went to work and fifteen hours later they wheeled out nothing more than a shell of the man who, just a few hours ago, was sitting and chatting with some coworkers over coffee. His best friend, Max, was the first to brave a look. Slowly he entered the darkened room and, peering through a web of tubes and hoses, looked into the eyes of what was left of Marvin.

Five minutes later he's the phone with a contact at Lone Star. The investigation was going badly, he was told. The perpetrators were good and left virtually no evidence. Max explained what had happened to Marvin and the contact promised to put all he had into the investigation.

A month later Max receives a call from his Lone Star contact. Another robbery had been perpetrated the night before, matching the previous crime to a tee. And this time they had a witness, a young gang member who had managed to escape and was later captured fleeing the area. It took some roughing up but they finally got a name: Snake. Both robberies involved the theft of a special chip which has a high market value on the Asian continent. The contact gives some fence names which deal in this area of the world and sends him some similar chips he "found" in the evidence storage room.

Max's search takes months and he finally gets a lucky break. While discussing the chips with a local fence a group of people walk in, a group of shadowrunners. The fence quickly brushes Max aside and, as he walks out the door, hears the fence greet one of the runners as Snake. All it takes is some tailing and Max finds out where these runners eat, sleep, party, and meet. He also gets a snapshot of the mysterious Snake.

Max visits Marvin, who has made little headway against his condition and is still all but a vegetable. He pulls out the photograph of Snake and places it in front of Marvin's vacant eyes. The heart monitor jumps. Max smiles. Now all he need do is wait. And plan.

It ain't over till it's over and, as we've learned in life and in Shadowrun, it's NEVER over. Most of the time the loose ends simply dangle. But sometimes these loose ends act as a fuse, slowly burning down until it ignites a blast of retaliation. Every action leaves a loose end and, no matter how hard you try, there's no way in hell you're going to be able to tie all of them. It's called paranoia and paranoia is what forces you to keep your edge.

Far too often runners, and even gamemasters, forget about these loose ends and allow potentially volatile, and exciting, situations and scenarios to simply die away. There's a tendency to consider an NPC "out of the picture" as soon as he's out of the fight. The result is runners who go through life without anything on their minds other than their current run and, after this run is finished, the following one. Such an attitude denies a central theme in Shadowrun which is, again, paranoia. Without paranoia runners acquire an attitude of invincibility and smugness which accompanies the knowledge that nobody's going to mess with them.

The lose ends are what keep them on their toes. You can't simply send a corp after them for no reason whatsoever in an attempt to "scare" them into paying attention because what the hell does a megacorp care about some runner group which never messed with them in the first place? But waste Renreku's most celebrated combat mage and they're gonna want to take the price it took to train him out of your ass.

Commonly a runner will attempt to get rid of a lose ends through the use of simple elimination. Elimination of the witnesses, or the wounded guard, or the passers by. For some reason the runner finds comfort in knowing that this person will not be able to come after them in the future because they're dead. Well, guess what, these NPCs do not live in a parallel universe from which they enter the "real world" for the duration of a firefight and then vanish back to wherever they came from. They have friends, dependents, and other people who are going to be quite upset over what has occurred. Now, granted, the average security guard won't have the resources to go after a full fledged Shadowrunner who wasted their buddy, so perhaps Marvin was a bad example. But wax a Yak soldier who happened to be the son of a high level boss and there's gonna be trouble.

Gamemasters should also be careful not to over use NPC retaliation. You want your runners to be paranoid, but not so terrified that they're scared to go to the Stuffer Shack to get some sloppy soy. What they should be is on their guard while going to the Stuffer Shack, or nightclub, or wherever. I know when I personally walk down a city street at night I assume that every person I pass is going to pull a gun on me. I don't exactly consider myself paranoid, I just find comfort in knowing that if somebody does pull out a gun I won't shit myself in surprise and perhaps do something stupid that will get me shot. In Shadowrun, you'd be ready to go for your own gun. I can't exactly do that in real life, although I can quickdraw my wallet faster than anybody I know.