1. Accident Free

ACCIDENT FREE
A cyberpunk short story by Peter Whitmore

Daniel Allen Irons. 58 years old, twice my own age. Caucasian, perhaps a little bit more tan than I from his time served in the middle east. Hard to tell now that he's been killed. His body looked pale as a sheet when I arrived; pale as a sheet that was heavily stained with the dark crimson of his own blood that now painted the floor around him and the side of the massive server that he was found leaning against.

I squatted down in front of his body as best I could without getting my knees soaked in his blood. A tremendous gash ran down the height of almost his entire torso, as if a butcher had tried to gut him. Most likely the cause of the fatal blood loss. A cursory glance at his left arm revealed several more lacerations of varying degrees of size and severity. Assuming that he wasn't a ritual bloodletter with poor articulation, these had to have been defensive wounds that had been inflicted in the struggle against his assailant.

And speaking of assailants, I took note of the broken construction drone laying just a few feet to his left, its busted chassis also caked in dark crimson blood. I recognized this type of drone; it was a bit of an older model, one equipped with more traditional construction tools that were being slowly phased out in favor of 3D printed buildings, but I knew enough about Icarus Industries' robotics operating procedures to know that this drone wouldn't have been in operation without one of its servo limbs missing like the way I found it. No, the limb had to have been removed sometime during or after the attack. I found the missing part right next to the chassis, appearing to have been forcibly removed from its socket. At the end of this detached arm was a circular saw, ideal for carpentry, and for cutting gashes into Icarus employees.

"It's a pretty straightforward case, Detective Stone." I turned my attention over to one of the Cerberus Security Systems field officers as he strolled over in the general direction of the crime scene. "We always knew that Mr. Irons was resentful of the drones taking his job, so he lashed out at one of the things in anger. Triggered the self-preservation protocols and it cut right through him."

"I thought robots weren't supposed to harm humans." I replied, looking to Daniel and his wounds, and his busted cybernetic right arm. Pneumatic, military grade, like my own right arm, but broken. "Or cyborgs, for that matter."

"Asimov's laws of robotics are just science fiction, Detective." The armored officer replied, shaking his head at me. Though most of his face was obscured by his security helmet, like every Cerberus in uniform, I was given the impression that he was rolling his eyes at me as well. "Science fiction from more than a century ago. This is 2084, Mr. Stone. Get with the times. Icarus Industries is a private corporation. It has the right to protect its property and its assets with all necessary force and precautions. Every last citizen of the Gibson Springs sector, Dan here included, had to sign an agreement to abide by the rules and conditions set forth by this sector's majority shareholder, that shareholder being Icarus Industries. In that agreement included the clause that in the event that Icarus products were damaged or misused, the company cannot be held liable in any way for any injury or death that may occur."

"And here I didn't think they taught you Cerberus rent-a-cops anything more than how to be rude and shoot a gun." I was being facetious with my reply, of course, but the guy's condescending tone of voice was striking a nerve with me. I was well aware that there were some genuinely good people working for Icarus Industries's private military police force, Cerberus Security Systems. Or at least, they used to have some good people in the past. I worked alongside them myself. Nowadays, I wasn't too keen on the idea of ever setting foot in the Gibson Springs sector of Pacific City ever again, but my prior connections to the company made me too good a candidate for a private investigation into this matter. "There's just one small matter, though..."

"And what would that be?"

"How do you know that this wasn't an accident? How do you know that Mr. Irons deliberately set about to break one of your precious construction drones?"

My question gave the officer a moment's pause. I wish I could have seen the expression on his face. "Mr. Stone, are you implying that our constructor drone had somehow malfunctioned and lethally injured Mr. Irons?"

"You're catching on much faster than I thought you would, officer."

"Mr. Stone, that is a preposterous allegation to make. Every Icarus Industries workplace throughout the entire Gibson Springs sector has been accident free since 2062. We take the utmost care and precision into the production of our robot drones and cybernetic implants, as I'm no doubt certain you are aware. Are you not a Class III cyborg outfitted with some of the finest Icarus Industries prosthetics?"

"Class IV, actually. But just barely. Thirty-one percent cyberization rate still counts as Class IV. You should know that."

His tone started getting a little more friendly, but for some reason I still didn't find this very reassuring. "Indeed, you are correct. I'm still just a Class II myself, with a seventeen percent cyberization rate, but at every tenth percent plus one, your classification ranking increases, and Icarus employees receive more benefits-"

"I'm not here for a sales pitch, I'm here for Dan Irons." I replied, turning back to the body. I issued the cybernetic eye in my right socket to display the victim's employee records in my augmented reality overlay, allowing myself to go over them and examine the scene at the same time. "Dan's widow gave me his employee records. Says here that he officially registered as a Class V cyborg as early as 2060, shortly after the war, right when the classification system first went into effect. Forty-two percent cyberization rate. Why was he still a lowly construction worker more than two decades later? He should've been eligible for way more since he was always under Icarus payroll during and after the Cyborg Wars."

Mrs. Irons already told me the answer to this, but I wanted to hear the answer from an Icarus official as well. "I never met the guy personally, but I was always told that Daniel Irons was a rather...stubborn employee. Like Irons, most of our older coworkers at Cerberus were veterans of the Cyborg Wars of the 2050s, many of whom came back from the middle east exhibiting all the classic symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. Icarus Industries has since developed neural implants specifically to treat these issues, but...ah! Here we are!" It would seem that the officer had been looking through an augmented reality overlay through the lens of his own helmet, and had been going through the employee files as well. "It's true that Mr. Irons had neural implants, but none of them were for therapeutic treatment. They had all been tactical neural implants installed during the war." And he was back to his strictly-business tone of voice, the way I preferred it. "He is recorded as telling his coworkers that he wanted to be a builder, considering it a way of atoning for the destruction he caused during the war. Icarus Industries deployed many military drones in addition to cybernetically augmented soldiers like himself in the war, and this old constructor drone found here at the scene was quite similar to some of the ones used for constructing temporary military encampments, so perhaps its sudden appearance on the scene caused him to have flashbacks and attack the drone in a fit of hysteria-"

"Or perhaps," I had to cut him off, standing up and pointing a finger at him with my prosthetic right arm. "Perhaps your employers were getting tired of having to pay long tenured constructors like Mr. Irons here, since construction drones have become cheaper to produce and maintain than the cost of training and paying a human construction worker, and they've already replaced more than ninety percent of their construction workforce with drones in the past decade alone. Icarus Industries stands a lot to benefit from Mr. Irons's retirement."

All I could really see of the guy's face was his mouth in chin, and I watched as his mouth contorted itself into a frown for a moment before he responded. "I don't know what you are implying, Detective Joseph Stone, but Cerberus Security Systems did not allow a private investigator into one of its own investigations for him to make spurious allegations about its own parent company. I would suggest, for your sake, keeping your delusional theories to yourself and focusing on what is clearly evident within the case at hand, if you know what's good for you."

I was, indeed, focused intensely on the evidence at hand, and I knew that my hunch was far from spurious, even if the Cerberus goon would never buy it. What troubled me the most at that moment was the fact that the constructor drone's arm had been yanked clean out of its socket, despite being the apparent murder weapon. Most humans couldn't have had the strength to accomplish such a feat, but a pneumatic arm like mine certainly could. Daniel's prosthetic arm didn't look too different than mine. Perhaps it might have been an older model, but still very capable of this. What bothered me, however, was the almost complete lack of blood spattered onto its mechanical frame. Dan had evidently been bleeding quite a bit; it would have made sense that he might have clutched the open wound in his chest cavity in an attempt to stop the bleeding, but that would have soaked his hand in crimson, which was not the case at the crime scene.

"Well, speaking of evidence, I'm going to need to confiscate Mr. Irons's prosthetics for further investigation." I told the officer. "Same goes for the wreckage of the drone, and any security camera footage of this area."

"We cannot permit that, Mr. Stone. Daniel Irons's cybernetic implants and the constructor drone are all property of Icarus Industries, and are to be immediately repossessed."

"And the data recorded within that hardware?"

"All implants found to be in working condition will be refurbished and their software restored to factory defaults. You may purchase these items once they are made available for sale at the nearest Icarus secondhand outlet."

"Daniel's implants and the constructor drone could have valuable data at the time of the incident."

"Cerberus will run a complete scan of the hardware's data banks and enter any relevant data it finds into the evidence file, of which you have your own digital copy, Joseph."

"How about the security camera footage? How is that coming along?"

"We actually have just been able to reconstruct the incident on the local GRID using the available footage. As an official member of the investigation unit, you have been authorized to view it."

Finally, we were getting somewhere, or so I had somewhat hoped. I didn't trust any of the corporations or their private law enforcement firms to be so truthful or forthcoming about whatever evidence they presented to me or anyone on the outside. Any metrics or footage I would receive from them would likely be doctored, so I concentrated on my AR overlay and watched the three dimensional playback on my cybernetic eye, taking what I saw with more grains of salt than was in the entire ocean that bordered this urban sprawl. The image of Daniel Irons walking along through the half constructed server room showed up as if it were an avatar on the GRID, the virtual realm overlaying the "real" world. He stopped just a few feet away from where his body was found, next to the image of the constructor drone, hovering just a few feet away from where its wrecked chassis had been found. Irons lifted up his mechanical arm without warning and struck the drone over its top. The drone immediately stopped the welding job it had been working on, the yellow LED lights on its body suddenly flipping to a violent red as it began to make siren noises. It thrust its welder in Dan's direction, but he reached out with his mechanical arm and crushed it as if it were made of paper, matching the broken state I found its welder component in at the scene.

The drone then swung out one of its arms, the one with the circular saw on its end, which came to Daniel's left side. Dan tried to block the blow with his left arm, his fleshy arm, perhaps out of a reflex, and the next thing I saw was the vision of blood spraying across the drone's chassis as its circular saw tore lacerations across his arm. Dan had been pinned up against the refrigerator sized computer server that his body was found leaning on at this point, so he tried to wrestle the floating drone away from him with his prosthetic arm. The drone succeeded at cutting the man several more times during the struggle, ending with a deep incision into his chest, at which point Dan grabbed the sawblade arm, yanked it out of its socket, and shoved the drone over to his left where it smacked against the ground and ceased to move, its LED lights dying out. Daniel and the drone both fell to the ground exactly where they had been found, but for some reason, I still didn't believe that what I saw had actually happened.

I crouched down in front of Daniel's body once more, looking him in the eyes. Both of them were cybernetic in nature, like my right eye. They, too, looked like at least a slightly older model than mine, their appearance falling further into the uncanny valley than mine did.

I accessed my database of GRID contacts from my AR overlay, pulling up a priority contact to send them a personal message, encrypted so as not to be intercepted by the local Icarus GRID network. "Vykarius, Daniel's eyes might know something we don't."

It only took a moment for Vykarius to reply. "Brilliant. Are you going to yank his eyes out now? I'll start the data collection as soon as I'm wired in."

Daniel's implants were no longer connected to the GRID, and there was no way to turn their connections back on without removing them from his body first. I would have to wire a transceiver into his implants and then activate them, but I couldn't do this while Cerberus cops were swarming the place. Only one option remained...

I sent Vykarius one last message, "Watch me carefully and you'll know exactly what to do and when to do it. Just like we talked about before." Before I headed back to the officer on scene, holding up a small drive I had been keeping in my trench coat. "By the way, officer, I was specifically instructed by your boss to bring this to the first field officer on the scene. That would be you, right?"

He turned his head to the object in my hand. "I don't remember hearing of such a thing. I will contact him about it now..."

"No no, it's very important, very confidential. You said you were a Class II cyborg, right? You have a neural jack? These files are very important to the case. Your neural jack would be the safest method for delivering them. Now, if you excuse me, I need to review my copy of the evidence."

I forced the drive into the man's hands and started walking away at a brisk pace. Just as I was turning the corner, I looked back over my shoulder to see the officer, his helmet removed, inserting the drive into an open slot in his right temple. I zoomed in with my cyber eye to make sure this was what I saw.

A moment later, the corporate police officer jerked both of his hands up to grasp at his head, letting out a rather blood curdling scream as a shower of sparks erupted from that right temple, smoke pouring out from his eyes as he fell over onto his side, his body contorting itself with a series of violent spasms before stopping altogether.

Vykarius was now exactly where he needed to be, and I took my leave with all due haste in order to get to where I needed to be next.

---

While waiting on the AutoCab, I still couldn't shake the memory of one Mrs. Ophelia Irons entering my office that fateful morning. It took me by surprise, as I was normally doing business on the GRID these days, and scheduled my meetings in advance. Ophelia, on the other hand, arrived in person with no prior warning except for a handwritten letter, a dying trend in the late 21st century. She arrived wearing a heavy fur coat that looked too valuable for her to be wearing in such a rough part of town where my office was situated, an electronic cigarette in one hand, a handkerchief in the other, which she occasionally pressed to her eyes. They looked puffy, like she had just been crying prior to her arrival. I guess I couldn't blame her; she did just lose her husband of eight years. While it did strike me as odd that Daniel was 50 years old when he married the then 22-year-old Ophelia back in 2076, back when I was a wide-eyed rookie in the Cerberus police force, it did seem that she had loved her Daniel quite dearly, and his money perhaps even more.

Just a few months prior to Daniel's demise, Ophelia had taken out a very impressive life insurance policy, an amount that might have made me consider leaving the PI business for good. There was, however, the exception clause in the case that the subject dies while committing a crime, or is killed in self-defense. Thanks to the growing popularity and influence of automaton rights activists such as the Brotherhood of the Singularity cyborg cult, the penalties for causing harm to robots and drones was becoming more and more severe, almost to the point of incurring as much a sentence as an assault against a human, or at least a cyborg. If Daniel really did strike the first blow against a construction drone, his life insurance policy would be essentially rendered null and void, leaving Ophelia penniless. Historically, American war veterans had never been treated very well, after all, and Daniel was just trying to make ends meet working construction in the redevelopment of Redmond. The unemployment rate throughout all of Washington and Oregon had been soaring since the two states comprised the Gibson Springs sector, where robotics giant Icarus Industries had the final authority, and their increasingly autonomous robot drone workers were replacing human employees at an alarming rate. With a net worth in the tens of trillions of dollars, Icarus was the largest of the Big Three multinationals that controlled Pacific City, despite having the least amount of human employees of the three, due to breakthroughs in their robotics and AI program, a joint effort with the second most profitable company, a Japanese software and entertainment behemoth known as Mitashi Technologies. Drone labor became more efficient and cost effective than human labor in many fields, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, same old song and dance. While more people were giving up on their dreams, Dan was like a 21st century John Henry, determined to beat the unrelenting march of automation at all costs, and he seemed to have ended up the same way as Henry too. The poor, stubborn bastard.

Long story short, Ophelia wanted me to prove that either Daniel's death was an accident, or that he was maliciously attacked by a drone, or someone within Icarus. And she came to me, of all the one hundred million people in Pacific City, to investigate. I could still never figure out how she found out about me, as most of my friends were in the strangest places in society, or whether she knew about my prior history with Cerberus Security Systems. That was impossible, as according to their official records, I didn't exist. Regardless of her methods or her intentions, I had quite a few connections and favors to call in, in order to sort this one out.

"Vykarius, you were able to retrieve the blood sample reports, correct?" I asked my contact over the GRID overlay.

"You betcha, boss!" The virtual avatar of the user known as Vykarius, obviously an alias, stuck his thumb up at me. "The blood on the drone matches the victim's, of course, and get this, bionanites were discovered in it! Mr. Irons had a full featured nanobionetwork and everything!"

Bionanites. Now there was something I was hardly expecting. Nanomachine colonies inhabiting and maintaining your health from inside of your own circulatory system was the domain of Asclepius Medical, a rival company to Icarus Industries. Whereas Icarus specialized in hardware, wetware was Asclepius's bread and butter, and since every corporation held brand loyalty as the ultimate purity symbol, mixing brands was strictly against every company's policy. They would even go as far as to make their implants deliberately incompatible with rival brands whenever they could help it.

"Wait a minute..." In my moment of shock, I almost missed the arrival of the AutoCab as it pulled up next to me on the rain-soaked sidewalk, its doors swinging open to beckon me inside. "How was Daniel Irons able to operate with Icarus Industries mechanical implants and an Asclepius Medical nanobionetwork at the same time? Usually one will refuse to function if it detects the presence of another. So either his mechanical implants were not working, or the nanomachine colonies in his bloodstream were inert."

The avatar of Vykarius shook his head at me while I boarded the AutoCab. "I checked the collected data from the nanites and the hardware implants from when the Icarus examiners scanned and wiped them, and neither scenario is the case. His hardware and wetware were both working just fine, even in harmony with one another, right up until the moment he was killed. Much like your own bionetwork, now that I think about it."

Of course. I had a colony of exactly one million autonomous microdrones, each the size of a red blood cell, circulating through my veins with every beat of my heart. With the help of Vykarius and a few other acquaintances that happened to specialize in circumventing hardware and software protocols, My mechanical implants had been modified to operate alongside the nanites without conflict. It wasn't exactly a legal procedure; a dangerous one in unskilled hands, in fact. When you violate the end user licensing agreements of your own bionics, they become ineligible for further software updates, and the corporations are not held legally accountable for any injury or death that may occur as a result of your implants malfunctioning. A tragedy that took the lives of many biohackers who made one too many errors in their trials, and the manufacturers got away with all of them. Just because your bionics were modified didn't mean that the corporations weren't still allowed to repossess them after your death. This often lead to legal conflicts between the Big Three megacorps whenever they ended up finding the body of a biohacker whose hardware, software, and wetware was cobbled together from multiple sources. Slightly more clever hackers would write completely original code for their implants, but if they ended up in the morgue, you could bet your bottom dollar that the code would end up belonging to one of the corporations after all was salvaged. Even if they were to never actually implement a single line of salvaged code in their current or future products, it still legally belonged to them, and they all had an army of lawyers to harass anyone else that tried to implement them, and all the judges were in their pocketbooks as well, so most who ended up getting caught would be found hanging themselves in their own holding cells. This was how and why a sort of code of honor was formed among biohacking communities, to salvage each other's implants before corporate police could get to them, in an effort to keep the march of progress in biotech free and open source, as they would say.

"Vykarius, do you suppose that Daniel Irons had modified his own hardware?" I asked him as I stared at the digital dashboard of the AutoCab, its interface instructing me to input a destination.

"I suppose that his hardware was modified from its legal parameters, though not necessarily by himself." The avatar of Vykarius wagged an index finger at me.

"By someone else, then. Nothing I read about the victim or his widow seemed to suggest either of them being biohackers. Perhaps he did have access to someone who was part of the community. Any leads?" I approached the dashboard, ready to issue a command.

Vykarius seemed to enjoy keeping me in suspense as I waited for a response that took a bit longer than I expected, until his avatar finally animated again. "I was combing through the biometric data from the nanites, and I found a subroutine that was keeping track of his location via GPS coordinates. Here, let me map them out. There's something worth seeing here."

A map of the state of Washington was brought up on my AR overlay, several areas in and near Seattle and Redmond were highlighted with varying degrees of intensity while Vykarius continued to speak. "Most of this is just his commute between his home and work on various construction sites, but there was one interesting thing I felt worth pointing out." He reached out to the map and zoomed it in to a small island right in between the two cities. "Right here, on Lake Washington, is Mercer Island. There's an old bar here that he frequented, popular among Cyborg Wars veterans. He went there quite a bit during the last few months."

"And you're going to tell me that it's worth asking around there." I concluded.

"Your father was in the Cyborg Wars, Joe. Hell, your squad leader at Cerberus was in the same unit as him. That's the kind of nepotism that got you into the force in the first place, wasn't it?"

I lowered my gaze at Vykarius. "We don't talk about that anymore, Vyke."

Even though I was just glaring at a virtual representation of him, it was still enough to give him pause. He raised his hands defensively. "Okay, okay! I'm just sayin' it's relevant and all. Tell the patrons that you're the son of an Icarus cyborg soldier!"

"I never knew my father, Vyke. He left for the war when I was too young to remember him, and he never came back. Made my mother drink herself to death because of it."

"Which is why you may want to ask around there! Chances are likely that someone in that hole in the wall will know more about your father than you do."

I could only give a sigh in response as I looked back to the AutoCab's dashboard and punched in the coordinates for Mercer Island. Touché, Vykarius. Tou-fucking-ché.

---

Old Jack Morrisson's was the name of the bar, its interior looking it was cobbled together from surplus Cyborg Wars drone and vehicle parts. It almost made the vintage jukebox in the corner look out of place by comparison as it played the century old song "The Eagle Has Landed" as I walked in. Old soldiers with outdated prosthetics turned from their drinks to me as I entered, the youngest of them looking to be in their late forties.

"The fuck are you doin' in here, kid?" One of the patrons said as I passed them by, his voice reminding one of a gravel pit. "You lost? This ain't no soda shop!"

I simply continued to approach the counter and waited for the bartender to notice me. Taking note of his cybernetic eyes, I pulled up a three dimensional scan of the victim in the AR overlay, knowing that he would have to have seen it. "Daniel Allen Irons." I said to the bartender. "He come to this bar recently?"

"Who wants to know?" The bartender replied, his mechanical arms whirring busily as he mixed and poured drinks for the patrons sitting adjacent to me. "You here for a drink, or you just wanna stalk my clientele? If it's the latter, I'm gonna have to ask ya to leave."

"Sir, your customer Mr. Irons was murdered this morning. I'm the private investigator hired by his widow. When was the last time you saw the victim alive?"

"Ya think it's my fuckin' business to remember every ugly mug that walks in this hellhole?" The bartender leaned forward across the counter as his electronic eyes glared into mine.

I simply returned the stare without blinking or flinching. "Yes, it is your fucking business, as a matter of fact." I pointed squarely at his eyes. "Do those eyes still work? I can tell that they've been recording ever since I walked in. You record all the time, don't you?"

"Yeah, well, I delete all the footage at the end of the day. Takes up too much storage space."

I shook my head at him, now wagging the finger that I had been pointing. "Bullshit. Your eyes may be an older model, but they can still store exabytes upon exabytes of footage. You could record twenty-four hours a day for an entire year without blinking and still have space to spare."

"Is Mrs. Irons paying you to be a wiseass?"

"Do you bartenders get paid to obstruct investigations? Let me see the footage of Daniel Irons's visits."

"Look, pal, Dan never done anything out of the ordinary here. You wanna know what he does here? I'll tell you what he does. He comes in, he orders a few drinks, he shares a few war stories with his buddies, and he leaves. And if yer thinkin' I'm a suspect in his murder, you're fuckin' wrong, buddy. He always paid his tabs, and he never fought with anyone, at least not inside my establishment. Why would I murder one of my own customers? It ain't good for business, it's fuckin' stupid."

"Of course you didn't murder him. I never thought for a moment that you would be capable of even breaking your own glass bottles at your bar." I retorted. "What I do suspect, however, is that you or someone else in your bar had been supplying Mr. Irons with illegal bionics prior to his death."

"Is that so, huh?" The bartender said as he left his spot behind the counter, nonchalantly walking over to the vintage jukebox in the far corner. "Well, there's only one thing I can tell you, kid."

"And that would be...?"

He changed the song on the jukebox over to "Delivering The Goods", and then made some kind of signal with one of his mechanical hands. "I can tell you that you know too much! Get 'em, boys!"

The two old soldiers sitting next to me suddenly got up from their seats, one of them taking a swing at me with a mechanical fist. I immediately dove out of my chair and on to the floor to avoid the blow. Seeing that they were still coming after me,  scrambled under the nearest table and knocked it over onto its side, using it as a cover against my attackers while I reached into my gray trench coat, drawing my trusty revolver out of it as the combat analysis interface began to appear on my AR overlay. I used the telemetry it provided to quickly line up a shot and fire off a round through the table, hitting the nearer of my two assailants in the right side of his torso, blasting a sizeable chunk out of his mechanical chassis.

He doubled over as mechanical fluid bled out of him while the other ex-soldier swiftly closed the distance and punched an even bigger hole in the table I was ducking behind with his pneumatic arm, grabbing onto mine and the gun I was holding. I tried to resist, as both of our mechanical arms were industrial strength, but he had a matching pair of them, whereas I only had the one mechanical arm on my right socket and my natural arm on my left. He used his other arm to shove me back as he pried my revolver out of my hands before tossing it aside and continuing to come after me. I went to throw a left punch aiming for his head, but he easily blocked it by catching my fleshy fist in his metallic grip. I took this as an opportunity to throw him a right hook, my own pneumatic fist tearing off most of the synthetic flesh of the lower left half of his face and jaw as it connected with him, exposing some of the mechanical skull he had been outfitted with.

"You got an entire cybernetic skull, huh?" I wondered aloud as he was reeling from the blow. "Wow, that's impressive! I don't think they had synthetic flesh during the wars, though. You must have got something newer."

The cyborg didn't seem too interested in conversation, however, and responded simply by trying to smash me with both of his metallic fists. Thankfully for me, his arms were a bit of an older, slower model, so I had little trouble rolling out of the way. I grabbed a nearby bar stool with my own mechanical arm, raising it over my head, and bringing it down as hard as I could over his. I ended up breaking the stool over his head, and breaking the overturned table in two as my assailant crashed to the ground over it.

"Pardon the mess." I dusted off my coat as I got back up to my feet, looking to the two violent patrons now on the floor. "Just put the damages on my tab." I said to the bartender, only to have him point my own revolver back at me. He must have picked it up when I had dropped it during the struggle.

"What a fascinating little number you have here." The bartender said, looking to the solid white revolver in his hands. "It's a cyborg pistol. Most people can't manage the recoil on these things without augmented arms, like yours, for instance. And what have we here?" Carved across the left side of the gun's foot long barrel were eight letters: GOLDHART. "I don't suppose this was..."

"Jacob Goldhart. From the same division as Jules Stone." I replied.

"Icarus Military, 79th Division?" The bartender looked incredulous at first. "What are you, Goldhart's boy? Nah, you're too white."

I shook my head in response. "I'm Jules's son, actually. Joseph Stone."

The bartender looked quite amused, eventually turning the gun around, handing it back over to me. "Jack Morrisson, former Icarus Military 79th Division and founder of Old Jack Morrisson's."

"I hope I didn't harm anyone important." I said as I looked over to the two old former soldiers I knocked out.

Jack flicked one of his mechanical hands dismissively at the two of them. "Those two assholes? They owed me big time. I was just calling in the favor. Looks like they're gonna owe me even bigger!"

"No hard feelings, then?"

Morrisson simply scoffed in response. "Let's not push your luck, shall we? If you're Jules's kid, I'm just gonna call it even. Now tell me what you want before you leave my establishment and never come back."

Fair enough, I prefered to get down to business as quick as possible, so this was an opportunity I would take.

The bartender nodded, and motioned for me to step into one of the back rooms. I was wary that this might have been another trap at first, but then again, he did hand me my gun back first. I was worried about whether I would need to use it until I finished descending the staircase he was leading me down to what appeared to be a massive bootleg bioworkshop where all manner of prosthetic organs and limbs were being worked on, mechanical and organic alike.

"I know that Jules's boy can keep a secret, eh? Just between you and me?" Jack grinned at me from over his shoulder.

"I imagine that I would end up in pieces all over here sooner or later if my answer were anything other than yes."

My reply made the cyborg bartender bust out laughing, slapping my back with one of his metallic hands. I felt like that was going to leave a bruise. "You catch on pretty quick, kid! Jules would have been proud."

"He was your squad leader, wasn't he?"

"Not at first, but he rose through the ranks with incredible speed! Some say it was corporate cronyism, but the people who say that know nothing! I saw your father's dedication and leadership skills on the battlefield firsthand! Nobody was more fit for the title of squad commander than Jules Stone!"

"It sounds like he was a good man. I never knew him. I was too young to remember when he went away to war."

"Aye, but his bravest lieutenant Jacob Goldhart vowed to raise his commander's son in his stead, did he not? How's ol' JAkey boy getting along now?"

"About as well as my father is. Corporate conflicts of interest got him killed four years ago."

The nostalgic joy on Jack's face vanished. He turned around, looking at nothing in particular in the workshop. "Aye. The Big Three take everything away from us, sooner or later. The greedy bastards, never satisfied no matter how much blood is spilled."

"It's similar to how my father got killed in action, isn't it?"

"Aye, I can't bring your father Jules or your uncle Jake back, but if you ever need an upgrade for that right arm of yours, or that right eye..."

"Sorry, these implants have personal sentiment to me."

"Like I imagine your shooter does?"

I simply shrugged at his response. He was right, in a way. Some of my prosthetics, too, used to belong to someone else. Someone that meant a lot to me.

Jack simply nodded and turned back to his wares. "Well, if there be anythin' else you need, bionic limbs, 3D-printed organs, skeletal reinforcements..."

"How about circulatory nanites? You got any of those?"

I watched as Jack wandered over to one of the rows of shelves containing preserved organs. "Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I believe I do!" He reached out to one of the higher shelves and brought down with him a jar of what appeared to be a metallc gray liquid. "Looks like just some weird goo to the naked eye, but under a microscope? Millions of self replicating robots just a few microns in size!"

"I know what nanomachine colonies are, Jack. I came here asking about Dan Irons. A little autopsy revealed nanomachines in his blood."

"Oh! Yes, yes, of course!" Jack nearly dropped the jar he was holding in the excitement of his sudden recollection. "Our doctor was here to help administer them to Mr. Irons a while back!"

"So you're admitting that the victim received his nanobionetwork here? Such nanomachines are exclusively the property of Asclepius Medical. Mr. Irons was and has always worked for Icarus Industries. Mechanical implants and circulatory nanomachine networks have been designed to be mutually incompatible with each other."

"You are correct, my good sir! But this was no ordinary doctor we have! The nanomachines he produces are, shall we say, specially made?"

"That's exactly what I figured. But there was something else that had been bothering me as well..."

---

"Mrs. Irons, are you aware of the fact that your husband had been using illegal hardware, specifically, the nanites in his bloodstream? I hate to say it, but this invalidates his life insurance policy."

And that was the moment that she pulled a gun on me, right there in front of the construction site where we had agreed to meet, as soon as I had gotten all of my facts together.

"I've seen what you've done. All of it." She said as she kept the pistol trained at my forehead. "You fried a field officer's neural circuits in order to create a diversion so that your accomplice, Vykarius... was it, could exploit a security flaw in the Icarus GRID."

"I don't know how you knew that, Mrs. Irons, but I'm impressed. Genuinely impressed. We used that to get the autopsy report before Cerberus could modify it."

"Oh, I'm aware. My husband had access to the surveillance network of this site as another part of his job. I watched the whole thing happen."

"Then surely you must have already been aware of your husband's illegal implants. You knew this whole case was invalid from the beginning. I'll be collecting my investigation fees now, if you don't mind."

"You're wrong." She retorted without hesitation. "I made you and Vykarius access this part of the GRID so that you could modify the autopsy report. Remove all mention of the illegal implants and validate the insurance policy. I'm not leaving until I get this."

I threw up my hands in a shrug. "What makes you think Vykarius and I are even capable of doing such a thing?"

She smiled, as if in pride. "It was your friend, Aaron. I made him talk. He was...easy to persuade. He told me all about your investigative abilities and how your accomplice Vykarius was able to go anywhere he wants on the GRID with so little resistance. You and your friends are really something special, so I knew someone with your talents could get me what I want."

While she was talking, I attempted to reach into my coat, trying to reach for my own gun. She simply pointed her gun down where my arm was going and shook her head. I couldn't afford to take the chance. Not right now. "And you didn't tell me any of this until now because...why? Because you thought I were to refuse? What were you to do if I were to refuse? Put a bullet in my head now? I don't know what I find more offensive: this hare-brained scheme you've got going, or the fact that you went through a close contact of mine to get to me."

"If you refuse, I could just put a bullet in you now, yes, so you'd best just cooperate. And if I find out that you've been trying anything funny, I can release the surveillance footage that shows that you were the one that fried the officer's brain. You're lucky that they've only chalked it up as an unsolved accident so far, and I can keep it that way if you just continue to cooperate."

"But the original footage shows that it was your husband that started attacking the drone, does it not? This would still invalidate his life insurance policy. Not only that, but it could also expose the illegal nanomachines he had been using. I did a little bit of digging into the variety of nanite that he had been administered. There's a reason they're not officially used. They cause some...side effects in their users. Seems that your husband was losing some of his inhibitions as a result." I kept referring to my personal AR overlay as I explained this, waiting for a response from Vykarius. "Either way, it's not going to work."

"Nice try, Joseph, but my husband is innocent. You doubted the veracity of the original footage you were shown, did you not? You were right to do so. I was the one that modified the footage. The drone attacked my dear Daniel first. He tried to fight back. I knew that you would doubt the doctored footage."

"No, I still don't believe it." I shook my head at her. "You did no such thing. If you did, show me. Now. Bring up the original footage on the AR."

"Mr. Stone, do you really think I would be so foolish as to take an eye off of you while I have you at gunpoint?"

At this point, Vykarius finally came through to me on the GRID. "She's telling the truth, Joe. I just checked the surveillance network myself."

I could only give an exasperated sigh at Vyke's bad news before I could collect myself once more as I turned my attention back to Mrs. Irons. "All right, so this just leaves me with one more question."

She raised an eyebrow at my statement. "And that would be...?"

"Who manipulated the constructor drone into killing your husband? That's not how they usually act. And no one inside the company would knowingly murder your husband when there's a huge life insurance policy for them to pay out. It's just not profitable for them. That just leaves..."

That prideful smile of hers came back, and this time it sent shivers down my spine. "Yes, it was me, darling. My husband's access to the surveillance network also allowed him to override control of the drones, and he entrusted that to me."

While she was explaining this, I quickly reached for my gun under my coat. She must have realized this, however, as she immediately shot me in the left shoulder. I tried to move myself out of the way, but she got off another shot that hit me in my right side, and I fell to my knees from the shock. She casually approached me after that, pressing the warm barrel of the gun right up against my forehead.

"You're not necessary anymore, sweetie. Your friend Vykarius is the only one I need. That is, unless Aaron can tell me more..."

I could only watch as she clutched her finger down against the trigger for a moment, then my vision was engulfed in a bright spotlight, the wailing of sirens ringing through my ears. It was a Cerberus security drone hovering over us, followed by a half dozen armored officers emerging onto the scene. The silent emergency call I made on the GRID had gotten through to the authorities after all, and not a moment too soon.

"Ophelia Irons!" One of the officers' voices blared out over their helmet speakers as six laser sights from their rifles converged on her figure. "This is Cerberus Security Systems! For assault with a deadly weapon in Icarus territory, you are under arrest! Do not attempt to resist us!"

Ophelia, however, must have panicked, as she dropped her gun and immediately fled in the opposite direction. I would turn my head to watch as she got no more than a few yards away from me before I witnessed her and everything immediately around her being thoroughly sprayed down in a torrent of assault rifle rounds, painting the vicinity in blood and bullet holes. By the time the roar of gunfire stopped, there was hardly anything left of her.

One of the officers rushed up to my aid. "Mr. Stone, sir! We have responded to your emergency call and will be billing your account accordingly. Do you require any further assistance?"

I nodded, grunting in pain. "Yeah...a little first aid would do the trick. Just add it to the bill. By the way, what happened to that one field officer who was here yesterday? I heard that he got his neural implants fried."

"Just a little malfunction resulting from a hardware and software conflict. Sad to say it, but this part of Gibson Springs can no longer be said to be accident free."