Stone And Steel [NaNo '15]

BACKGROUND AND SUMMARY

In the 2050s, religious and political tensions within the Middle East had eventually erupted into an all-out war between various political and ideological factions. Aiding each of these armies were three multinational corporations: Icarus Industries, a Detroit based weapons manufacturer that turned to researching drones and cybernetic implants over the course of the war. Asclepius Medical, then a budding new biotechnology firm that rose up out of Berlin to patent the world's first intravenous nanomachines, putting them to use on the battlefield to create better soldiers and experimenting with neuroscience to discover that the brain was capable of psionic augmentation. Mitashi Technologies, a Japanese electronics company that gave soldiers new tools and gadgets such as augmented reality overlays to give them an edge on the battlefield. While the death toll rose in the Middle East, the battlefields became the testing grounds for a Renaissance of new technologies: mechanical prosthetic limbs, artificial intelligence for drones, synthetic organs and body parts grown from stem cells, brain-computer interfaces, psionics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and even rumors of working quantum computers.

The war eventually came to an abrupt end one day, specifically on March 15th, 2058. Throughout the day, a torrent of warheads containing countless swarms of nanomachines were dropped onto key locations and cities throughout the center of conflict, undetected by even the most sophisticated of technologies that the corporations had to offer until it was too late. These nanobot swarms were programmed to do nothing except self-replicate and consume all matter around them for energy. This is exactly what they did, tearing apart every living and nonliving thing from within and without as the landscape began to level out into a uniform gray sea. The first attack began at midnight, and by dusk of that day, every major faction that had a stake in the war had been completely compromised, and the swarms would continue to spread out into Africa and Eurasia if nothing was done. Ultimately, the crisis was resolved in an even more drastic manner: by midnight of the following day, almost exactly 24 hours after the first swarm hit, a previously decommissioned nuclear weapons platform, still remaining in Earth's orbit, suddenly activated and launched its entire payload at the infested region, cleansing the gray desert in nuclear fire and ensuring that the only outcome of the war was mutually assured destruction.

Everything around the Persian Gulf was rendered more or less uninhabitable by the nuclear radiation for thousands of miles around. The entire war had been called off on account of having nothing left to fight over, but no one was sure who was responsible for the fatal strikes. Nanomachines were a trademark of Asclepius Medical, but they denied all involvement in the attack; their own field research headquarters in Jordan were among the first places to be consumed by the gray plague. Mitashi Technologies could have designed such a swift and undetectable aircraft that would have been required to fly over all of these locations so quickly and so stealthily, but none of the factions they were helping were spared in the attack. The orbital nuclear missile platform was created by Icarus Industries, but it had "officially" belonged to the United States government and the official report goes that the missiles were launched under executive order as a last-ditch effort to prevent the spread of the gray plague.

This day in history had caused so much fear and global panic due to the shocking results and all the unanswered questions that many groups began lobbying for new laws to be passed against the use of nanomachines and nuclear weapons to prevent such a day from never happening again, while others grew distrustful of governments in general, blaming them for the cause of both the start and end of the war. The three corporations that were involved in the war, on the other hand, had seen considerable growth in all departments due to the spoils of war. Many of the surviving soldiers that had grown disillusioned with their governments ended up working for one of the three corporations' private militia, or had already been contractually bound to their company when they received their technology to begin with.

Icarus, Asclepius, and Mitashi, collectively known as the Big Three, wanted all the help they could get in protecting their company assets during all of the civil unrest that ensued. In doing so, they slowly began taking over the political landscape themselves. The military forces of many countries were contracted out to these companies to begin with, so it was only a matter of time before the other governing branches were financially taken over as well. This trend was especially popular in the United States, when the Big Three each ended up purchasing thirty percent of the national debt, effectively making them the majority shareholders of the entire country. In 2060, Icarus Industries formed their own political party with an extensively funded campaign for their chosen candidate, who appealed to United States citizens, already haven grown distrustful of their current leaders, through the use of Icarus's drone, cybernetics, and security technologies seeing widespread use among the general public after having been pioneered in the war. Many people believed that the Gray Plague was the result of some mass organized terrorist attack, and so Icarus had responded by reforming their private military and prison companies into Cerberus Security Systems, an entirely privatized police force made up of former soldiers and equipped with the best technology that came out of the war to deal with terrorism, rioting, and all manner of crime that America had to face in the latter half of the 21st century. One by one, police organizations all across the country were converted into Cerberus Security outfits to bring back the people's faith in law enforcement. Icarus Industries's political party ended up winning the electoral vote in 2060, marking the beginning of a new era of American history. The only reason they lost the re-election in 2064 was because they had lost the vote to Asclepius's own candidate. Indeed, the established Republican and Democratic parties were soon retooled into Mitashi and Asclepius's own political platforms, respectively. From that point onward, there were now three primary candidates running for office every election term.



This story begins in the year 2080, when the Mitashi candidate is suddenly assassinated in the middle of his own campaign, throwing suspicion onto the remaining two candidates as the public drives the political intrigue up to a fever pitch. At this time, both candidates are due to make their appearances at various locations throughout the West Coast Sprawl, a critical part of the United States territory that stretches from Seattle, since renamed Gibson Springs by Icarus, all the way down to San Diego, which now comprises part of a sector known as Winterton. In between the two regions is Summer Heights, centered around the San Francisco bay area and owned by Asclepius Medical, while Mitashi Technologies holds its strongest stateside presence in the Autumn Falls sector, comprising region around Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The new technology brought about in the 21st century had ushered in an age of staggering population growth in the West Coast, causing all of the cities to rapidly expand until their borders began to overlap, eventually resulting in them all congealing together into one nearly unbroken mass of urban sprawl. The new names came about as a result of disputes over which areas belonged to which city, prompting Mitashi, who had the most presence in the West Coast at the time, to give the place a name inspired by the company's own Japanese heritage: the four seasons. The sprawl was split into four main sectors from north to south, named Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. The borders shifted slightly over time, and Icarus and Asclepius made an overwhelming presence in the Spring and Summer sectors, respectively, the two changes eventually leading to the current name change. Winterton, the southernmost sector of the West Coast sprawl, remained the only region without a strong corporate presence due to its reputation of consisting of overpopulated, crime ridden slums filled with the poor people that couldn't afford to live in the relatively nicer cities up north, which were being well maintained by comparison thanks to corporate funding. The Winterton slums would continue to spread southward into Mexico, where the border patrol presence was nearly non-existent by that time. Gang leaders, crime lords, and the Yakuza coming over from Japan and Autumn Falls would eventually become the primary authority in the southwest regions that the corporations forgot, only entering into these forsaken territories in force when they absolutely had to retrieve something or someone of theirs that happened to flee into this region for protection, at which point they would not stay down there any longer than they had to, for the sprawl of slums had been overrun by crime syndicates of varying levels of size and organization, all trying to stake out their claim while dealing in forbidden wares and technologies that the corporations didn't want anything to do with. Many a corporate political candidate has vowed in their campaign to clean up this blemish on the United States, but the situation there has more or less remained the same for decades.

Enter Joseph Stone, born in 2055 in the Winterton slums near the San Diego area, his parents wanted a better future for young Joseph. Even he is not exactly sure what they did, but chances are at least one of the many syndicates running various rackets in the region had to have been involved, and while he had never seen his parents again since early childhood, he ended up being transferred all the way up to Gibson Springs, where he was raised by a wealthy foster family that sent Joseph to the Cerberus Academy Of Law, where he graduated into the field of law enforcement under Icarus's contract by the age of 25. Having witnessed firsthand the harsh living conditions of Winterton residents during his childhood, he joined the Cerberus Security Systems police force with a strong passion for justice and a burning desire to set things right.

Joseph began his career as a beat cop patrolling the dockside districts of Gibson Springs, where the Poseidon Shipping Company would load and unload their cargo for their voyages the Pacific Ocean to the Hawaiian Islands (now converted into a set of research facilities split between Icarus and Mitashi), Australia (having most of its Outback desert since converted into a lush tropical nature preserve by Asclepius Medical's Climate Management Initiative program), and Asia. When Joseph accidentally discovered a criminal operation in progress in which the local street gang known as the Krakenheads were illegally smuggling Icarus brand servant robots into China, a country in which foreign produced robots were banned, he was caught witnessing the deal going down and was taken hostage by the gang, locked within their hideout in a condemned warehouse. He was able to escape from his confinement, but not without alerting the entire gang to his presence. As a result, Joseph found himself forced to eventually bludgeon the entire gang to death with one of their own nail bats in his effort to escape with his life. After having gone missing for almost a day, he returned to his Cerberus police station covered in the gang's own blood, shocked and traumatized from the harrowing ordeal that he was made to recount to his peers and superiors.

Once the trail of bodies he left behind had corroborated his story, Joseph was commended for his brave efforts to single handedly take down an entire gang that had long since been cutting into Icarus Industries's profit margins. The fame he earned among his colleagues as a local hero attracted the attention of one Captain Jacob Goldhart, a veteran of the war from the 2050s as a decorated psionic soldier who had since been putting his empathic perception abilities to use as the leader of Investigation Team Charon, a highly specialized squad of Cerberus Security tasked with tracking down and bringing in Icarus's more troublesome adversaries in clandestine operations that Icarus Industries wanted to keep out of the public eye. Jacob selected Stone to become the newest member of this squad, and taught him how to become a sharpshooter with handguns, having sensed Joseph's own distress over his experience with the Krakenheads and never wanting to wield a bludgeoning weapon again. Jacob's awakened psionic abilities gave him an uncanny edge with the massive, ultra high caliber revolver he had used to take down heavily armored supersoldiers during the war, and Joseph became a fast learner in his footsteps without any psionic talents of his own.

Joseph's growing marksmanship abilities were also honed with the help of another Team Charon member simply code named Scarlet, an accomplished sniper outfitted with bionic augmentations from rival company Asclepius implanted, in addition to a pair of cybernetic eyes from Icarus, to assist in her craft.

Also comprising the squad was a man simply known as Red, an ex-convict with an incredibly violent criminal history that had since been expunged from all official records in exchange for becoming part of Icarus's experimental criminal reformation program, wherein certain convicts held within Cerberus's own privately owned prisons are subjected to experimental brain surgery in an attempt to correct their violent, antisocial, or otherwise undesirable behaviors. In the few best cases, these experiments have sometimes led to the discovery of new psionic capabilities almost on par with the ones Jacob had been gifted when he volunteered himself for these during the war. Red was not one of these, however; a failed experiment rendered him almost completely brain dead until the researchers teamed up with Icarus's own robotics and drones division to replace the damaged parts of his brain with a drone control apparatus and artificial intelligence electronics, effectively turning him into an otherwise mindless slave capable of following orders and adapting to changing situations to learn to solve problems. When this proved to be a success, the research teams then began to use his body for further experiments. His limbs were amputated and replaced with servomechanical prosthetics based on heavy construction equipment, capable of crushing cars and snapping steel beams in half. The weight and power of these new artificial limbs had to be maintained by reinforcing Red's skeletal structure with steel plated joints and a metallic coated rib cage, eventually resulting in a nigh unbreakable Frankensteinian monstrosity of a man, a prototype for a new manner of Cerberus grunt to do the muscle work in their law enforcement division. Red has since been transferred to Investigation Team Charon to prove this concept.

The final member of the team was a gifted computer hacker that went by his online handle, Vykarius. While lacking in combat capabilities when compared to the rest of Team Charon, Vykarius was skilled in corporate espionage, and was able to procure some early prototypes of experimental Mitashi electronics and repurpose them for his own uses. With the help of a portable holographic projector and voice modulator, Vykarius is able to make himself appear outwardly as another person, mimicking their mannerisms and speech to acquire the information he needs to access computer systems. to gain the edge he needed in cyberspace, he had a brain computer interface installed in his skull, an augmentation that allows his own neurons to process computer data at the literal speed of thought, and further blur the lines between man and machine to the point of nearly overlapping. With all of these skills combined, Vykarius was able to perform public relations duties whenever the secret investigation squad's actions ever caught the attention of the general populace, in which case he would be able to smooth things over and keep Investigation Team Charon a secret whenever his superiors weren't around to bail them out.



Once Joseph had joined Team Charon, their first assignment with him on the job was something they felt he was already good at: dealing with a gang that was perceived as a threat to Icarus Industries's bottom line. In this case, they were sent after a key associate of the notorious Rockbusters gang, a chemist who had been illegally creating and distributing his own brand of Chainlink. Older Icarus brand cybernetic implants will lose their function over time due to the body rejecting the artificial limbs, but the drug nicknamed Chainlink can be administered to correct this. A consistent dosage of Chainlink is required to maintain this, and the official drug is charged at a high premium for anyone that hasn't yet signed their life away to an Icarus company. Recently, a chemist and former Icarus employee started selling his own Chainlink, vastly undercutting the official Icarus distributors in price, from within a small mining town in Gibson Springs, where the iron miners that have not been replaced by robots and drones yet are heavily augmented with cybernetics in order to work inside the mine's harsh, toxic environment. Since the mine is officially owned by an Icarus subsidiary, the corporation wants to arrest and try the chemist as both an illegal drug lord and a traitor selling company secrets. The problem is that he and the entire mining town is fiercely protected by the Rockbusters gang, who have earned a glowing reputation in the eye of the public for providing a service to underpaid augmented people too poor to afford Chainlink.

Icarus Industries wants to turn the tables and make the chemist into a traitor and an enemy of the people, and so Team Charon is sent discreetly into the mining town to investigate. Vykarius begins the operation by disguising himself as one of the locals to learn of the chemist's location, which eventually leads him to the discovery that his laboratory is holed up deep within the mine itself. This leaves it to Jacob to lead Joseph, Scarlet, and Red into the mines, but the Rockbusters attempt to stop them by force. The four of them put their specialized combat abilities to use, slaughtering several Rockbusters and even some miners trying to protect the chemist as they have to fight their way to the hidden lab. There, the chemist had anticipated their arrival and, knowing that there was no way for him to get out of this, had rigged the entire lab to explode and cave in. Jacob's squad is unsuccessful in saving the chemist or the lab, but they are able to escape from the trap he had set in one piece. When their superiors at Cerberus headquarters are informed on these events, the solution of the strike team arriving on site is to cover their tracks by caving in the rest of the mine, blaming it on the Rockbusters, and summarily rounding them up as a result, executing everyone that resists on the spot. Joseph is distressed at a decision like this, but has no choice to comply in the matter. The mission is still chalked up as an overwhelming success in the eyes of Icarus Industries. Joseph would later find out that another gang known as the Vultures, from the next town over, had had their eyes on the mining operation for quite some time. Even though the mines are now gone, they are still unopposed in any effort they would make to take over the town and expand their territory and power, and from all the rumors he has heard, it would definitely not be for the better. With the iron mine gone, Icarus had no further stake in the area, unless they were to dig the mine back out with drones, in which case they would have no use for hiring people.


While Investigation Team Charon had been busy dealing with the Rockbusters gang, one of Icarus's offices had been attacked by terrorists, or rather, a sole terrorist, heavily augmented with military grade cybernetics and weaponry. There were no survivors to the attack, but the perpetrator had left behind a calling card in the form of a data stick, identifying itself as the "Angel Of Retribution". The few surviving bits of security footage of the attack identified the attacker as a Class X Cyborg, meaning that over ninety percent of its body had been bionically modified. Red, by comparison, registered as a Class VII Cyborg, with just over sixty percent body mass being cybernetically enhanced. In addition to the amount of modifications, the Angel Of Retribution's calling card came in the form of a righteously motivated manifesto, speaking out against the corrupt practices of Icarus Industries and the other corporations during and after the war, blaming them for the Gray Plague, the rise in crime and unemployment leading to Winterton, and the plutocratic tendencies of the government, having been bought by the corporations. These characteristics of the Angel Of Retribution leads the criminal profilers at Icarus to believe that they are affiliated with the Singularity, a religious organization centered around transhumanism. Beginning as a small cult of bionically enhanced individuals in the Summer Heights sector, the Singularity believed that technology would be the key to humanity's salvation, that a virtual paradise could be brought forth by shedding their mortal forms for superior synthetic bodies of their own design. While the corporations had for the most part been content to leave this organization be, since they were heavy customers of their products, many members of the Singularity were also quite fond of modifying their bioware, cyberware, and electronics for their own purposes, a practice that had been ruled as illegal by the government since the corporations had started to take over.

The superior officers at Cerberus therefore assigned Investigation Team Charon to look into the Singularity's activities at their church over in Summer Heights, once an old cathedral that had since been remodeled with high tech accommodations and imagery. The Singularity seemed to be mostly peaceful, but over the years there had been more and more violent attacks throughout the West Coast that had been attributed to the organization, or at least the possibility of a more zealous, fanatical splinter faction existing within it. The cult had also been in trouble with the Children Of Gaia, an anti-technocratic group of environmentalists wanting to put a stop to the pollution being caused by the corporate industrial complex and saw bioengineering as a hideous corruption of nature.

Team Charon attempts to infiltrate the Singularity's cathedral in Summer Heights by sending Red, Vykarius, and Scarlet over as would-be followers seeking guidance and possibly initiation into the organization, using their already installed augmentations and Vykarius's disguises to give themselves the impression of having an interest in transhumanism. Captain Jacob, while being psionically enhanced, does not show any outward appearances of modification, and so he and Joseph take a different angle to their side of the investigation by visiting the Singularity's own enemy, the Children Of Gaia. The two of them would come across a rally being organized by one Hera Erisson, a mysterious charismatic speaker who was getting a crowd of Gaia followers outside the Singularity church worked up into a frenzy. This eventually culminated in the gathered crowd beginning to rush the front doors of the cathedral, and as soon as the first Singularity member from within had struck back in self defense, the tension erupted into an all out riot between the two sides, with the members of Team Charon all getting caught in the middle. With the investigation unit having been split into two teams, they both end up having to fight their way through the frenzied crowds with their weapons in order to save each other and escape alive before calling in for help from the rest of Cerberus. Since Summer Heights falls under the domain of Asclepius Medical, however, their own law enforcement division is the first to show up at the scene, where Hera is the first to tell them that the Children Of Gaia had been congregating peacefully outside of the Singularity church before the cyborgs suddenly opened fire on them with their concealed weapon implants. The local police force ends up siding with Gaia, and sends in their best armed SWAT teams to the cathedral to apprehend the members of the Singularity, who then surrender quietly as soon as the Children Of Gaia had fled the scene upon the police force's arrival. Cerberus Security considers this to be a favorable outcome since the terrorist that attacked their offices was probably among one of the Singularity associates arrested, and if they are not, interrogations might reveal their whereabouts in time. Even if this proves unsuccessful, they can always incarcerate most of the cultists for the illegal modification of their products.



While Cerberus Security Systems begins their negotiating with Summer Heights's local law enforcement branch over the custody of the captured Singularity associates, the investigators at Charon are reassigned to Autumn Falls, where they believe that an employee for Icarus has been trading classified information on their robotics schematics with Mitashi Technologies, or as they were colloquially known by the company and the sprawl, MitaTech. Since MitaTech had the most presence in the Autumn Falls sector, Team Charon was assigned to investigate there. To avoid drawing too much attention to themselves this time, Captain Jacob decides that the team should split up to do their own investigations separately, and keep each other updated about their findings through their encrypted transmissions.

Joseph begins his end of the investigation by following some suspicious figures into a local bar, where he discovers that the strange looking people are in fact affiliated with the Yakuza, who have been serving as the de facto authority figures throughout most of Autumn Falls. Joseph thinks that they might know something about the mole that Cerberus was looking for, but he also couldn't stand the fact that the people of Autumn Falls are letting themselves be controlled through fear by such bullies as the Yakuza. When he speaks out about these feelings, he gets into a brawl with a few of the Yakuza thugs at the bar, but in a panic he manages to kill them with a holdout pistol he had concealed when he came in, a trick he had learned from Jacob and Scarlet. This immediately earns him a bad reputation with the Yakuza, but also the sympathies of one Shiro Hazukaro, an associate who doesn't like the way the Yakuza is currently running things and wants to take over the local chapter for himself, believing himself capable of doing a better job. He offers to help Joseph with everything he needs in exchange for helping him unseat the current Yakuza leader. Joseph agrees to this, and calls in Red as the muscle to help the two of them towards this cause, seeing as Red is the most capable of keeping this a secret from the others.

Shiro is quite knowledgeable about the Yakuza leader's whereabouts, and is able to get him into his penthouse apartment quite easily. Joseph realizes a moment too late, however, that the leader of this particular chapter of the Yakuza is also the CEO of Mitashi Technologies itself, and that Shiro is his own son, tired of his father's rule and wanting to take over for himself. He lured his father into a false sense of security and brought Joseph and Red over to assist with the assassination. Once this is completed, however, Joseph is made to take the fall, with Shiro taking the role of a victim of his father's death calling out for vengeance as he is promoted to the new Yakuza boss and CEO of Mitashi Technologies. In a token gesture of honor, Shiro gives Joseph a short head start in his escape before sending both the Yakuza and Mitashi's security force after him and Red. By this point, Jacob, Scarlet, and Vykarius had noticed that the two of them had not reported in in some time, and so Vyke had used his computer network searching prowess to find Joseph. The five of them are eventually reunited and are able to fight their way out of MitaTech's Autumn Falls branch before eventually losing their trail and reporting back to Cerberus HQ.



While Joseph had been unwittingly assisting in a coup for the whole of Mitashi Technologies, the Yakuza had been alerted to the fact that Icarus was searching for their mole. Jacob and Scarlet found the informant too late, after he had been executed to prevent him from leaking any information on the MitaTech side. And now with Joseph's actions, relations between Icarus and Mitashi have been further soured, but as far as Cerberus Security was concerned, the mole problem had now been dealt with, and the rival company was probably now going to be at a disadvantage while the new manager Shiro takes over. While all of this is happening, Cerberus sees that it is finally time to send Investigation Team Charon deep into the heart of Winterton, where even the other corporations would dare not tread most of the time. This time, Icarus is seeing the potential of using the poor, unemployed civilians of Winterton as a cheap labor force. If they can establish a strong enough industrial presence within Winterton, they may be able to gain the public's attention enough to win the favor of the Presidential candidate that Icarus is endorsing. The only problem right now is that Asclepius Medical and Mitashi Technologies are also doing the same exact thing in Winterton to promote their own candidates, and their Charon investigation squad is just secretive enough to be able to do something like sabotage the rival companies' operations while Icarus safely maintains plausible deniability in their involvement, since Charon "officially" does not exist in Icarus Industries records.

The recent events that had unfolded in Autumn Falls had thrown MitaTech's chain of command into a state of confusion, and so despite being the closest sector to Winterton, this circumstance has put them at a disadvantage when it comes to promoting their endorsed Presidential candidate for the upcoming elections, assuming they even had a replacement to begin with due to their candidate being assassinated. This just leaves Asclepius Medical's presence unaccounted for, and to that end their industrial branch had managed to secure a Rocka Rolla Cola bottling plant in their name, repurposing it as a factory for their own products and hiring Winterton locals on the cheap to save money on the operation. Icarus wants to take over the factory as their own, but cannot acquire the legal means to do so. They want to see if Team Charon can find the factory's manager and force him to sign a contract handing over all ownership to Icarus Industries.

Winterton proves to be quite hostile as Captain Jacob and his team arrive, living up to the region's reputation of being run by thugs and crime syndicates of the worst caliber. Even after fighting off several attempted muggings, the whereabouts of the factory manager in these slums prove to be quite elusive, and the locals don't take very kindly to strangers like Jacob and his crew at all. It isn't until they happen to meet a young musician named Aaron Steel performing at a club one day that their luck begins to turn around. The toughness required in his upbringing had not hardened his heart to strangers such as Joseph, and his passion for his craft had gained him a lot of influence throughout Winterton. When Aaron speaks, the locals tend to listen, or at least they are far more likely to do so than when strangers like Captain Jacob's crew do.

Even though the Asclepius factory had quite a few people employed within a sea of the unemployable, they were all being paid far less than living wages for even the low class lifestyles of Winterton civilians, and the working conditions were horrible. The factory had an incredibly high turnover rate due to workers leaving and being replaced over job related accidents or deaths, or the management just coming up with some reason to let its employees go at a whim. The factory hadn't been improving the quality of life for anyone in Winterton at all, it had just been causing that much more distress, and Asclepius Medical certainly wasn't winning over the crowd with their efforts, or lack thereof. Even if Icarus Industries were to take over the factory instead, there was certainly no guarantee that they would be running things any better, and would only accomplish hurting their own reputation. Even if they did try to improve working conditions somehow, the factory itself had grown old, being built with now outdated technology that was more trouble to maintain in the 2080s than it was worth. No amount of remodeling would be enough to save it. To the local people, the whole forsaken factory had quickly become a symbol of everything that was wrong with the corporate presence in this section of Winterton. The factory had to go altogether, and Aaron Steel was the one with enough charisma to bring together enough civilians for the cause, hopefully a much better cause than with what happened over in Summer Heights.

Joseph eventually decides on his squad's behalf to go along with Aaron's plan to rig the entire factory to explode. With the help of the local citizens, many of them being disgruntled factory workers themselves, they are able to storm the factory grounds, subdue the Asclepius security teams on site, and overload the factory's main power reactors, detonating the entire building. Many civilian lives are lost in the battle and the ensuing explosion, but Aaron assures everyone that the people lost in the collateral damage will be remembered as heroes, and that Icarus Industries should be credited for inspiring them to this brave action. When Cerberus Headquarters finds out about what had happened, they tell Captain Jacob of their plans to build a new factory on top of the ruins of the old one. Whether they can be better about running a factory than Asclepius was is out of Team Charon's hands, but at least they won't be cutting any corners during its construction, right?


By the time that Investigation Team Charon is through with their efforts in Winterton, they are called to go all the way back to Gibson Springs once again. Presidential candidate Albert Drake, endorsed by Icarus Industries, is finally arriving in the West Coast sprawl as part of his election campaign. While performing a public speech in Gibson Springs, Cerberus Security has assigned Captain Jacob and his team to serve as their candidate's bodyguards during this leg of his campaign tour. Or at least, that's what the official story is. The reality is that the Asclepius Medical endorsed rival candidate is also arriving in the same place at the same time to set up a debate with the Icarus candidate. Icarus Industries is not going to leave anything to chance this year, and once Team Charon arrives at the scene, they issue an order to assassinate the Asclepius candidate outright and plant evidence at scene to link it to the doing of the notorious Angel Of Retribution, ensuring that Icarus candidate Albert Drake can run for President unopposed and that he can found his campaign upon abating the public's fears brought about by the Angel's supposed works of terror.

Joseph Stone is having none of this, and for once, the rest of Team Charon agrees. Joseph regrets killing so many Krakenheads so brutally when he had been captured. He regrets not being able to save the iron mine and the town around it from the Vultures. He regrets not being able to tell the authorities what really happened when the Children Of Gaia attacked the Singularity church. He regrets being made into a pawn by a mob leader's son to kill his own father to replace him and put all of Autumn Falls in jeopardy. He regrets the loss of life that he couldn't prevent in Winterton, and most of all, Joseph regrets being complicit in all the dirty work he has been doing so that the plutocratic corporations could fill their pockets out of the blood shed of the working class. The rest of Team Charon puts their foot down and refuses to take these orders, so the higher-ups at Icarus send a backup team, somehow being lead by Hera Erisson, to bomb the hotel penthouse that the Asclepius candidate was staying at.

Hera had been working for Icarus Industries all along, and had been serving as a speaker for the Children Of Gaia as an agent provocateur of sorts. She now uses her manipulative abilities to bring the best of Cerberus's private militia against Team Charon, and they are overwhelmingly outclassed in firepower. Red is brought down in a hail of gunfire in order to stall for time to let the remaining members escape to the hotel penthouse in an effort to stop the bomb. Vykarius hacks into the hotel's local network to try to defuse the bomb wirelessly, but the new security measures that Cerberus had the foresight to implement discover him, sending a massive electrical discharge into his own skull-mounted jack to fry his brain to a crisp. Scarlet is hit by aerial strikes while providing cover for Joseph and Jacob with her sniping skills. The two of them barely manage to make it to the penthouse, but it was already too late for them before they even started. Hera anticipated that they would try to stop the bomb this way, and so she had the bomb rigged to detonate as soon as there were exactly three people in the room: Joseph, Jacob, and the Asclepius candidate.

Joseph would later awaken in a mental asylum hidden away somewhere in the Cascade Range, missing his right arm, his right eye, and his entire identity. Having been admitted as a nameless patient, it is not until he escapes, with the assistance of an anonymous benefactor from the outside, that he finds out that he was the last remaining survivor of the incident to assassinate the Asclepius presidential candidate, securing Albert Drake as the next President. With Jacob, Red, Scarlet, and Vykarius dead, Icarus Industries washed their hands of Team Charon by removing all private and public records of their existence. Joseph tries to protest to the general public about the truth of the matter, but to no avail; the only official record of him that exists is that he is a former patient of a mental asylum, and that the Asclepius candidate was assassinated by terrorists, most likely the work of the Angel Of Retribution.

With no one left to turn to, Joseph looks into the mysterious being that aided in his own escape from the institution. It turns out to not be a person, per se, but rather a digital entity existing entirely within cyberspace, like an artificial intelligence. An artificial intelligence that calls itself Vykarius, who claims that it was once the original Vykarius working for Cerberus Security Systems, and, indeed, seems to remember everything about Joseph and the rest of his colleagues. While the original Vykarius was killed while neurally connected to the Global Reality Integration Domain, or the GRID, his digital avatar continued to persist in cyberspace as if the hacker had never died. This digital Vykarius entity has since been wandering the GRID in search of any remaining evidence of the incident that Icarus Industries had not yet erased, and eventually discovered that Joseph was also still alive. Together, the two of them find out where the evidence to that fatal incident was being stored within the Cerberus Security headquarters, and stage an infiltration, with Vykarius crippling the HQ's security electronics on the GRID to allow Joseph to sneak inside.

There, they discover that the evidence was in the process of being destroyed. What they are able to save is some of the personal belongings and augmentations of their own colleagues that had been salvaged from the site, since the cybernetics were still property of Icarus Industries even after their deaths. With Vykarius's knowledge of the criminal underground on the GRID, he connects Joseph with a disgruntled cybernetics surgeon, formerly Icarus and now working freelance under the radar, who is able to verify that much of the cyberware is still functional and even compatible with Joseph's biology. Joseph elects to have Red's right servo arm and Scarlet's right electronic eye installed on his body to replace his own missing parts, and begins to carry Jacob Goldhart's semi automatic revolver with him as a memento until Vykarius is able to hook him up with an underground arms dealer that is able to provide the necessary bullets. The platinum white revolver, emblazoned with Goldhart's own signature carved across the left side of the foot long barrel, was based on a line of handguns used in the war for the most heavily armed of infantry, often equipped with servo powered prosthetic arms, to be able to take down the most heavily armored soldiers and vehicles that they would encounter on a battlefield full of experimental technologies. The extremely high caliber bullets fired by this kind of handgun meant that the user would experience an incredible amount of recoil with every shot, and only something with the strength of Red's servomechanical arms, for example, would be able to absorb most of that recoil. Joseph learns how to use this new gun with his new arm, and with the electronic eye of a dead sniper installed in his right socket, he is able to train himself as a one handed sharpshooter in order to survive on the mean streets of the West Coast Sprawl.

With all ties to Icarus Industries and Cerberus Security Systems having been officially severed with Joseph and Vykarius, the official records say that they do not exist. Joseph uses this circumstance as an opportunity to start a new career as a private investigator, living off the grid and making his new living by finding the truth for the people who need it the most, with Vykarius in the GRID to help him make the connections he needs to pry the truth out from the web of lies those in power tend to spin. For the next four years, Det. Joseph Stone, PI hones his practice into a fine art as he gets himself involved with the personal matters of those around him, those on the streets of the sprawl, various gangs and underground organizations, and starts to work his way up to the corporate slaves under the employ of Icarus, Asclepius, or MitaTech, still holding onto his dream of one day exposing their corruption and letting the general public see them for what they really are, a dream remaining somewhere in the back of his mind, even though his spirit had been broken the last time he tried to oppose the corporations and had gotten his friends killed. Over these four years, Joseph begins to realize that the people seem to be aware of the corporate practices on some level, but there is nothing that any of them can do about it. Even if it could be proven that the corporations were committing some crime against humanity, the wageslaves had all of their jobs so compartmentalized and distanced from each other that none of them could claim responsibility for such things, and so they remained content to simply do their jobs and get paid, not thinking of the potential consequences they may be having on society, because as individuals, they couldn't see themselves as having such an impact. Thoughts such as these begin to wear onto Joseph as he gets more involved amongst the dregs of society, both low and high class, his heart and mind slowly becoming desensitized to all the corruption and violence until he has nothing left to feel except the numbness of nihilistic apathy. One human was only but a small grain of sand on a vast beach of countless other grains of sand of a magnitude beyond their comprehension, sooner or later to be washed away by the coming tide.
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Her sleep had been interrupted by a soft tone and the mechanical whirring of a machine coming to life, followed by a light blue glow of some manner of display in a dome in front of her face. In her groggy, partially awakened state, the words flashing by might as well have been arcane runes for all the good it did for her trying to read them. Another series of tones sounded out to her, and the words in front of her, or whatever surface they had been displayed on, started moving away from her before rising up and out of her sight.

It was then that she realized that she had no idea what was happening, where she was, how long she had been here, or even who she was.

The sudden realization of so much uncertainty panicked her into sitting herself up.  Or rather, sitting up is what she would have done if she hadn't already been standing up in some fashion. Whatever she had been sleeping in was not level with the floor, but rather tilted backwards at an angle with her placed in a leaning back position. When she sprang forward, she had forgotten to balance herself on her feet and instead fell forward onto a cold, hard gray floor before her.

Her surroundings were dark, very dark. She could barely see her own hand in front of her face at first. But her vision would quickly adjust itself to the darkness. A massive wall stood up in front of her, and when she turned around, there was a wall behind her as well. But nothing to the sides. She thought she must have been in some sort of long hallway at first, since the walls continued onward as far as she could see in either direction. But these walls looked so strange, they almost looked like stacks of boxes, and other large containers of indescribable shapes. She herself had just stumbled out of what looked like a coffin-sized cylinder set into the wall with the rest of the container stack, or at least half of a cylinder. Upon closer inspection, the top half of the cylinder had flipped up like a lid.

The cylinder was big enough for most people like her to fit inside, and made of a cool black metal on the outside. She searched with her hands along the sides of this container, feeling around for some sort of mechanism, but even if she did find some manner of button or switch, she wouldn't be able to tell what it did in this darkness. The only time she had seen any light so far was when she had woke up. She must have been looking at a backlit display on the inside of the lid before it had opened up, presumably to let her out. But ... why? What did this thing say before it let her out? Could she find a way to reactivate the display, and perhaps give her a light source for once?

While trying to investigate an answer to this, she slowly became aware that there were several more of these cylindrical containers just like hers beside her. They had no lights on or around them, and she could not tell what was inside any of them, if there was anything inside of them. Several containers down the row, and she found two of them that had their lids opened up. They were completely empty inside.



One thing that she had not yet taken notice of at first was that, aside from the container activating and waking her up, everything had been dead silent. All she could hear were her own footsteps and the brushing of her hands against the metal containers as she felt her way through the dark. She only began to realize this when a metallic creaking noise suddenly rang out from somewhere off in the distance, followed by several sets of footsteps that were not hers, followed by the sound of something metal being slammed shut.

Off in the same direction as these noises, two or three or four beams of light began to pierce through the darkness, however faintly. One of them was briefly pointed upward, and seemed to travel up for hundreds of  feet before stopping at a ceiling full of steel beams before dropping back down towards the ground in the next moment. These lights were all obscured by the walls on either side of her, but not entirely, and the walls did not even reach all the way up to the ceiling. The lights shone through the cracks of these walls to clarify the shapes of the containers around her. They cast more shadows to further confuse her, but she was soon able to piece together these "walls", for what they really were: shelves. Massive steel shelves at least six feet high, holding containers that were more often than not larger than herself. She was standing in an aisle between two of these shelves.

The light sources had been clustered together when they had first appeared, but soon began to break away from each other and move along in different directions, each beam of light running parallel to the floor. She could see the end of the aisle that she was standing in, and when she tiptoed over to the edge of this aisle, too afraid to make any noise, she could see that this aisle was just one of many, extending outward in every direction in what appeared to be a neat and orderly grid shaped pattern. The lights were starting to move up and down these aisles in a systematic sweep, as if patrolling the area, or searching for something, or someone.

Whatever they were doing, they were bound to find her eventually if she just stood there, and she was too frightened to let that happen. She wanted to leave this strange and dark place, to escape this nightmare, but she hardly knew where she was or where to go. She could try fleeing in the opposite direction, but what if there was nothing there? She could be trapped in a dead end. There had to be a way out of here. The others probably were not here before her, and had just arrived, so maybe wherever they came from must have been a way out. But what if there were more of them waiting beyond that?

There had to be a better exit somewhere, and without a light source of her own, she would need to observe the existing ones in the distance to get a lay of the area, while at the same time staying out of sight of them. She tried holding her breath to remain silent and, when she could not hold her breath indefinitely, took light breaths and even lighter footsteps, trying to synchronize them with the other ones she could hear. She could also hear voices, low murmurs of conversation that she could not make out from too great a distance. She could not tell what they were saying, yet the tones of these voices did not sound friendly in the slightest, and she felt little inclination to approach them to hear these words any better.

Due to the apparent grid layout of the shelves surround her, there were logically only four possible directions for her to go, or merely two when she was travelling down an aisle. She started in the direction that none of the lights seemed to be travelling towards and continued on in that direction for as long as she could, eventually reaching a steel wall that actually was solid for a change, and extended all the way up to the ceiling. This had to be the edge of the room or the building of wherever she was for sure. There had to be a way out of this place from somewhere along the perimeter, assuming that there was no ladder or staircase from somewhere in the middle of the room to leave from. She continued along in one direction of the outer wall, again trying to avoid the lights in the area, until she eventually came across another identical wall running perpendicular to the one she was following. This had to be the corner of the room or building. She would continue along this next wall with the utmost of caution, until another beam of light had suddenly appeared from out of the darkness, this time right in front of her, and pointed directly at her.



"Who the hell are you? Warehouse security?" A gruff voice spoke out from the oddly-shaped silhouette shining the light on her. "Nah, that's no security uniform I ever seen. And ya certainly ain't one of us." The figure took a step closer to her, revealing the tattooed face of a man with a pink mohawk and questionable taste in facial piercings. The light he was shining on her wasn't a flashlight, or rather, it was, but it was a flashlight strapped to the barrel of a handgun trained right on her. "Whoever ya are, yer in the wrong place. Too bad we're on such a tight schedule, 'cause I woulda taken advantage of a pretty face like yers right here where no one can find us right now! Guess I gotta just kill ya instead."

Without any further thinking necessary, she threw herself off to the side of the man, away from the wall and towards the nearest aisle, just in time to hear a gunshot roar out from where she had been standing. She didn't look back, she just kept running, trying to put as much distance behind her as her legs would allow. She became keenly aware of her pounding heartbeat, and the voices in the area rising to a commotion, followed by the light sources starting to converge on the location she was fleeing from. She could also see that a light was being shone on the aisle she was in from behind, followed by the sound of another gunshot. She rounded the nearest corner that she could, hoping for dear life that she would lose her pursuer. There was another beam of light approaching, so she ducked into another aisle.

She could not outrun them forever, not when she didn't know where to go. She had to defend herself somehow. Hands shaking, she tried to take one of the smaller boxes off of the shelves and scrambled for a way to pry it open, but to no avail. One of the others soon caught up to her somehow, shining a light on her through the barrel of a gun. She retaliated by tossing the metal box at them. It smacked them in the face, causing them to fall to the floor, dropping their weapon nearby. She ran up and knelt down to grab the gun, but a rough hand suddenly clasped itself around her arm to stop her. Now with a bruised cheek and a broken nose, the assailant shoved her to the floor as he stood up, retrieving his weapon and pointing it straight at her, finger closing firm around the trigger.

She tried to scoot herself away from on her back before a loud gunshot rang out and gore splattered across the floor and shelves, but to her surprise it was not her, it was most of her current assailant's head that had suddenly erupted in a fountain of blood and brains, the body falling forward onto her, spilling blood all over the purple jumpsuit that she had apparently been wearing.



Another silhouette approached her in the darkness, one with a faint, glowing amber light in its right eye. A man in a brown trench coat and a five o'clock shadow, grasping a smoking white revolver nearly the size of his forearm in his right hand. With his left, he extended out to her, to help her to her feet. "Come with me if you want to live." His voice was stern but inviting, almost reassuring.

As she was helped up to her feet, the man with the mohawk came running down the aisle towards the two of them. She began to shout out a warning to the man with the revolver, causing him to spin around and fire off a round in one seamless motion, stopping the mohawk dead in his tracks with a fist-sized gaping hole in his chest.

She didn't know what was going on, whether she could trust the man with the stubble, and while she could run while his back was turned to her, a bullet from that tremendous revolver could surely catch up. In her hesitation, this man grabbed her by the hand and led her down in the opposite direction she would have fled. In the moment they passed between two aisles, another gun-toting leather jacket emerged from several aisles down, and as if by some sort of uncanny reflex, the man with her used his revolver to blast them in the arm, rendering their entire gun hand a bloody stump after a burst of red mist. The two of them were made to continue rushing onward without stopping after this.

She and the brown coat continued along through the labyrinth of shelves, him gunning down another figure from across an aisle with one well-aimed bullet to the gut, until the two of them were approaching a light pouring in from a massive double doorway. This was the exit that she had been looking for all along. It had to have been. Only problem was, as they were nearing it, three figures in torn denim jackets suddenly emerged from the doorway, each one pointing a sawed-off shotgun at them.



"Well, well, if it isn't ol' Stony Joe and his nose for trouble being poked in where it don't belong as usual! This time it's your last mistake, pal!" The man in the middle spoke.

"And what business do the Vultures have in this sector?" The man in the brown coat replied. "Last I checked, this warehouse, and all the warehouses around it, they all belong to the PSC."

"Wouldn't you like to know, Sherlock! Well I ain't tellin' ya! Me and my boys don't gotta answer squat 'cause our roomsweepers here are gonna shut ya right up!"

"If you know who I am, then you know damn well that I can drop all three of you, right now, before you even get the chance." He levels his revolver at the three gangers.

"That six shooter of yers has gone off four times already, and ya couldn't have had time to reload. Now I ain't much of a numbers guy, but I'm pretty sure ya don't have enough bullets left to take down all thre-"

The ganger was cut off with a revolver blast to his leg, causing him to fall over while the other two raised their weapons. The first one was too slow and was taken down first with a clean shot to the skull, taking out the top half of his head. The man in the brown coat raised up his right arm and ran up in front of her as the remaining ganger fired off a shotgun blast, being blocked from her by the brown coat's own body. He responded by putting a hole in the ganger's chest, and staggered onward to their now crippled leader, extending his right arm to point the white revolver at his forehead.

"Goldhart is an eight shooter." Joe corrected him. "Now tell me what the hell you're doing here."

"Aw, fuck you, Joseph!" The ganger screamed as he clutched his broken leg in agony. "There ain't no fuckin' way I'm talkin' ta the likes 'a you! Go ta hell!"

"You go first." Joseph held his trench coat over his face to keep the blood spatter out of his eyes as he made his last headless ganger for the evening.

"H-hey! You didn't have to kill him!" She finally screamed out to him.

Joe turned back over to her with a startling tranquility in his eye. "And you don't have to tell me how to do my job. Last thing I need right now is even more trouble coming back to me because of some surviving witness." He gave a thoughtful blink, and then began to raise his now blood-spattered revolver to her. "And speaking of witnesses...who the hell are you? You certainly don't look like you work here. Not enough metal in your body." His right arm had been torn up by the shotgun blast, but there was no blood pouring out of his wounds, only a metallic chrome frame beneath his skin.

She stared down at his metallic arm, and the revolver it was holding. "Umm...that gun really does hold only eight shots, doesn't it?"

There was a pause. His stone faced expression slowly morphed into a smirk, and then finally a chuckle. Without lowering his gun, he reached out with his left hand and swung open the cylinder, revealing eight large chambers. He tilted the revolver upward, and eight spent bullet casings came tumbling out, each one the size of his own index finger. He jerked the gun to the right with his hand to swing the cylinder back shut.

"You're right. And lucky for you, I left my spare clips in my other coat." He opens up one side of his coat, revealing a sturdy-looking vest beneath as he slides his revolver into an empty pocket under his coat, then extends his right hand out to her in greeting. "Joseph Stone, Private Investigator. I'm in the market for answers, starting with yours. Who are you?"

"I'm..." She suddenly realized that she didn't seem to remember much of anything, including her own name. She had to search her mind after being so on edge with the ordeal she had just been through. What could she remember that felt like it might just be her name? There was only one thing that could come to mind for her, after several moments of Joseph waiting patiently for such a response.



"A... Andria. My name ... it has to be Andria. Andria Turing. With an I" Why is this a name that she remembers? Is it really hers?



"Other than your own name, which you don't even seem to be very sure of to begin with, you don't remember anything else? Where you came from, how you got here, what you're doing here, nothing?"

Andria shook her head sadly. "I'm sorry, I can't think of anything. Maybe it will start to come back to me if I can find out where we are."

Joseph gave a cursory look around at their surroundings. Beyond the docks they were standing by was a vast stretch of water, expanding to where the horizon met the overcast night sky. "Well, that's the Pacific Ocean, for one thing." There were rows upon rows of massive warehouses along the docks, just like the one that Andria had just came out of. Beyond them were the lights of a city skyline. "And over in that direction is scenic Gibson Springs, or as we used to call it a few decades ago, Seattle."

"Gibson Springs? I've never heard it called that before! Since when did they change the name?"

"I just said, a few decades ago. Sometime around the forties or fifties, shortly before I was born in '55. The older generation still insists on the cities' old names."

"Wait, what!?" Andria felt quite startled and confused. "What year is it now!?"

Joseph's right eye started to radiate a faint amber light. "According to my retinal overlay, it is currently March 15th, 2084, at 1:52 AM. Speaking of the time, we had best get going. We really don't want to still be here when the police show up after what we just did."

"You mean, after what you just did." Andria felt a need to correct him.

"Not that it's gonna matter much to begin with. The media is gonna find some way to spin the news in their favor. They always do. Let's just get out of here." Joseph motioned with his hand to keep up with him as he began to walk towards the city lights. "First thing we're gonna do is head to the cleaners and get the blood out of these clothes before anyone starts asking any questions."

"And the cleaners themselves aren't gonna be asking any questions?"

"They know who I am and what I do, and they're okay with it. They also know that too many questions can get themselves killed around these parts. Around most parts, really."

Andria felt pretty sure that a lack of questions would be more likely to put her in danger under her current circumstances. She had to ask Joseph about that cylindrical container that she had found herself sleeping in.

"Oh, that? A cryostasis pod? You're telling me that you just crawled out of one of those?" Joseph sounded incredulous, or at least a little. "Well, that does kind of look like one of those jumpsuits that they put you in when they put you into a cryopod, so that could be likely. I'm not seeing any sort of emblem or logo, though, which is pretty strange. The Big Three love to put out their branding on everything they make or touch."

"The Big Three?"

"Icarus Industries, Asclepius Medical, Mitashi Technologies." Joseph sounded a bit resentful as he spoke of these names. "The big corporations that produce, well, pretty much everything these days? Look around you. Every product you've ever bought was probably made by one of those three."

"I'm sorry ... I don't seem to be able to recall very much."

"How long were you in cryostasis? What year do you last remember it being?"

Andria simply shook her head with a sad sigh.

"I've heard rumors of some of the possible effects of long term suspended animation. That you were even able to wake up in the first place could be considered a miracle to some.  You're lucky that memory loss seems to be the only problem you have so far."

"Lucky!?" Andria objected, "My memories define who I am, and I have none! There could be people who are depending on me somewhere and may be wondering where I am right now!"

Her last statement made Joseph stop walking right there for a moment. "Hey now, there's an idea. If your name really is Andria Turing, maybe there could be someone looking for you if you've been away for as long as it seems. There can't be that many Andria's spelled with an I, after all. I know just the person we can talk to about this, once we change and get back to my office, that is."



The forest of warehouses soon began to give way to some dingy, dilapidated looking buildings on what must have been the fringes of the city. Just a few buildings down from there stood what appeared to be some kind of laundromat, although it had been locked by some manner of electronically operated door, and next to it was a scanner of some sort that Joseph put his left eye up to, and the door swung open, letting the two of them inside to be greeted with a row of washing machines the likes of which Andria had never seen before. They had a very sleek, streamlined appearance, yet their mechanisms and interfaces appeared far more complex than anything she had remembered being used to.

While she was trying to figure these things out, Joseph had been speaking with someone in a back room, and eventually motioned for Andria to come on over. The back room turned out to be full of rows of various kinds of clothing that the owner claimed to be selling to Joseph, and, of course, that he would be footing the bill since it seemed pretty obvious that Andria didn't have anything with her other than the strange jumpsuit she found herself in. She was given a dressing room in which to try on whatever she wanted until she was satisfied. There was a full-length mirror for her to examine herself for the first time. Aside from having a set of jet-black hair, icy blue eyes, and a pale complexion, the rest of herself looked fairly average, or as average as she expected the average person to be. A little more than five and a half feet in height, which meant Joseph must have been nearly six feet in comparison, And she was probably somewhere around ten stone in the weight range from the looks of her, and Joseph must have had a sturdier frame than her, even if he was hiding it under a trench coat.

Eventually she decided on a few sets of casual wear and sweaters for herself, since Seattle did feel a bit chilly in March. Joseph would eventually be seen in a gray coat instead, and could still be wearing a bulletproof vest under the muted dark blue shirt he picked out as well. The owner promised to them that they would have their old clothes delivered back to them very soon, and that there would be no traces of blood on them, guaranteed. This sort of promise made Andria question what sorts of customers he was used to dealing with, but then soon decided that was one answer that she was not quite so much interested in finding out for the time being.



"Glad that's all taken care of." Joseph remarked, sounding quite relieved. "Now we just need to catch the first bus back to my office." The two of them would make their way out from the laundromat down the street. For it being two or nearly three in the morning, the city streets looked quite bustling with pedestrians, many of them looking a bit disheveled in this part of town. What Andria thought of as strange was that many of these people seemed to possess artificial or prosthetic limbs. Arms, legs, eyes, even parts of some folks' torsos seemed to be made out of metal and electronics where flesh and blood was normally expected.

She had to ask Joseph about these when they made it to what looked like a bus stop, and if this is what he had in his right arm and right eye, to which he gave her an amused chuckle. "Of course, of course! Have you been living under a rock these past fifty plus years? Oh wait ... well, regardless, cybernetic augmentations have pretty much always been Icarus Industries' bread and butter. You see, around the 2010s there was this couple, a doctor and an engineer, and their first child had been born a cripple. They loved their kid so much that they wanted to do everything in their power to give them the best life possible. By the time their kid reached their teens, they had constructed one of the first prototypes of prosthetic legs with hardware that could interface with the human nervous system. It's been the basis for all artificial limbs ever since. I've got a friend, the one we're going to see once we're in my office. He's great with computers, which is why we're going to see him. He tells me that our brains are already computers molded by nature to begin with, operating on a network of biological circuits and wires, so it was only a matter of time until we could create brain-computer interfaces. Icarus Industries became the first company to capitalize upon this in the early 2020s, and now they're one of the most powerful entities in the world." His enthusiastic demeanor gave way to a dejected sigh as soon as he had said this. "If only they had remembered their original vision."



Once the bus had arrived at their station and opened itself up for boarding, Andria knew that she had to stand a lot closer to these strange civilians than she was comfortable with, but even stranger still was the fact that the bus itself appeared to have no apparent driver. Where a driver's seat and steering wheel had been expected, there was only a large, strangely shaped computer tower and a series of extra display panels along the dashboard, but no obvious buttons or switches to manipulate. Joseph must have noticed her staring at this, because he soon remarked "Don't you think a self-driving transit system is convenient? Icarus sure seems to think so. I haven't seen an actual human drive a bus or a taxi in Gibson Springs since I was a child, and even by then, they were already getting very few and far between. The corporation has had quite a history for phasing out human jobs by slowly replacing them with their robotic automated labor forces. As soon as their machines became more efficient and easier to maintain than people, well, the job market just got that much more scarce. It's no wonder the unemployment rate has been steadily rising." He shook his head, his hopefulness once again giving in to disdain. "If the executives and management of Icarus all got replaced by cold, unfeeling machines one day, I don't think anyone would be able to tell the difference. Not even me."

Although Andria had been busy watching the urban scenery rush by from her window seat on the bus, Joseph, who had been sitting in the aisle seat next to her, leaned over to tap a bespectacled passenger sitting across the narrow aisle. "Excuse me." He started in a casual, nonchalant manner. "A friend of mine here dropped her last pair of AR specs on the sidewalk. She's looking for a tag that's important to her. Could we buy your spare pair?" He pointed to what appeared to be a pair of glasses in the man's chest pocket. I'll make it worth your while. Maybe I can introduce you to her sometime." Joseph gave the man an assuring smile, as subtle as a smile on his particular face was, and reached into his gray coat pocket to pull out a sleek metallic stick slightly larger than a fountain pen, waving it in front of the man's face.

The man looked to the silver stick, then to Andria, then finally back to Joseph. He sighed and produced a similar looking stick from his own pocket and held it up to Joseph's. A display began to light up on the sides of both devices, indicating a number rolling down on Joseph's, and a number rolling up on the other man's, before they both finally displayed the message "TRANSACTION CONFIRMED" in glowing green letters. With this, the other man pocketed his stick and handed over the pair of glasses from his pocket over to Joseph, who then handed them over to Andria.

"Here, put these on. I don't care how good you say your eyes are, I bet you can't see AR without them." Andria reluctantly picked up the eyepiece and slowly put them on. As soon as the glasses came over her eyes, she started to see things she never could before. There were signs, both inside the bus and out, that refused to let themselves be bound to any surface, and seemed to overlap the world itself. The ones outside on the streets were going by too fast for her to read, but along the walls and ceiling of the bus there were various pieces of two-dimensional and three-dimensional artwork that mostly appeared to be advertisements for various products, from synthetic foods to personal service drones to small firearms, all from various different brand names and labels, but any bit of fine print she noticed on these digital pictures would inevitably contain "A subsidiary of Icarus Industries" under every company label. Indeed, the emblem of a gear adorned with a pair of wings seemed to factor in to most of these ads somewhere, which she presumed to be the Icarus trademark. The density of these advertisements flooding Andria's vision was quite overwhelming to her, to the point to where she could barely even make out the virtual overlay of the bus's actual schedule and a map of its route. She had to take off the glasses and hand them back to Joseph after the sensory overload was starting to get to her. Thankfully, all of these signs and displays vanished as soon as she removed the piece.

"No no, keep it. You'll be needing it, trust me. You don't have any cybernetic eyes like me, now do you?" Joseph pushed the pair of glasses away and back into her hand. "Augmented Reality is more of a MitaTech thing, but, as you can see, it's caught on throughout the rest of the West Coast as well."

"MitaTech? What?"

"Mitashi Technologies. One of the Big Three, remember? Everyone just calls them MitaTech these days. Gibson Springs is more Icarus's territory, but the influence of MitaTech's electronics are hard to miss. Especially if you travel on down to Autumn Falls in the desert sectors. Or maybe you're more familiar with that place being called Las Vegas."

"Vegas ... Autumn Falls?"

"Do the two names of that place sound familiar to you? Any memories coming back to you, Miss Turing?"

"I ... I don't think so ... I'm not so sure."

The bus began to ease to a stop. Joseph stood up from his seat, presumably to get a better look, and extended his hand out to Andria. "This is where we get off, Miss Turing. My office is just a short walk from here."

The buildings around this area seemed to be in slightly better condition from the outside, though the traffic of vehicles and pedestrians alike was busier as well. There were trashcan-shaped robots on wheels rolling about near the sidewalks with monitors on their sides advertising trinkets and small general goods that might be expected to be found in convenience stores, along with slots in their bodies that looked just wide enough to insert something exactly the size of that silver stick Joseph was carrying, and a compartment beneath that, which looked just big enough to be able to dispense the items being shown on the monitors. AR Glasses seemed to be one of these items in their selection, so why Joseph insisted on getting a pair from some stranger on the bus was a mystery to Andria.

Joseph had eventually led her to a nondescript looking office building at least a dozen stories high. They entered the lobby to be greeted by another robot with several whirring servo arms working at the elevator doors, an OUT OF ORDER sign being prominently displayed over them whenever Andria put on the glasses. Joseph directed her instead over to a door leading to a stairwell, leading the two to a tedious trek up a little over two dozen flights of water-damaged concrete in an echoing, dimly lit spiral shaft. They eventually stopped at a door labelled with a large 13 over it, which they continued through to an unnervingly long hallway full of locked, unlabeled doors, all of which had empty nameplates. All except for one door at the other end of the hall, one with a faint beige light pouring out from its frosted glass window. Across the frosted glass were large bold words being displayed in Augmented Reality as well as painted on the door itself:



DET. JOSEPH STONE

INVESTIGATIONS INTO MATTERS PRIVATE AND PUBLIC



Joseph himself went through the door first, getting to sit behind the massive desk by the time Andria had walked in. He was no longer wearing his coat, but it could be found hanging up on a sleek black coat rack by the door, alongside several other similarly shaped trench coats, coming in a variety of muted earthy and metallic colors. The items that he had been carrying in his coat now seemed to be placed on top of his desk: the silver currency stick, the platinum white revolver with the rectangular barrel and handle, and five cylinder magazines that Joseph must have finally gotten out from one of his other coats. He went to open the revolver's cylinder, load the magazine into place, then swing the cylinder back shut as he put the now empty magazine next to the others while he opened a drawer on the right-hand side of his desk, where he deposited the revolver itself.

Joseph must have pressed a button on the side of the desk at the same time as he put away his gun, as the moment he closed the drawer again, a compartment in the center of the desktop suddenly slid open, and the device beneath began to project a holographic screen above the desk, right between him and Andria. It was projecting a flat, white, slightly transparent rectangle, like a monitor without a physical terminal. Joseph would then proceed to open up a control panel from his side of the desk and punch a few buttons before some black letters slid into view on the white rectangle, spelling out "CALLING: VYKARIUS".

A moment later, the minimalistic display was soon replaced by the vision of a rather well-groomed looking man with flowing dark hair and an expensive-looking robe, standing in front of an ornate set of arched windows overlooking an idyllic countryside. He gave a look of surprise at Andria's appearance, followed by a warm, inviting smile to her. Or it could have been to Joseph. With the two of them looking at the same screen from opposite sides, it appeared as though the man was looking at both of them at the same time.

"Hey, Stony Joe! My main man! Who's the Femme Fatale that you got in your office with ya? Is this a new lead?" The main exclaimed with an air of charming confidence in his voice.

"I certainly hope so, Vyke." Joseph replied. "Found her in Warehouse 18, all thanks to your tip. Says she just came out of cryostasis and doesn't remember a thing about herself. Thinking she might be some kind of experiment or test subject or..."

"Or perhaps a human slave in transit?" Vykarius suggested, which Joseph reacted to with a look of disgust. "Look, Joe, hopefully that isn't actually the case here, but we gotta consider all the possibilities, and we both know better than anyone that the truth isn't always a pleasant one. Word on the Grid is that a dreck-hot new experimental drug that affects the memory centers of the brain was leaked onto the black market by a disgruntled AsMed pharmacologist. Depending on the dosage and method of administration, it could help you remember things, help you forget things, make you remember things differently, makes your memories like soft clay! A large enough dose could theoretically induce an artificial amnesia that may or may not be permanent, or it could just make you plain dead in the brain if you're overdosed."

"Vykarius." Joseph's voice was calm but stern. "This is Miss Andria Turing. Does she look brain dead to you?"

"She certainly don't look like an overdoser, no sir! But what I'm saying is that human traffickers could use this new drug on their merchandise to make them forget about whatever life they had before they were taken away, make them believe whatever they're told instead, ya know? And we already know about the O'Devlin Syndicate having a history of smuggling human slaves in cryopods. I wouldn't be surprised if they've already gotten a hold of this new juice by now, considering how close they operate to the AsMed territories in Summer Heights."

"AsMed? Summer Heights?" Andria was having a hard time keeping up with more and more unfamiliar terms as they were being thrown at her.

"Dear Lord Azrael, they really boggled your mind up good, didn't they?" Vykarius shook his head as he gave an amused chuckle. "AsMed. Asclepius Medical. The German biotech firm most active around Summer Heights?"

"Formerly known as San Francisco." Joseph added.

"AsMed is big into medicine, if you hadn't figured that out already. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that they ARE medicine. They bought the last chemical formula patent almost a decade ago, and now they have a monopoly on all things pharmaceutical. They also hold a claim on all manner of surgical operations that Icarus didn't claim first when they were coming up with cybernetic implantation procedures. While Icarus has the whole Grafting Metal Things To Your Body stuff cornered, Asclepius made their name by growing artificial organs and body parts out of the same sorts of tissues that you're already made of to begin with, and they even won an ownership dispute with Icarus over a patent for microbe-sized robots and drones designed to coexist within the human circulatory system."

"So you think that this new drug is going to lead us back to Andria somehow?" Joseph asked. "Do we even have any evidence or probable cause to believe that it had anything to do with this in the first place? It could be more likely that something went wrong within the cryostasis procedure."

"That could be a possibility. Could be any of these things. Could be none of them at all." Vykarius had to admit. "Tell you what, Joe. I'm going to do some more research on my end. Until this Turing lady can see if she can scratch up any more old memories lying around, maybe the best lead you have right now is to return to where you found her. See if you can find any more evidence and clues while the scene is still hot. Andria, well, you should come with me on a trek across the Grid. See if we can't find anything together."

"The Grid?" As Andria was asking this, Joseph was reaching into another drawer in his desk, and handed her a small plastic card.

"First door on the left when you leave this room. There is a full VR unit in there. Vyke will instruct you on how to use it." Joseph said as he insisted on placing the card into her hand. "Don't worry, he'll be there. Won't you, Vykarius?"

Vykarius gave them both a confident smile. "As surely as I live and breathe!" He broke into laughter at this. Andria felt like she had missed a joke somewhere.

"Just take care of her while I'm gone, Vyke." Joseph was not nearly as amused at the supposed joke. "I'm not losing another lead. I can't afford it. We can't afford it. Not after all that we've both been through." He was putting his gray coat back on as he was saying this, securing his revolver beneath it once again, and pocketing something else that Andria didn't quite get a good look at. He shot her one final look of concern before turning away, almost reluctantly, as he left his office and strode down the hall with a look of purpose to every step. Or at least, a hesitant look of newfound purpose.

"What is this all about?" Andria turned to ask Vykarius after Joseph had left.

"Ah, don't worry about it. At least not for the time being, anyways. It's a long story ... Stony Joe and I go back quite a ways. But he's a private investigator now, and the secrets that he uncovers are strictly confidential between him and his clients. Until it concerns you, you needn't worry about a thing." Vykarius had slowly been dropping his friendly smile as he said this, exchanging it for a somewhat more solemn gesture as he leaned forward towards the screen. "People have been killed over finding out things that they shouldn't have. Just ask Joseph about this, I dare you. Or better yet ... don't. There's a reason half his body is prosthetic now, and it ain't because he chose to be a razorguy or anything." He paused for a moment after this, and his serious demeanor suddenly evaporated, returning to his cheerful side. "Now then, let's see what we can do about your side of the story, now shall we? Step into the first door on your left, and I'll be right over!"



It had already been a crazy night so far, which for me would probably be considered business as usual these days, but ever since I laid eyes on that Miss Andria Turing I've been having the strangest feeling. That woman is going to lead me to the answers I had been looking for all these years. Or maybe to my grave instead. I'd say it would be a coin flip between the two possible outcomes if physical currency still existed, and I've always considered myself to be a gambling man; every time I step out into the streets, I'm taking a gamble with my life. So many people and organizations seem to want me dead, simply living to see the next sunrise is an adventure in itself. And it had been a long time since I had seen any sun in Gibson Springs. The whole damn sky over the city was overcast with scattered showers and the occasional thunderstorm day in and day out. The stars could have all gone out and we would never know about it. Weather like this is what lead me to making the trench coat a permanent part of my wardrobe. Not that I mind the wind and rain all that much, but when you're on the bad side of the Irish Mafia, the Yakuza, and half a dozen street gangs, a heavy coat can go a long way when it comes to keeping a low profile.

I had to make it back to Warehouse 18, but I had a feeling before I got there that it was already too late. As I made it to the entrance of the dockside warehouses district, there was a crowd of confused onlookers standing in my way of the display before them. Shining siren lights were lighting up the massive police blockade that had just installed themselves by the front gates to the docks. At least a dozen squad cars and a few armored vans were present. Officers decked out in riot gear were manning the gates, examining every vehicle that was fixing to drive in or out, often calling them to pull over into one of the nearby warehouses that I can only presume was being used as a makeshift detainment center at this time. The emblem of the three-headed bulldog stenciled across the first armored black van zooming past me had told me everything I needed to know. This was the work of Cerberus Security Systems, Icarus Industries's privately owned police force and militia, and the entirety of the presence of law enforcement that existed in Gibson Springs as well as anywhere else that Icarus had a legal stranglehold over.

I asked one of the rubberneckers what was going on, just to humor myself. He told me that there had apparently been some sort of dust-up between the Vultures and the Hell Patrol. Well, they were half right, but that was the most you could expect out of the journalistic integrity of the Icarus News Network. In fact, I could see their field crew van pulling into the gates not long after I had arrived. The Hell Patrol was a biker gang that had been a financial thorn in Icarus's side for quite some time, and so their media outlet made them a popular scapegoat for everything that was wrong with Gibson Springs, which, again, is only partially true. If anything, I would say that Icarus is what's wrong with Gibson Springs, and most of the world. But that is only partially true as well. And I don't deal in partial truths. To get the whole truth, I needed to find the parts that had been omitted, such as what was about to happen to whatever capsule that Miss Turing might have come from.



I shoved my way through the crowd up to one of the gates, where I presented the guards with a badge that Vykarius was able to procure for me. He and I didn't always see eye to eye on a few things, but his ability to get me fake IDs, for example, proved to be invaluable in times like these. As far as the Cerberus goons at the scene were concerned, I was their detective. And that meant that I had access to the crime scene, or so I had hoped.

Once I was through the checkpoint, I hurried on over to Warehouse 18, where it looked as if a forensics crew was just finishing up and leaving. There were no more grisly bodies to be found, probably because they were already on their way to the morgue, and the news crew was on site instead. I ducked out of sight to get to the back of the warehouse, in search of any boxes or cryostasis pods that Miss Turing could have crawled out of, but there was nothing. A large section of one of the shelves at the ground level was conspicuously empty.

"Excuse me," I began, holding out my badge to the nearest officer at this site as I approached. "I'm the detective on duty for this district. Can you tell me more about what went down here?"

"You don't look like the face of any detective I recognize." The officer remarked.

"I just came in from Winterton down south. The PSC specifically requested me to look into this matter." That was the story I was intending to stick with. The Poseidon Shipping Company was technically considered a neutral party that owned these docks, but Icarus Industries owned thirty percent of the company's stock, and a good chunk of their docks on the American side of the Pacific were right here in Gibson Springs to begin with. Another thirty percent of their stock was owned by Mitashi Technologies, since they did a lot of business together over in Japan. "You know how Poseidon can be."

The officer gave an understanding nod. "Right, well, we were alerted here when the Warehouse 18 stocking drones had failed to activate. It seems to be that this sector of the docks had its entire security system fail for nearly an hour. When we arrived, we found half a dozen bodies that are currently unidentified, but, off the record, I'm pretty sure they were associates of the Vultures syndicate. The only weapons signatures we could find on the scene are believed to belong to them."

Of course they would. Even if they could find any bullets or casings from me, I doubt that they could trace any of them back to me. Goldhart is one of a kind, and we go back a long way.

"Could you tell me about all of this empty space out here?" I asked him, pointing to the shelves. "Was it like this before?"

"No sir, there were a shipment of RVW brand Personal Cryostasis pods found at the scene that were not in the warehouse directory, and were thus confiscated. Three of which appeared to have been activated recently, but all of them were empty."

"Is that so?" I replied. "What are they gonna do with them?"

"Who knows? They could probably slap the Icarus label onto the pods and claim that they belonged to them all along, or probably just dispose of them if that isn't a profitable enough investment."

"They're not gonna hold them as evidence? I would like to at least give them a proper inspection before they're handed off to the suits."

"I can't promise ya anything, but I'm pretty sure I saw them carting off most of the pods to Warehouse 23, where they're rounding up the suspects."



And over on to Warehouse 23 it was, with me. Even if the number hadn't been painted on each side, the place was hard to miss due to all the flashing lights of the vehicles parked around it. As I had approached the entrance, some of the armed Cerberus officers were leading out a single file line of handcuffed suspects into one of the armored vans.

"Chief Williams, sir. With all due respect, I do not believe that there is probable cause to further detain these civilians!" A young dark man uniform had been arguing with a portly, pale chief that looked like he would much rather be at a desk right now. "These civilians had nothing to do with the incident we are investigating. I have interrogated some of them personally, and their alibis all seem to check out!"

"Don't tell me how to do my job, rookie!" The superior officer shot back. "These mouth breathin' commoners gotta be guilty for somethin' we can bust them on, and you know our district is way behind on its monthly arrest quota! You want us to make our bonuses, don't cha? My woman could use some new cosmetic implants!"

How could I have forgotten. Cerberus owned most if not all of the prisons in Gibson Springs and had a strong presence of them along the rest of the West Coast. With a good chunk of the US legal system in their pockets, pretty much anything that you could do, intentionally or otherwise, that might cut into Icarus's bottom line, could lead you to spending your next few years inside one of their prisons. They were paid based on how many inmates they could get, and it soon followed that the Cerberus police force was given more and more incentives to make as many arrests as possible, based on laws that their own corporate owner had passed. All in all, it was a mighty fine racket being run in the name of keeping peace and order. It was making the crime syndicates jealous.

The young man looked quite distraught as the chief walked away. "What ever happened to justice and due process?" He asked as he was left alone. What ever happened indeed.

"Give it up, kid. Just keep your head down and do what you're told. Don't think about it and get paid." I told the boy as I approached him. "Or you could always quit your job and live off the grid."

Officer Lionel Bright. That was the young man's name, according to his Cerberus uniform. His skin looked to be the exact shade of brown as another important man I used to know, except younger. Same profession, too. "Sir, I just graduated from the Cerberus Academy of Law Enforcement last December!" He told me. "No way I'm gonna throw away the opportunity of a lifetime to do some good in this world for a change! Cerberus Security Systems is all about protecting the innocent! Holding the evildoers accountable for their actions!" I had to suppress my own laughter at his enthusiasm. Yeah, kid, you just keep on believing that tired old rhetoric, I thought and resisted the urge to say to him. If you think you can ever hope to make a difference, you're in for a rude awakening.

"I'm the detective on duty here, Mr. Bright. I'm here about the cryostasis pods that were shipped into this warehouse."

"Oh, those things? They were just delivered over to the station along with the rest of the evidence we collected, sir."

"I need to have a look at that evidence."

"Do you, sir? Would you care to ride there with me? I was just needed back at the station myself. We haven't received any word from the office in more than an hour, need to see if everything is all right. Right this way, sir."

Easy enough, I suppose. Almost too easy. This rookie didn't seem to suspect a thing, which seemed to be working in my advantage. The two of us piled into one of the squad cars and he set a course for the nearest Cerberus police station in the area, letting the automatic piloting system built into every wheeled vehicle like this one take care of all the driving. It was funny, remembering the first time I saw a car that required manual driving every step of the way, back when I was a child. MitaTech was the first company to make a real mark on the world of self driving cars, and was able to push forward the legislation necessary to put in place the infrastructure needed for automated electric cars to be commercially viable. Just to make sure they would have their way, they had the same legislators impose heavier and heavier taxes on gasoline before eventually outlawing all manually driven cars entirely, citing the amount of deaths caused by auto accidents and the pollution footprint left by gas powered cars as justification in their legal crusade. There were now a number of laws against when and where you could engage a car's Manual Override functions, and even then they wanted to phase that out in favor of removing the steering wheel entirely. Only car races remained the last bastion of that bygone era, and even then the corporations were still troubled by all the illegal underground racing circuits run by the last of the gearheads and the autofanatics, such as the notorious Hell Patrol gang of bikers and racers.



I could see smoke rising into the overcast sky as we approached the station, and by the time we pulled into the parking lot, the two of us could easily see why. The station had clearly been on fire, and I say had been because it looked like a good portion of it had burned through already. We were only seeing the last few dying embers by the time we had arrived.

Lionel looked understandably shocked as he jumped out of the car as soon as he could, running over to what was left of the station in a panic and calling out for what was probably the names of his colleagues before he reached for his commlink to call for backup. The front doors were gone. We had to step over a pile of rubble just to get inside. It appeared as if something big had exploded in front of the lobby, which was not much better for wear either.

Lionel drew his officer's pistol and bravely made his way into the wreckage of the station. I did the same with my revolver. The front desk and all the office areas were more or less shredded to pieces by what appeared to be heavy machine gun fire. Rubble, shell casings, and bloody uniformed corpses were strewn all over the floor and desks. Tremendous holes had been melted into the walls, as if by something hot or corrosive, or both. It looked like a whole damn war had marched itself right through the entire station on an unstoppable rampage of death and destruction.

I saw Lionel rush on over to the holding jails at the back of the station. Expecting the worst, I had to follow after him. The jail guards had been completely perforated with bullet holes, and in a few cases, ground up into unrecognizable chunks from heavy fire. Holes had been blown in all of the jail cell doors and walls by what looked like more explosions. Every cell was empty. Judging by Lionel's reactions, they must have all been full the last time he was here.

The rookie couldn't take such a grisly sight before him any more, and I don't blame it for him either. He fell to his hands and knees, losing his lunch onto the floor as he looked very faint. I left him to his traumatic misery for a moment as I went to investigate the chief's office. My one electronic eye had picked up an AR signal coming from there while the rest of the station's electronic systems appeared to have been damaged beyond repair. It was a data stick, left right next to the chief's terminal, left conspicuously undamaged beside the chief's mangled body. I slotted the stick into the terminal and found it to contain a single audio file.

"What you are witnessing here is the long overdue punishment for the sins of the guilty." It was a deep, metallic growl that barked out of the audio file, like some nature of a mechanical predatory beast imitating human speech. "For far too long have the Cerberus and the Icarus preyed on the innocent. They have poisoned us with lies and false promises, exploiting our desire for safety and security for their own selfish gains. They are as the ravenous wolves in sheep's clothing, caring for nothing except their own appetites for power and corruption. They speak of peace while sending us away to war. They preach of salvation while locking us away as slaves. They ensnare us in a narrative of fear to remove our freedoms and liberties in favor of their control. Icarus Industries, Asclepius Medical, Mitashi Technologies, you will be made to answer for your crimes against humanity. No amount of money or power can protect you from the coming storm of judgement and revenge. The Angel Of Retribution shall soon be passing over your ill gotten ivory towers, meting out due justice for every atrocity you have committed, every bit of suffering your avarice has caused. For I am the Angel Of Retribution, a monster of your own creation, come back from the dead to repay you in kind. Everything that shall be brought upon you in the coming days is the price of your own selfish actions. You cannot escape Retribution."



With the keycard that Joseph had given her, Andria had used it on a scanning slot mechanism to open a door near the detective's office. Beyond it was a similarly sized room that was full of computer equipment the likes of which she had not seen before. There seemed to be at least a half dozen monitors, each one tuned to a different display, and what appeared to resemble a dentist's chair in the center of it all.

As she stepped into the room, the monitor closest to her suddenly changed to a display of Vykarius. This time his hair was more streaked back, he wore a jumpsuit that seemed to glow with neon green circuit patterns, and behind him was a kaleidoscopic display of geometric shapes with similarly highlighted edges. "There you are, Turing! Or should I just call you Andria? Andy, maybe? What took you so long? Anyway, Andy, this here is a VR machine. It'll give you the full sensory experience when you take yourself into the Grid! Just have a seat on that chair and strap yourself in!"

"Full ... sensory? Is this all safe?" Andria asked him hesitantly.

"No, of course not. This is all a clever ruse that will immediately kill you as soon as you sit down." Vyke replied in a very deadpan tone, before bursting into laughter. "Of course it's safe! As long as you follow all of the safety precautions ... well, most of them, anyways, and life is never full of guarantees. I learned that one the hard way. Not to worry, however! Just go ahead and strap all the equipment on. Everything else has already been prepared for you."

Andria still felt a bit reluctant about this, but there didn't seem to be much else that she could do in her current situation. She took a seat in the reclining chair and strapped on the gloves that were provided, along with a large headset that wrapped around her entire head. She felt something prick into the back of her skull as the machines around her all started to rev themselves up, and before she knew it, they were all gone. She was no longer sitting in that strange looking chair, she was instead standing in an ornately decorated parlor of a classically styled mansion, sunlight pouring into the large room from tall arched windows. She could feel the warmth of the sunlight on her skin, the scent of the exotic flowers potted near the windows, and hear a large pair of double mahogany doors swinging open, revealing a series of well-stacked tall bookshelves in the room beyond, perhaps a library or study.

Looking at the books themselves as she walked into the new room, she was expecting to find a series of classical novels or self-help books and biographies, judging by all of the hard-bound covers, but upon her closer inspection, the titles along the spines all sounded more like the titles of newspaper articles and subjects, and the biographies seemed to be named after social network usernames than actual people. She grabbed one particularly thick book that stood out to her, a black cover labelled "The Angel Of Retribution" in bold red lettering and began to leaf through it, feeling the crisp pages on her fingers. The book's interior seemed to consist of a collection of news reports from various sources as well as what appeared to be social network chat transcripts, of which Vykarius's name appeared a few times among the usernames...

"Browsing through my data folders already, I see?" A familiar voice suddenly called out from behind her, startling her into dropping the book. When it fell to the ground, it suddenly reappeared in its proper place on the shelf.

Vykarius himself was standing there when she turned around, dressed in the fancy robe that she had seen him in the first time. In fact, the entire place she was in looked just like the mansion she had glimpsed before. She looked down to find herself wearing a fancy Victorian style outfit, one which she could feel the heft of every fabric.

"Glad to see you finally decided to make it, Andy! Hope the Victorian Manor Grid Hub that I set up isn't too tacky for you. I can give you something a little more like what you're probably used to instead. Here's a theme that's pretty popular with the centenarians." He snaps his fingers a couple times and everything suddenly vanished around Andria, including Vykarius himself as she was left alone in an empty, formless void for a few moments before she had suddenly found herself standing in the living room of a twentieth century suburb, an idyllic looking suburban neighborhood on a sunny day visible through the windows. Vykarius had reappeared as well, this time dressed in a football jersey, blue jeans, and a baseball cap.

"Now this Hub theme is just totally radical, as the eldsters would say!" Vyke struck a goofy looking pose with both of his thumbs up for a moment. "I've got about a hundred or so more of these themes for any kind of taste. You can connect yourself to the Grid from a tropical island resort, a medieval castle, an ancient Japanese palace, or from aboard the starship of your favorite space opera! Well, regardless of your preferences in home decor, let's get ourselves onto the rest of the Grid, now shall we?" He walked over to the front door of the house they had been standing in and opened it up, stepping outside. Andria followed soon after, but instead of finding herself in the neighborhood that she could see outside, she was now standing in the middle of a vast plain of blue grid lines over a black, nondescript surface. Vykarius was now wearing the neon highlighted jumpsuit that she had seen before, as was herself, somehow. The sky had also been pitch black, making it indistinguishable from the ground had it not been for the blue grid.

A moment later, various shapes suddenly began to spring up from the ground. Many of them were textured with the same blue grid that they were coming from, while others resembled everyday objects, and appeared to be so accordingly. The space around them also suddenly started to fill out with people just like them, as well as people not like them at all, taking the forms of anything from cartoon characters to animated person-sized vehicles. Whenever Andria trained her eyes on any of these people in particular, she could see the letters spelling out a name start to appear above their head, only for these words to disappear as soon as she took her eyes off of them. Vykarius was, indeed, Vykarius. Complete with the unusual spelling. Not only that, but he was now wearing a black trench coat over his neon jumpsuit, along with a pair of sunglasses.

"Welcome to the Grid, Andy. Somewhere around a century ago, there used to be the World Wide Web. Over time, it grew and evolved in the available capabilities of its users interfacing with a virtual data library. Some time in the early 2010s, a social networking company bought out a virtual reality headset manufacturer. A decade later, this inspired a humble electronics firm from Japan, called Mitashi Technologies, to incorporate virtual and augmented reality features into what would be the first of a new line of Web browsers. They called it the Global Reality Integration Domain, or as we now call it, the GRID. This launch was so successful worldwide that two-dimensional browsers were phased out over the course of only a few decades. Mitashi Technologies became a household name, and that name is MitaTech."



Seeing as I was one of the first witnesses to the aftermath of the horrific incident at this particular Cerberus police station, along with Lionel, I couldn't simply walk away from this. I was now considered too involved for me to leave. Even if I wanted to, I knew that Cerberus wouldn't let me. I worked for them once before in the past, and while they don't remember me anymore, I know from experience that they like to tie up their loose ends by whatever means necessary.