NaNo14

---1---
	“Are you awake? … Can you hear me?”

	Claire awakened to this faint voice in her head, as well as of a display appearing before her eyes, her only beacon in the dark abyss around her. Her eyes were too glazed over to make out what the display was saying, but it had disappeared before all of her senses could come back. The voice in her head tried to come back, but this time it was drowned out by a loud mechanical whirring coming from right in front of her, a dimly-lit shelf slowly fading into her vision.

	She sat herself up to take in her surroundings, finding herself to have been laying in a steel coffin of sorts, its lid having just been removed by some automated process. There were several more of these coffins just like hers right next to her, all stacked up on a shelf some ten to fifteen feet high.

	“You’re awake! That’s good. How are you feeling?” The voice came back to her. It was like a voice you would imagine hearing in your mind, only it was not imagined, nor was it a familiar voice.

	“Where are you? WHO are you?” Claire would ask, turning her head this way and that in an attempt to discern the source of this voice.

	“No, no need to look for me, Miss. I’m not here. I’m calling in remotely, if you could call it that.” The voice told her. “You women always did like talking on the phone ever since it was invented…it makes sense that you would want to have a NeuroCom installed in your head, so you can talk wherever and whenever you want, with a thought.”

	“A NeuroCom? I’ve never had anything implanted in me!” Apprehension was starting to creep its way into Claire’s being. Then again, waking up in a steel box in an unfamiliar place with someone you couldn’t see talking to you would do that to a lot of people.

	“Think again, Lady. That box you were snoozing in was keeping an eye on your biometrics all the while, and it’s telling me that you’ve got quite a bit of work done inside that skull of yours.”

	Now that she thought about it, Claire did feel like she had a bit of a headache. The entire top half of her head felt rather sore, like something…significant had happened to it recently. “Where … where am I?”

	“Where does it look like you are? Probably in some sort of storage…place. A warehouse, maybe? Try getting up and looking around. Do you feel well enough to walk?”

	She carefully slid herself out of the box she had been sitting in and placed her legs over the edge of the shelf, feeling solid ground beneath them. She had not been placed very high up from the floor, thankfully. She stood up, trying to get her bearings by stepping away from the shelf she just woke up in.

	“Post-stasis sickness will wear off pretty quickly. Just walk it off…but quietly.” The voice told her. “We may not be alone in here, after all.”

	Claire looked over to the other containment units on the shelf, all of them seeming to indicate that they were occupied, but she had no way of telling who any of the occupants actually were. “Are you going to wake up the others, then?”

	“No…not if you can make it, at least. It would make things a bit more complicated than I would like them to be right now.”

	“I would say that you are making things more complicated by not telling me what’s going on. Do you have anything to do with this? Did you put me in here?”

	“No…quite the contrary, actually. You see…I’m planning to get you out of here.”

	“And why should I believe that you are telling the truth?”

	“Well…stay with me and you will find out for sure.” The voice assured her. “Or you can take your chances with the freaks that just got in here as well. Since I’m not actually in the warehouse, I’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ll wake up one of those other popsicles if you don’t make it.”

	Surely enough, Claire had gotten the sudden feeling that she was not alone. If she held her breath and listened carefully, she could hear faint footsteps somewhere off in the distance. This, and her own heartbeat.

	“Say, could you look up and to your left a little ways? I need for you to get a good look at one of the security cameras in here.” The voice chimed back in. “I know the place is a little dark, but maybe we can use this to our advantage.”

	“You can see what I can see?” Claire asked. “Did they give me a pair of artificial eyes too now?”

	“No, your eyes seem to be one hundred percent organic as far as I can tell. If they weren’t vatgrown, they are still the ones you were born with, I would assume. But yes, I can still see through them. Your NeuroCom interface is quite intricate, I’ve noticed. That’s a big reason why I woke you up in the first place.”

	“Then you will definitely have to tell me the other reasons pretty soon.” Claire replied as she finally spotted a security camera pivoting back and forth on its perch, illuminating the darkness with a tiny red light to indicate it was operational.

	“Yeah, I will be sure to let you know what you need to know, as soon as we are no longer in trouble.” The voice paused after this for a moment, before a display window suddenly popped up in her vision. “Ain’t augmented reality wonderful? Even your natural eyes can see them thanks to the work done to your gray matter!” The voice exclaimed. The display showed a bird’s eye view of this particular row of the warehouse, no doubt the camera’s live feed; she could even see herself on it. Her dark, nearly jet-black hair was a bit of a mess, but she was still glad to even have a full head of hair after apparently having gotten some work done on her brain. The warehouse appeared to be quite spacious, with neatly arranged rows of steel shelves as far as the eye could see. Although it was kind of hard to see without many of the lights turned on. If there was any daylight left, the warehouse didn’t seem to be letting in any of it at all. It was also a wonder that any of the lights in the warehouse were even turned on, as the place appeared to be unstaffed at the time. Unstaffed, except for a few figures wandering up and down the aisles nearby…

	Claire felt her heart sink into her chest as she realized she wasn’t alone in here. But with her disembodied benefactor having patched her into the camera feed, she had another vantage point of these intruders. She felt quite lost, but she had gotten the gut feeling that she didn’t want to ask these particular folks for directions.

	The camera feed in her vision was replaced by a different one from another angle. Whoever had been talking to her seemed to be doing this. It was taking control of the cameras for her. Just as that voice claimed to have been looking through her eyes, so was she now looking through a different pair of eyes, or rather lens of a camera as it zoomed in on a pair of barely-lit figures in the next aisle over as they approached each other and began to talk.

	Claire quietly tiptoed over towards these two people, leaving a steel shelf stacked with metal boxes between them as she tried to listen in on the conversation through them.
	“Any of your boys found anythin’ yet?” The first voice she could hear was quite coarse. Like a gravel pit that had been smoking a roll of sandpaper.
	“There has been nothing found yet. Give us a little more time. There is quite much to go through, after all.” The second speaker did not sound very…human. It sounded more like some kind of wild animal that was imitating human speech.
	“Yeh, well ya hairy freaks had betta get us the goods real frakkin’ soon! Dey offered us a whole lotta moola if we got this job dun right, an’ more importantly dun on time!” The first speaker replied.
	“Then I hope, for the sake of all of us, that they have directed us to the right place, because I am beginning to question the directions we were given based on our findings thus far.” As the second one was saying this, Claire had decided that it was better to try to sneak away. She was considering her exit strategies, trying to find a doorway out. She thought long and hard about the information that the camera feeds had given her so far, and deduced the location of where another camera had to have been, wishing she could see through its lens as well. To her surprise, another display appeared within her augmented vision, showcasing the camera feed that she was looking for.

	“Can you read my mind? How did you know that that’s the feed I was wanting to see?” Claire whispered, hoping that the voice on the other end was still listening.

	“What? No, I can’t read your thoughts. Your NeuroCom interface doesn’t quite work that way!” Came the reply. “You must have manually switched the display yourself, or hacked into that camera somehow or something…how did you do it?”

	“You tell me. I just thought about it hard enough and…it just happened.”

	“Is that so, Miss? Well, I’ll be. You really seem to be gifted at this sort of thing, it would seem. Or at least, whatever was put in your head could be considered a gift, whether you wanted it or not.”

	The new display had given her a view of what had to have been the central aisle of the warehouse, down at one end had to be an exit. She made her way down the aisle she was in until she found herself in that center, and began to bolt towards the edge of the warehouse.

	Claire had started running out of desperation to be rid of this dark and unfamiliar place. She didn’t want to linger here any longer than she needed to, but had gotten lost in this feeling and forgotten too late to take a more silent exit. From one of the other aisles, a massive figure jumped out in front of her, blocking her way out. It was a man with a pair of beady yellow eyes that appeared to be reflecting what little light was in the warehouse, a pair of eyes that looked more animal than human.

	The gruff looking man flashed her a menacing grin, his teeth not quite human looking either, appearing more like those of a predatory beast. With this grin the only warning, he lunged out towards Claire with hands that looked more like sharp, deadly claws in the dim light. She dodged this by ducking into one of the adjacent aisles, breaking into a frenzied sprint in an attempt to evade her assailant. If the desire to escape the warehouse wasn’t enough, this attempted assault had gotten her adrenaline going.

	Her attacker let out a threatening growl, seemingly to alert his companions. Her cover had to have been blown by now, she thought. She didn’t know if she was what they were after, but she wasn’t going to let them have it if this was the case. Claire made sure to round a corner in an attempt to lose her pursuer, but all that this move would accomplish, as she quickly found out, was running straight into the barrel of a shotgun. A shotgun held by a pudgy, denim-clad man sporting a pink mohawk and a questionable taste in facial piercings. Certainly not the type one could expect to reason with. Especially with the way that he was pointing the gun at her with his artificial arm.

	“Well what we got here? Dis what da boss iz lookin’ fer? Nah, yeh can’t be. We ain’t never lucky nuff ta be scorin’ ourselves sum pretty ladies in dis line a’ work!” He said with a smirk that worried Claire almost as much as the shotgun pointed at her.

	“You can say that again, you freak!” The voice in Claire’s head commented, though she was sure that only she could hear it. It didn’t sound too worried that she could be moments away from a messy end, but then again, she was really the only one in danger here, as far as she could tell.

	“Whadda cryin’ shame. You ain’t s’posed ta be here, an’ da boss made it pretty dang clear what I gotta do when we run inta people who might get in our way.” The mohawked man pulled the pump of his shotgun with his cybernetic arm. “Dat’s too bad, as I woulda liked ta have sum fun wit’ cha othawise.”

	In that moment when a person is staring down into the face of a certain demise, it is said that their entire life can flash before their eyes. Claire didn’t remember the most recent few weeks of her life, but time did seem to slow down for her in this moment, as though time itself was relative, just like Einstein had told us. She thought about the man that was about to kill her, about his poor taste in fashion, about the massive shotgun he held in his augmented arm, about the metallic arm itself, its intricate workings and its connection to his nerve endings that allowed it to move. She wished she could move it herself, to point that thing away from her.

	And just as if her wishes were heard, the punk’s cyberarm began to jerk itself spastically, as if malfunctioning, just before he could pull that trigger. He ended up dropping the shotgun to the floor, where Claire reacted by kicking it away, sending the firearm sliding away underneath one of the steel shelves, just out of reach. She further made use of this opportunity by running past the man as he was unable to get control of his artificial appendage.

	Claire’s path to freedom still seemed to be blocked by the others looking for her. She would need to find something that would get them out of the way, some kind of intervention…

	“Are you still there, Miss?” The voice in her head suddenly piped up. “I think we’ve got company! Well, even more company! Someone must have tipped them off!”

	That was when the massive double doors to the front of the warehouse suddenly opened themselves up, letting a bit of moonlight into its dusty interior, as well as a lot of flashing siren lights.

	“This is the Cerberus Security Systems police force! Everyone in here is under arrest!” A commanding voice declared over a loudspeaker system. “Drop your weapons and lay down on the floor or there will be lethal consequences! This is your only warning! All violators will be shot!”

	An entire mobile police unit was parked right in front of the entrance, a squad of five decked out in riot gear, and three hovering police drones lighting up the place with the characteristic red and blue police lights. These dome-topped robots would fly over the tall shelves of the warehouse space, seeking out their targets with the cameras build into their undersides, shining spotlights on the armed men as a synthetic voice demanded their surrender. Meanwhile, the five troopers would be seen splitting up to find the perpetrators based on the information the drones gathered and make the arrests.

	A gunshot rang out into the air, followed by one of the drones losing its altitude and crashing into one of the shelves. These thugs were not about to give up on their heist just because some uniformed men and remote-controlled eyes in the sky told them to. The collision with the shelf was such that it wobbled violently, spilling its contents onto the floor with a series of loud crashes. This would only prove to be the prelude to the many gunshots under this particular roof that would follow.

	“Looks like this commotion is going to make our escape a lot more complicated!” Claire heard over her receiver. “Then again, we might be able to spin this to our advantage.” There were gunshots coming from as close by as the next aisle over, a destructive symphony of the police’s rifle fire and the shotgun blasts of their enemy. But between those two, she could hear a third type of gunshot that sounded a bit different from the other two, this one almost sounding like a cannon.

	She peered around the corner of one aisle to see two thugs staring down an officer with a more distinct, decorated uniform than the others; presumably the squad’s leader. In his right hand he clutched a massive handgun that one might use to hunt large animals, if you had to hunt with a pistol for some reason. As one of the thugs raised his weapon, the sergeant snapped up his firearm in one swift motion before letting his arm jerk back slightly when this hand cannon went off, splattering most of his target’s chest cavity across the area. He crashed to the floor with a loud thud, and the sergeant proceeded to let the other guy meet a similar fate when he turned his back to flee.

	“That guy’s not human!” Claire’s friend exclaimed. “He’s got to have quite an arm on him to be able to shoot a gun that big one-handed!”

	“You wanna ask him how he does it?” Claire replied. “I’d rather not find out. Is there another way out of here?”

	“Huh? Oh, sure! There is a back exit over to your right! Get over there before the police surround it too!” Claire was already on her way over before the speaker had finished, ducking out of the way of the remaining two drones flying overhead, using the aisle shelves as cover. She waited for the sergeant to gun down another beast-eyed freak in her way, then stepped over his splattered remains after he had left, shoving open the exit door with her shoulder and not looking back.

	A light rainfall had been trickling down from an overcast night sky, the first sky that Claire had seen since she woke up. From the warehouse she had fled from, row after row of identical looking ones seemed to stretch out beyond it, as far as the eye could see. Behind her, half-shrouded by the darkness of night, stood the colossal cargo freighters parked at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, bearing the familiar mark of the Poseidon Shipping Company. She had glanced behind her to take note of this for just long enough to get an idea of her surroundings, and continued to run off into the night, hoping that she wasn’t being followed any longer.

	“I think we lost them! Or at least, I hope we did!” The voice in her head came in, ecstatic. “We’re not out of trouble yet, but I suppose I do owe you an explanation for all of this.”

	“Yes, I concur.” Claire replied. “I want you to tell me who you are, where I am, and how I got here. Or so help me I’ll figure out how to hang up this thing.”

	“Well, I can tell you for sure that you’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy! No, judging by your surroundings, I would say that you are near the docks by Gibson Springs.”

	“Gibson Springs?” Claire cut in. That was a little bit further away from home than she would have liked to be, but, thankfully, good old Winterton would still be no more than a bus ride or two away.

	“That’s what I said, wasn’t it? It’s the only city in the West Coast Sprawl that touches the Pacific Ocean, so it was only a matter of simple deduction. That, and the mark of Icarus is everywhere.”

	Claire stared off into the urban skyline in front of her. At least half of the city had been brightly lit up by the orangeish-red neon glow that had been a longstanding trademark of the various companies that fell under the corporate umbrella of Icarus Industries, one of the largest corporate entities on the planet, and the whole of Gibson Springs was considered to be part of its turf.

	“So how was it that I ended up in a box in a warehouse in the docks in Gibson Springs?” She would ask the voice on the other end.

	“I am not entirely sure of that myself, but the nature of such a situation would seem to indicate that someone was wanting to ship you and some other human popsicles off across the Pacific to get some more work done overseas, and none of you had been willing to come along quietly. If you didn’t have a NeuroCom installed in your brainpan before, you do have one in you now…and probably some other things that even I am not entirely sure of.”

	“What kinds of other things?”

	“Well, you seemed to be able to interface with a lot of different devices even more easily than I could, as if your mind had been turned into some kind of universal remote. What’s up with that? I’d kill to have one of those things myself. Not you, though. You’re cool in my book.”

	“And speaking of your book, just who are you, and why are you contacting me in the first place? What do you want from me?”

	“Me? Well, that’s a bit of a long story. I can’t say I really have all the answers myself, but it goes something like this: I used to be a hacker, they called me Cipher. Maybe you’ve heard about me and my exploits if you hang out around the right circles on the ‘Net. I had a NeuroCom kind of like you do, though I had to interface with electronics the old fashioned way, by hacking them. I was in the middle of a job one day to breach a particular security system, using my NeuroCom to upload myself into the ‘Net so that I could work at the speed of thought, speed is everything you see, and, well, something went wrong.”

	“I doubt you would have contacted a complete stranger in a strange predicament in the first place if everything had gone right.” Claire commented.

	“Exactly! You catch on pretty quick! That’s one of the reasons I like you. Well anyways, I suddenly found myself unable to return to meatspace, to my flesh and blood self. My physical body been disconnected somehow! I never thought such a thing would be possible. Disconnecting your NeuroCom from the ‘Net would dump you back into your own body normally, it would feel like waking up from a dream, maybe feel very disorienting for a bit. But the problem for me in this case, is that I can’t seem to wake up from this nightmare! It’s as if someone took my body away while somehow still leaving my mind inside the ‘Net! My body is probably a vegetable right now, if it’s even still alive. So I’m stuck here in cyberspace like a ghost, trying to find someone to help me get my body back.

	“So why did you turn to me, of all people you could have gotten in contact with?”

	“I am not at liberty to say, but let’s just say that this gift you have has a lot to do with it. I think you may be the key to what I need.”

	“You sound quite sure of that. I, on the other hand, am not sure how I got here. I can’t even remember the past few weeks, or however long it’s been. All I know is that I have people that must be worried sick about me.”

	“And those people might be in danger. Whoever did this to you is going to find out about your escape sooner or later. They’ll probably come after you. You won’t be safe. So I would like to take this opportunity to propose a deal: since I helped you out of that warehouse, I would think you would owe me a favor in return, yes?”

	“I’ll think about it.”

	“Yes, you go ahead and think about just that! I will be contacting you again soon, because I think you may be just what I need to get myself back in one piece. I will need your help, and from the looks of things, you will be needing mine again.”

	The voice on the other end went silent. She had gotten the impression that the call had ended as she made her way towards the streets of Gibson Springs. A few moments later, however, she got another call from a familiar voice.

	“Oh, wait, wait a minute! What was your name again?”

	“It’s Claire. Nice to meet you, Cipher.”

	“Nice to meet you too, Claire! I look forward to working with you again very soon! Very soon indeed…” These words faded out in Claire’s mind as the West Coast Sprawl stood out before her, a concrete jungle full of all the danger and excitement one could expect to find in the tail end of the 21st century.

---2---
While the light trickle of rain came down from the forsaken heavens above, almost no one on the streets of Gibson Springs seemed to bother to bring an umbrella with them. Then again, that sort of accessory had been going out of style with the advent of new clothing technologies. Waterproof clothing and equipment tended to be in fashion due to the amount of rainfall the city was known to get, especially around this time of year.

Claire, meanwhile, had been doing her best to try to blend in with the crowd on the streets that evening. She had been placed in a strange sort of prisoner’s uniform when she woke up, so she was quick to duck into the nearest clothing store she could find to change into an adjustable outfit, one with an appearance that could be changed with the press of a button. For Claire, however, she quickly found out that she was able to control the outfit’s settings with a thought, no doubt due to the nonstandard model of NeuroCom she had found herself with. She would make sure to keep the old outfit with her, as it was the only piece of evidence that might point her to whoever did this to her.

She continued along down through the thankfully not so busy streets, lit up by sleek streetlights and orangish-red neon signs. Paying only a token amount of attention into where she was walking, she spent most of her concentration in figuring out her new mentally-operated interface. Augmented reality displays would pop up before her eyes, holding information for her to sift through. The interface seemed not too dissimilar from a standard model of a personal mobile device that was capable of AR projection, though most people had to wear special glasses or goggles in order to see the augmented reality content if they didn’t want to get a pair of prosthetic eyes. Claire’s software came equipped with a minimal array of applications that one would expect to find on a personal mobile: clocks, calendars, notebooks, email, GPS, camera recording, audio and video conferencing, those sorts of things. Luckily, her NeuroCom had functional access to the ‘Net as well, as had been evidenced by the individual that called himself Cipher, and the simple fact that every electronic gadget in this day and age had a built-in browser if it had a UI as well. She would find out that her particular NeuroCom had an entire exabyte of memory available for it, pretty decent for a mobile device, especially since the storage capacities of the previous few generations of NeuroComs had only been measured in petabytes. With this much space, and great reception out in downtown Gibson Springs, she could easily download as much additional software from the ‘Net as she needed to.

Her cursory examination of this AR interface was suddenly interrupted when an electronic voice spoke to her. “GREETINGS, CITIZEN! CAN I INTEREST YOU IN ONE OF MY SERVICES AND WARES AVAILABLE THIS FINE EVENING?” It was one of the many service robots that roamed the streets of downtown Gibson Springs. Icarus Industries prided itself on being the world’s foremost leader in robotics, and liked to display its prowess by populating cities like this one with semi autonomous robots to help the city by providing menial labor and other services that were cheaper to do than hiring human employees. It was little wonder that the nation’s unemployment rate was on the rise.
This particular robot resembled a rectangular garbage can on wheels, on each side of it a video screen, as well as a holographic projector. Every one of its displays was showcasing a different product for sale by Icarus Industries, or a subsidiary thereof. Drone accessories, cybernetic implants, street-legal weapons and firearms for self-defense, the robot didn’t actually carry any of these things on its person, that would’ve made it too easy a target for thieves. Instead, it would allow customers to set up a pickup or delivery location for the goods and services offered and charge the amount due to their digital bank account.

“No thank you, I am just looking for the bus stop.” Claire would reply to the robot.

“THE NEAREST BUS STOP IS IN THIS LOCATION.” One of the bot’s video displays changed to a map of the surrounding area with a marker on a particular point. “THE NEXT BUS WILL ARRIVE AT THIS LOCATION IN THIRTEEN MINUTES AND THIRTY-SEVEN SECONDS. WOULD YOU LIKE TO COMPLETE AN OFFER FOR A DISCOUNTED BUS PASS?”

Claire shook her head. “That will be all. Good evening.”

“WAIT! YOU ARE THE CITIZEN IDENTIFIED AS CLAIRE, CORRECT? I AM PROGRAMMED TO INFORM YOU THAT THERE IS A GIFT WAITING FOR YOU AT A DRONE STORE LOCATED HERE.” The map display highlighted another nearby point. “THIS GIFT HAS ARRIVED COURTESY OF A GENEROUS USER KNOWN AS ‘CIPHER’. ENJOY YOUR GIFT, AND HAVE A NICE EVENING.”

So this Cipher character wasn’t just her imagination, Claire had thought to herself. Assuming this “gift” was something she could safely take with her, she would have plenty of time to pick up whatever it was and make the next bus ride to Winterton. There was a family of a sort that was waiting for her there. According to the calendar in her NeuroCom, it had been a few weeks since she could last remember what day it was. They were definitely worried about her. She would have to give them a call with the video conferencing application to let them know that she was all right. At least, she hoped she was.

With a few mental commands, she rung up the number on her videophone application that mattered the most to her while on her way to the drone shop, then proceeded to wait for a few incredibly anxious moments for a response. Soon enough, the face of a young blond-haired boy would appear on an AR screen before her, staring quizzically back at her.

“Hello? Who is this? You’re not a stranger, are you? Mister Huxley told me not to talk to strangers!” He said matter-of-factly. Claire did not recognize him either, yet she looked a bit relieved.

“Hi, you must be new! What’s your name?” She replied to the boy. “Can you tell Mister Huxley that he has a caller waiting for him?”

The boy walked away from the screen, and in a few moments he came back with a man wearing a heavy apron and a welding mask. He pulled off the mask to reveal a light brown face chiseled and scarred with years of experience, but also the gentlest eyes that could calm and assure just about anyone. “Well, if it isn’t Mama Claire!” He exclaimed, his stony facial features breaking into a wide grin as he let out a relieved laugh. “You’ve been missing for weeks now! I’ve had to take care of the kids and the shop by myself since you were gone! We figured you were in a bad way, and wondered if you would ever come back!”

“Yeah, me too. It’s good to see you again too, Huxley.” Claire said with a warm smile. “I’m going to try to be back before you know it. Who’s the new kid, by the way?”

“Oh, you mean little Tommy?” Huxley looked over his shoulder, presumably towards the boy in question, who had wandered off the screen again. “We found him off by himself in one of the run-down apartments of southwest Winterton. Poor kid lost his folks when they were caught in the crossfire of a gang war.”

“That seems to be happening more and more often.” Claire added, her smile quickly fading into a frown. “He’s going to be all right now, right?”

“Well, it was a good thing that we found him when we did! Tommy looked like a skeleton when we first found him. I don’t think he’d have lasted another week in the condition we found him in. And speaking of which…what kind of condition have you been in these past few weeks yourself, Claire?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing, Huxley. Truth be told, I can’t remember what happened to me either. I woke up today in a cryo-stasis unit alongside a dozen others that were about to be shipped across the Pacific. What was I doing the last time you saw me?”

“You told me you were going out with Milly to scavenge for more spare parts and scrap that we might be able to salvage and sell for our little shop, help keep our hungry mouths fed. Where is Milly, by the way?”

“She’s not with you?”

“We haven’t seen her since you left! Lord knows we turned half of Winterton inside-out looking for you two! If milk cartons still existed, I’d have paid good money to have your faces on all of them!”

Claire felt her heart sink into the pit of her gut. “This is all my fault…” She thought aloud. “I think having my face everywhere would only put the rest of us in danger. I’m taking the bus back now, and when I get there, I am going to tell you everything that happened that I can remember, and see if we have any leads.”

Huxley looked quite concerned, but he forced a smile and gave her an affirming nod. “Don’t you worry one bit, Claire. I’m sure sweet little Milly is safe and sound, wherever she is, and we’ll get her back in one piece! You take care, now! The children and I will throw a big welcome-back party for you!”

The call ended with mixed emotions for Claire. All she wanted to do now was think about this mysterious gift she had gotten to stop herself from ruminating about Milly. She headed straight into the drone store, where the season’s latest remote controlled and autonomous personal use drones were on display on the show floor. She ignored these, pushing towards one of the service desks where a cashier robot was waiting. She provided the redemption code that the robot outside had given her, and a small spherical drone the size of a baseball suddenly floated out from one of the back rooms.

It floated up to her eye level and emitted a beam of light, scanning her facial features with it’s own eye-like face. “USER HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY REGISTERED AS CLAIRE CION.” It’s synthetic voice announced. “CONGRATULATIONS ON THE ACQUISITION OF YOUR NEW ASIMOV ROBOTICS PERSONAL SURVEILLANCE ASSISTANT DRONE. FOR YOUR SAFETY, THE FOLLOWING OPERATIONAL PROCEDURES ARE RECOMMENDED-ED-ED-REC-REC-RECOMM-” The voice stuttered as the drone’s hovering altitude wobbled erratically, its chrome-plated frame emitting a small shower of sparks before it suddenly shut itself down, bouncing and rolling across the floor as it succumbed to gravity.

A moment later, the drone suddenly whirred back to life and floated back up towards Claire’s face. This time it would speak to her with a more familiar voice.

“Sorry about that. This drone’s a bit of an older model. It’s got some weird kinks to its hardware and software, but that just made it easier to hack externally!” It was Cipher, without a doubt.

“So you’re going to stalk me with this hovering drone now, is that it?” Claire said, rolling her eyes as she turned to walk out of the store, ignoring the puzzled looks of the other customers.

“It’s handy to have an extra pair of eyes.” Cipher said as the drone floated just behind Claire on her way outside to the bus stop. “Plus, I needed a new body to control, and I didn’t feel comfortable hijacking one of those gynoid sexbots over in the red light district. Don’t wanna think about what’s been done to them, you know? Besides, I didn’t want to overshadow your own attractiveness.”

“Should I feel complimented or insulted by being compared to one of those things?” Claire remarked.

“Feel however you want to feel, sweetheart. Unlike the government, the media, and corporate powers controlling them, I don’t try to tell people how they should feel about a thing. Feel offended if you want to, but don’t be trying to suppress other people’s freedom of expression if you do feel that way.”

“The world might not be in such a sorry state if more people thought like that.” Claire added. “So what is it that you’ve contacted me again for?”

“It is of my understanding that you are looking for a lost little girl named Milly, right? A little bird told me.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “So I suppose you were listening in on everything through the hardware they put in my head, huh? Yes, Huxley and I run an orphanage down in Winterton. We rescue and take care of children with missing or dead parents. Huxley also manages a used electronics store to help pay for it. I’m only telling you this because you’re one of the few people that hasn’t tried to kill me today. Assuming you’re a real person and not an artificial intelligence, that is.”

“Artificial? Me?” Cipher let out an amused chuckle. “I haven’t met a single AI that could feasibly pass itself off as human. I don’t know if they ever will.”

“Perhaps you have already met an AI over the ‘Net that you have mistaken for a human? How would you know for sure?” Claire suggested.

“I doubt I’ve ever been an involuntary participant in a Turing test. But I assure you, I’m as flesh and blood as you are. Or at least I was. I don’t know how I’m able to survive on the ‘Net without a body. I have all my memories with me…but what if the real me is dead, and I’m just a program running off the data of my collected memories? I’d rather not think about that. I’d rather think about getting back into the physical world, one way or another.”

“And I would rather think about getting back to Huxley and the children. I can sympathize with your plight, Cipher, but right now I am much more concerned with finding Milly than helping you out right now. I’m sure you can understand.”

“Oh, I do understand you completely, Claire. And let me ask you one thing…how did you end up with little Milly in your care in the first place? What happened to her parents?”

“They left her. Or rather, they seem to have been taken, kidnapped by someone or something, why?” Claire looked to the drone with an air of concern.

“Well, since I have been banished to the ‘Net, I have had pretty much all the time in the world to research the goings-on around the West Coast Sprawl. One of the recent trends in the news blogs has been a mass string of disappearances in all four cities, and probably in the New Babylon arcology too if we could ever find out what was going on in there. Some people say that it’s a government conspiracy, some people say that it’s aliens. People say all sorts of things, really. We could speculate about it all night long.”

“And you think that those disappearances have something to do with Milly and her parents?” As Claire asked this, a sleek red and black bus pulled up at the stop in front of her. She grabbed the drone in her hand, studied the AR display being projected from the side of the bus to see its routes and destinations, and stepped on board when the door swung open. She used a mental command to pay the automated robotic bus driver her fare, and headed on down the aisle to the seats. Most of them were empty at this time of night, and she thought she had picked an empty seat when she went to sit down at first, but she had failed to notice that she had sat down next to a little girl with strawberry-blond pigtails.

“Isn’t it a little unsafe for you to be out alone this late?” Claire asked the little girl. “Where are your parents?”

“Oh, I’m not really a little girl.” She responded with a smile. “I only chose to be one today. I can be whatever I want to be, and this is what I felt like being today.”

“What, are you one of those frequent switchers from Summer Heights? That’s over to the north. This bus is headed south right now, to Winterton.”

“I know that, silly!” The girl giggled, the innocence in her voice and demeanor seeming to be deceptive. “I was an old man yesterday, and a dog the day before that. Hey, I wonder what I should be tomorrow? Winterton is full of street gangs, right? Maybe I could look like one of them!”

As biotechnology saw many new developments and breakthroughs throughout the 21st century, new fashion trends developed to take full advantage of them. Cosmetic surgery had given way to full body transplants. Prosthetic limbs had been advancing to the point where entirely prosthetic bodies were available to some. It was only a matter of time that something like this would be possible after the first brain transplants had been successful. People could change their gender, ethnicity, age, and so much more in the way of physiological attributes as easily as they could change clothes, yet people still found differences to discriminate against others for. As the costs of prosthetic bodies were prohibitive at first, the uses of these were limited to wealthy old barons that would buy their way to immortality, and for rich people with questionable hobbies. There had been rumors of a fringe group of people that could afford to change bodies this frequently, but Claire didn’t think that she would actually meet one until now. And even then, this little girl could have been only playing make believe this whole time.

“Yeah, well, you take care of yourself, little girl. I wouldn’t want to be responsible if anything were to happen to you.” Claire replied, rolling her eyes as she rolled back in her seat. “And if you need a place to stay while you’re in Winterton, look for Huxley’s Secondhand Electronics. Tell him that Claire sent you.”

---3---
Warehouse D6 was in quite a messy state after the last shot had been fired. The investigation team had been called to the scene after Sgt. Joseph Stone and his squad had finished clearing out the area of intruders, courtesy of an anonymous tip. Joseph was standing out by the squad cars, sending out an encrypted message back to headquarters.

“Sergeant Stone here with the initial situation report. Our unit responded to a tip that suggested suspicious gang activity going down in Warehouse D6 of the Poseidon Shipping Company docks. Confiscated surveillance camera feed shows that eight unauthorized personnel were on the premises at the time of our arrival. Seven of these perpetrators were neutralized for resisting arrest, one is MIA. The bodies of the seven perps all bear the markings of the BludWulf crime syndicate. No current information on the lone escapee. Further investigation is currently under way. A full report is soon to follow.”

With this done, Joseph signed off the digital message and returned to the warehouse to meet up with the investigation team, making sure that his hand cannon was properly holstered. It had been used to put down at least two members of the BludWulf gang during the ensuing shootout, and throughout his career it had brought many more criminals to justice, or at least that was what he wanted to believe he was serving. Standing precisely at six feet in stature, being in peak physical condition for apprehending dangerous lawbreakers throughout the Sprawl, Joseph Stone had proved himself to be a valuable asset to Cerberus Security Systems, a law enforcement organization that was privately owned by Icarus Industries. They were the dominating authority in Gibson Springs, though they would occasionally extend their reach out to the other three cities in the West Coast Sprawl whenever it served their interests.

Joseph was also known to be a crack shot with his signature sidearm, a feat he accomplished with the help of his cybernetic arm and eye. Since he had lost his right arm and right eye in a sting operation gone bad a few years back, he had them replaced with the best bionic hardware that Icarus Industries had to offer. His arm was made to blend in with the rest of his body as much as possible, looking like an organic arm to the casual observer, but a closer inspection of its appearance and movements would reveal its true artificial nature through the Uncanny Valley effect. While the stopping power of his hand cannon would dislocate the shoulder of any lesser officer, Joseph’s cyberarm would barely flinch when he fired it in that hand and that hand only. His new arm’s ability to hold itself steady was combined with the enhanced vision provided by his electronic right eye to line up a better shot. Being linked up to a NeuroCom interface, he could view augmented reality objects and scope out a target from miles away in any kind of light or weather, not to mention record a video feed to provide as evidence on the job. Joseph alone was not special in this, however. More and more Cerberus officers were getting themselves chromed out with prosthetics like his every day. Those that did so would often find themselves on the fast track to a promotion, as their new implants were still considered property of Icarus Industries.

The sergeant stepped around all the clutter of the fallen cargo and blood stains that now peppered the warehouse, his attention being directed to one particular aisle. Here, he found a dozen or so cryo-stasis pods in use, one of which was opened and empty. Some of the investigation team had gathered around it, to which he called out to them.

“What happened here? Is this part of the scene?” Joseph inquired.

One of the investigators looked up to speak to him. “The data logs left in this stasis unit indicate that it was last activated shortly before you had arrived. The BludWulf gang may have escaped with its contents.”

“That can’t be right.” The sergeant replied. “There were at least seven of them on the scene, and all of them were neutralized, some by me personally. Although there was that one escapee…”

“The escapee may have fled with the contents of the stasis unit.”

“Or perhaps the escapee IS its contents! Do you know how the pod was activated?”

“The records suggest that the pod’s thawing protocols were triggered by an external signal.”

“A hacker, perhaps? But…how? Is there any way to determine the source?”

“We are currently looking into the matter as we speak.”

“What’s in these pods, anyway? Are there people in here?” Joseph stepped towards one of the other stasis pods in an attempt to peer into its window. One of the scientists stood up and barred his way.

“That information is classified, Sergeant Stone. Your assignment is to locate the whereabouts of the eighth intruder. All of the evidence we have gathered has indicated that they have vacated the premises, so I strongly suggest you do the same. The only other information that I am permitted to disclose to you is this.” The scientist thumbed a few buttons on his mobile datapad, and Joseph received a digital document for him to view on his cybereye’s AR display. It was a picture of a young, dark-haired woman accompanied by a table of technical information of biometric data gathered from the stasis pod.

“This is the person that was inside the pod, isn’t it?” Joseph said, feeling his suspicions to be confirmed. “So I am to believe that she simply woke up right here and escaped a secure warehouse while a crackdown was in progress. Do I have that right, Dr. Hartnell?”

“I am not in the market for speculations.” Hartnell replied. “You have your orders, and I have mine. Yours are to retrieve this female subject. If I am to speculate on anything, it would be that you are wasting your time here. My team and I will take it from here. Am I clear, Sergeant Stone?”

Joseph gave a reluctant nod, tightening the hand of his prosthetic arm into a balled fist. “Transparently so.”


Without saying another word, the sergeant left the scene of a shootout that he was a participant of and returned to a waiting squad car, having received new orders on his NeuroCom. He punched in the coordinates of his next destination into the vehicle's dashboard, and the machine roared to life and began to drive itself there with Joseph and his select crew as its passengers. Every vehicle in the West Coast Sprawl, except perhaps Winterton, had self-driving capabilities. In fact, many legislators throughout the United States were trying to pass laws banning manually-controlled vehicles altogether, citing the amount of vehicle-related deaths caused throughout the past two centuries as their justification. Of course, many motorists still objected to this, but the rising amount of violence caused by biker gangs was not giving them a good name. Stock car races and derbies were becoming underground sports, held in secret clubs that Joseph would sometimes be called on to bust up.

"So the other detectives shooed you out of the scene just like that? Sounds to me like the puppeteers over at Icarus are clearing us off the stage so they can make way for the next set of actors in their demented play." Joseph heard these words coming from Trooper Scarlet, and though she was sitting right behind him in the vehicle, he did not hear these words with his ears, but through his augmented mind. With mental commands, NeuroCom users could send messages to each other as the next logical step in the evolution of human communication, succeeding the text message. Passing notes in a classroom setting in this manner would have been more discreet than ever, if America's education system had still otherwise adhered to its 20th century standards.

Joseph relayed his orders to the rest of his crew, or most of them, as he would then remember that not all of them had NeuroComs. For whatever reason, some people still preferred the squishy organs they were born with over the many synthetic alternatives available in this day and age.  "For the rest of you, our unit has been given orders from the higher-ups to conduct further investigations into the BludWulf gang, starting with a crackdown on one of their known bases of operations here in Gibson Springs." Joseph announced to everyone riding along with him. "Our gathered intelligence indicates that a certain abandoned Rocka Rolla Cola bottling plant isn't so abandoned after all. In fact, it may prove to be the site of one of their hideouts, according to a report from one of our undercover agents. We will be dividing this unit into two groups. Trooper Scarlet here with her Bravo team will stand guard outside of the plant while I take Alpha team inside to investigate. Be prepared for any gang members trying to resist arrest just like last time. Are your instructions clear so far, gentlemen?"

The two teams soon arrived at the bottling plant within Gibson Springs' old industrial district. Since Icarus had been revolutionizing mass production with its entirely robot-operated factories, many of the facilities that required the human element had been going out of business, what with the amount of factory-related injuries and fatalities that occurred every year since the original industrial revolution. Every mayor of Gibson Springs promised to repurpose the old industrial district in some manner or another, but all that had really happened to the vacant factories was attract all sorts of unsavory types. Joseph Stone was determined to stamp out at least one of them tonight.

As soon as they had disembarked from their vehicles, Scarlet wasted no time in heading towards the rooftop of the bottling plant's neighboring building to secure a vantage point to look down the scope of her favorite rifle, while the rest of her team deployed a few flying scout drones to survey the plant from every side, including above. Joseph's team meanwhile readied their weapons as they approached one of the back entrances into the plant, their sergeant waiting eagerly for the all-clear from Scarlet on his NeuroCom.

“Everything is awfully quiet here, Sarge.” Scarlet came in through his NeuroCom. “Are you sure we have the right location?”

“We are about to find out.” Joseph replied, kicking in the door, considering getting himself augmented legs sometime in the future as well. The rusty interior of the bottling plant was eerily silent, not a living soul or operating machine in sight. Perhaps the BludWulf hideout was further inside, but there seemed to be signs of the place having been visited recently. Perhaps the place had been abandoned? Had they been tipped off that the authorities were closing in on their base of operations? If that had been the case, they forgot to destroy or bring with them any evidence that they had been there.

Members of the Alpha team came across one of the offices that had clearly been used as storage for all sorts of contraband. Illegal drugs, weapons, biotech, and media disks were haphazardly scattered around the place. “Are you seeing this?” Joseph asked Scarlet, forwarding his cybereye’s video feed to her as his gaze panned over the room’s contents.

“I see plenty of reasons to arrest the BludWulf gang, but none of the actual gang members so far. If they left the place, they would have taken these with them, or destroyed them if they were in a hurry.”

A muffled gunshot could be heard somewhere off in the distance, but it definitely sounded as if it came from inside the plant, just a few rooms over. “Perhaps they never left in the first place.” Joseph said as he snapped to attention, raising his weapon before rushing in the direction of the noise, signaling for the rest of his unit to follow suit.

When he arrived in the next room over, Joseph could smell blood, a stench that was more familiar to him than he would have liked. He used a mental command to switch his cybereye’s viewing mode to scan the area for potential threats, tightening his metallic grip on the handle of his gun as he spotted not one but several bullet holes poked around several spots, as well as various bloody stains. In the next room over, he found another office, but this one was not filled with contraband, unless one considered the bodies of what used to be the BludWulf gang members themselves to be contraband, which, to be fair, a lot of people did. Their corpses were strewn about the room from behind overturned tables and desks and corners and other sources of makeshift cover. Most of them appeared to have been riddled with bullets, or stabbed by something that had to have been at least the size of a rail spike. The bodies bore the distinctive tattoos and favored beastlike body parts that had become key to the BludWulf syndicate’s identity, but any other identifying features of their figures appeared to have been mangled beyond recognition. All of the features except one.

Through Joseph’s cybereye, he could see that augmented reality tags had been posted over each corpse. It was a box of text written for each one. Joseph started with the body slouched over in a chair, who appeared to have been perforated with bullets before he had a chance to leave his seat.

NAME: BRUCE “BLUDLUST” LOBON
SINS: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ARMED ROBBERY, VEHICULAR MANSLAUGHTER, MURDER, DRUG TRAFFICKING, HUMAN TRAFFICKING, ATTEMPTED ASSAULT OF THE ANGEL OF RETRIBUTION
VERDICT: GUILTY
SENTENCE: DEATH
RETRIBUTION HAS BEEN DELIVERED UNTO THE WICKED

Every other body in the room, and every corpse the team would discover in the next few rooms to follow, would have these same AR tags appended to them in the virtual overlay. They all indicated the victim’s alleged name, transgressions, and the sentence carried out was always obvious.

“Some self-righteous vigilante appears to have gotten to the BludWulf gang before we did.” Joseph relayed to his unit.

“No kidding.” Scarlet replied over the NeuroCom. “And our perpetrator appears to have left us a calling card. Many calling cards, it would seem. The modus operandi certainly seems to match that of the Angel of Retribution.”

A series of gunshots could be heard, and this time they didn’t sound so far away. “I think the scene might still be hot…it sounds as if the Angel is still here somewhere!” Joseph exclaimed, holding up his hand cannon and running shoulder-first through the door to the next room. A falling body splattered itself across the floor in front of him almost as soon as he entered. He looked up to see another gang member that had yet to notice him. He was too busy standing on an overhead catwalk, firing frantically in front of him with a shotgun as a series of metallic footsteps could be heard approaching, moments before a missile suddenly blast itself into him, blasting him and half the catwalk into tiny pieces that rained down onto the floor before Joseph.

One end of the narrow bridge had fallen onto the floor below, but the other side was still fastened to its spot, turning the catwalk into a makeshift ramp between the two floors, albeit an unstable one. Without thinking, Joseph jumped onto the fallen end of the catwalk and began to climb it upwards, towards the source of the pounding footsteps that were now moving away. Moving under adrenaline and his police training, Stone was able it to the top just before the rest of the catwalk buckled to the damage and fell to the floor below.

Two more gang members were running down the corridor towards Joseph, not seeming to even notice him standing there. They both had looks of sheer terror in their eyes. Joseph reacted by stopping one of them dead in his tracks with a gunshot to the chest cavity, while the other sailed on past him, not noticing that the bridge was out until he was too late, and lying on the floor below in a crumpled heap with the rest of the wreckage. There was a brightly lit doorway at the other end of the corridor, flickering shadows on the wall suggesting some sort of commotion in the other room. Already separated from the rest of his team, Joseph dashed on forward towards it while he sent a mental command for backup through his NeuroCom.

With his mind working so frantically, the length of the corridor seemed to stretch on for lightyears to Joseph, but when he finally did arrive in front of that doorway, he realized that the strange shadows had been the result of flames. The entire room had been cast ablaze, the dying screams of burning gangsters fading out as their charred bodies were dropping to the floor. And in front of them all stood a massive metallic figure, at least an entire foot taller than the sergeant, humanoid in shape but appearing to be made out of an entire cybernetic chassis. What appeared to be a flamethrower had been built right into its prosthetic left arm, but it had suddenly folded itself away into a skeletal steel hand. This being turned to face Joseph as he approached the doorway, though he was unable to proceed any further due to the raging inferno within. The being’s head vaguely resembled a human skull built out of a metallic alloy common for most cybernetic parts, though a prosthetic head was almost unheard of. It was too sophisticated to be an autonomous construct. If there was any humanity left within that steel chassis, it would have had to have been the brain, residing in that steel skull, viewing the world through a glowing red pair of electronic eyes, which now had been alerted to Joseph’s presence.

“Begone now, blind fool!” The creature spoke to him in a low, metallic growl somehow. “You are but an unwitting pawn in a wicked game of corruption! Witness the evil that your false gods have wrought, the wickedness that they have willfully ignored! Look upon me, for I am the wrath of God, the Angel of Retribution, and all the wicked shall be cleansed of their sins in the fires of Hell! Repent from your sins if you wish to be spared from infernal damnation!”

The creature turned and walked back into the flames with heavy footsteps, vanishing behind the smoke and fire. Joseph could do nothing to follow. He knew it would be far too late by the time any form of backup had arrived.

---4---
“Hey Cipher, maybe we should get you one of those prosthetic bodies to download yourself into? That would work, wouldn’t it?” Claire had stood up in the bus as it had reached her stop. She stepped past the robotic driver and out of the door as it had swung open. The strange little girl had already disembarked at a different stop a few minutes prior, and by that point, she was the only remaining passenger that dared to go down to Winterton.

“I’m not so sure about that, Claire. I mean, for starters, how would I be able to pass the prerequisite tests? How would they be able to perform a brain transplant when there is no brain to speak of?”

“Well, I suppose that might be a problem, but isn’t your brain basically just a collection of data right now? Maybe you could download yourself into one of those artificial ones.”

“I don’t know if it’s really that simple. I have never done a transfer quite like that before. I like to consider myself a skilled hacker, but even I haven’t quite memorized how to map out every neuron and synapse to transcribe myself properly.”

“We sell used electronics of all sorts at Huxley’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a spare cyberbrain in our stock somewhere.”

“I doubt I would want to fit myself inside a used brain.” Cipher commented through Claire’s NeuroCom. They had gotten off at a street by one of the more run-down areas of Winterton, Though it could be said that every part of Winterton was run-down to some extent. The whole city was like a relic of the past, built in an age that predated computers, the internet, augmented reality, the rise of corporate superpowers and cybernetics and designer biotechnology. While the surrounding cities that popped up had flourished, so had the cost of living, and those that had been dealt a bad hand in the capitalistic ladder were cast down to Winterton, a city of outcasts. The brick and mortar buildings were showing their age, but demolishing the more dilapidated ones just didn’t seem profitable enough to the construction companies, even as they were replacing more and more of their workers with robots. Because the corporate powers that thrived in the other cities had neglected Winterton, the city’s real-estate value plummeted, more undesirables took up refuge in the crumbling ruins, and the profit-driven companies wanted nothing to do with that. The downward spiral of neglect and stagnation had given Winterton a bad name. Anyone that wanted to do business here was probably doing business with one of the many gangs or crime syndicates that found this place to be a safe haven from the complacent authorities.

The only thing that the syndicates had to worry about were other syndicates, of course. That was the primary thing that anyone living there had to worry about, really. Like warring tribes, the various criminal organizations had divided Winterton into disputed territories that they would fiercely protect while trying to extend their borders. Many mob wars would go down near those borders of influence, and many bystanders would find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was truly a wonder that anyone still wanted to live here, but some people were stubborn. People like Huxley, who would always consider Winterton to be his home for as long as he lived.

The neon sign stood out above the entrance as Claire approached the building: “HUXLEY’S USED ELECTRONICS BOUTIQUE” and in one of the windows “ALL SALES FINAL”. It was a wonder this window wasn’t broken like most others on this street alone. Huxley must have gotten some new ones recently. He must have also been waiting for Claire’s return, as he he reached his burly arms out to wrap around her almost as soon as she had stepped in the front door.

“Claire! You made it back! The kids and I were worried sick about you, missy!” He exclaimed, releasing his grip on her and giving her a firm pat on the shoulder, looking back over his own to call out, “Look who’s back, children!”

A group of children, many of them in their single digit ages, came rushing down the stairs and ended up hugging Claire by the legs. Others just stood nearby, while others just stood by the staircase, looking quizzically at her.

“Oh, I am so glad to see you all too!” A smile lit up Claire’s face as she lifted up several of the smaller children for a hug, one at a time. “Have you been nice to Mr. Huxley while I’ve been gone?”

“He made me a new leg!” One of the boys said as he lifted one of his pant legs, revealing a fully functioning prosthetic leg beneath. It whirred quietly as he walked, and then he broke into a run to show how fast he could reach the other side of the store and run back.

“Some of them have been quite a handful, but nothing worth doing has ever been easy for ol’ Huxley!” The man said, flashing a warm smile.

“When’s Milly gonna come back?” One of the little girls asked, looking up to Claire with concerned eyes.

“Little Milly will be back home before you know it!” Claire responded, patting her on the head. “Now, who’s hungry?”

The children scrambled off into the dining room upstairs, leaving Huxley and Claire alone. She looked like she had a few words to share with him, to say the least. Before she could get to any of them, however, Huxley reached into one of his back pockets as he noticed his Portable Accessibility Device was giving off a bright blink, indicating that he was getting an incoming message.

“Hello there Huxley!” Cipher’s voice came in as soon as Huxley had pressed the call button on the display screen. “Claire here just told me all about you on the way over here! It is such a pleasure to finally meet you face to face!” To an outside observer, or to Huxley, it sounded quite strange to hear words like this being spoken by someone who appeared to be making a remote call.

“I beg your pardon?” Huxley replied, understandably dumbfounded. “Is this some sort of prank call?”

“If this is a prank call, then I’m the one that was pranked!” Cipher replied as the spherical drone that Claire had placed in her jacket pocket had suddenly leaped out of it and floated through the air, its eye turning to Huxley’s slightly perplexed face. “Let me give you the Cliff’s Notes version, Mister Fixit: I’m a hacker that uses his NeuroCom to immerse himself in cyberspace. Someone or something pulled the plug on me while I was dreaming the electronic dream, and now I can’t wake up, because I don’t have a body to wake up into. I found your lady friend on ice in a warehouse by the Pacific shores, about to be shipped off to Japan or China or maybe even Australia, somewhere off in that general direction by the looks of it. I woke her up, we met some resistance, but we made it back here in one piece, or at least she did. I don’t know how many pieces I’m in right now.”

Huxley looked from the drone’s lens to Claire, who gave him an affirming nod. He returned his gaze to the drone, as well as to his PAD, and his perplexed expression slowly shifted into one of amusement. “Well then, our little pawn shop sure attracts all kinds, don’t it!?” He exclaimed with a hearty laugh. “We do appreciate you getting our beloved Claire back safe and sound.   I don’t know what I’d have done without her! What is it you’re expecting from us in return? We ain’t got much, except some old junk. Were you wanting a deal on an old prosthetic limb, or perhaps an antique smartphone from the 2010s?”

“Yes, because that’s totally what I had in mind when I set out to rescue some stranger in the middle of nowhere! Not really, I’d like to find out where my body went, you see.” Cipher replied. “And I heard that you have a little one missing still. If she was abducted at the same time as Claire, well, the state that I found her in might be a clue as to what might have happened to her as well. A warehouse…in the docks in Gibson Springs…owned by the Poseidon Shipping Company. What do we all know about these things?”

“The Poseidon Shipping Company is a subsidiary of Icarus Industries, its own headquarters are even located in Gibson Springs.” Claire would add in. “Their sphere of influence covers the entire city, and they have branches in just about every other major city in the world…”

“That’s right, but Poseidon will also ship over just about anything to any country for the right price, no questions asked.” Cipher would respond. “Someone was counting on this to smuggle human subjects like Claire across the Pacific, but to what end?”

“Before we could even get ourselves out of the warehouse I was found in, the place was broken into by gang members.” Claire added. “They looked like the BludWulf syndicate to me.”

“You ran into the BludWulfs, Claire?” Huxley raised his eyebrows in concern. “Oh man, and we were trying so hard not to get on their bad side. I don’t even need to remind you about what happens to people that do that! The BludWulf gang…they’ve got a hand going in a human trafficking ring, don’t they? Claire…you don’t think you and Milly were…!”

Claire reached out with her thin yet lean arm and snatched Huxley’s PAD out of his hands, concentrating on the screen as she uploaded the video recorded on her NeuroCom to the device. A minute later, the events that had unfolded earlier that day in the warehouse, as viewed through Claire’s own eyes, were being displayed on the screen for everyone to see. She would periodically fast-forward, rewind, and pause the footage as she examined it with a close eye of scrutiny, at the same time trying not to linger on the many moments she had nearly gotten herself killed.

“Damn, girl! Ain’t that the goons from Cerberus that came in right there?” Huxley’s eyes widened as he bore witness to the scene, at least in a secondhand sense. “What’s the corporate police doing in there? I’d have thought they’d turn a blind eye to these sorts of things! Guess they actually do their civic duties every now and again, huh?”

“At least when it’s convenient for them to do so.” Cipher chimed in. “Their participation in something like this in the first place would seem to suggest that Icarus personally had a stake in something in this warehouse. Chances are likely that they were either protecting their assets or cracking down on the BludWulf syndicate for cutting into the business. Maybe a little bit of both. We could speculate on this all day, but I’m fairly sure that both sides might be involved in this somehow.”

“Hey wait a minute, Claire!” Huxley suddenly began to realize something that he should have noticed earlier. “How were you able to record all of this in the first place? You didn’t have your own PAD with you, now did you? And it certainly wasn’t implanted in your eyes either! You don’t have a NeuroCom, do you?”

“It seems like I do now.” Claire replied, rubbing the top of her head. “Ever since I woke up in that icebox, I’ve even been able to do things like this…” She motioned over to a shelf full of electronics, and they suddenly began to whir to life. Display screens flickered on and off, appliances began operating seemingly of their own accord, drones began to move. They all stopped as soon as she stopped concentrating on them, however.

“So whoever kidnapped you…and probably who kidnapped Milly as well…installed a NeuroCom in your head?” Huxley said, tapping his chin nervously. “I may not have one of my own, but I’m pretty damn sure that you can’t do something like THAT with just a NeuroCom!”

“I’d say you got yourself a pretty sweet deal, even if I do say so myself, Claire!” Cipher exclaimed as the spherical drone buzzed around her. “Do you know how much I paid for MY first NeuroCom? And it seems to have some extra features that I only wish I could have, and you got it all for free! Although those extra bells and whistles might not be part of the NeuroCom itself, strictly speaking. It could be extra hardware…what kind, I’m not sure…”

“Is there any way to find out?” Claire asked, suddenly feeling as if a bad headache was starting to come on.

“Well let me see…” The drone emitted a bright flash of light in Claire’s eyes, and she felt as if something was digging around inside her mind. “Doing a scan of your hardware…and it appears that you essentially have three major components up in there. The first component is definitely a NeuroCom, or at least something that looks and acts like one…but it’s certainly not a model that I have ever seen before. Maybe whoever did this to you was testing a new prototype? I might like to get myself one of those babies once I get my body back. If I get my body back.”

“You said there were three components?” Huxley said, concerned. “What were the other two?”

“Well, I’m not entirely sure, to tell you the truth.” Cipher replied. “The biggest of the three components doesn’t match up with anything I’ve ever seen before! Seriously, I am looking through every database of cyberware and bioware that I know, and what ever you’ve got up in your noggin is none of those things! It doesn’t seem to be harmful, however. It’s just interfacing with your brain’s functions in…strange ways that I’ve never seen before.”

Claire was almost too afraid to ask the last question. “Well…what is the last component, then?”

“The third component that my scan of your cranium revealed? Well, umm…” Cipher paused, now sounding quite hesitant. “Oh…oh dear. Oh dear. I…I don’t know what to say…”

“What!? What the hell is it!?” Huxley grabbed the drone out of the air with his hand, shaking it in frustration.

“It’s…well, umm…let’s just say that this discovery has proven itself to be quite…mindblowing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean!? Is Claire gonna be all right!?” Huxley tightened his grip on the drone as stared daggers into its lens.

Cipher’s response was just barely above a whisper in volume. “Well…technically…yes. I mean, so long as the detonation mechanism isn’t actually triggered.”

These softly spoken words were followed by a long, uncomfortable silence as the gravity of the situation started to sink in for the three individuals.

“It’s a bomb. There, I said it. Claire has a remotely operated bomb implanted in her brain.”