Modular eyes

“The data buffers in the cyberoptics…” Jensen guessed what the hacker
was thinking. “They’ll still have imagery stored in there from earlier in the
day. We just need to access it…” He cast around, looking for something to
use to remove the eyes.

“There’s a way to do that,” Pritchard said warily. “I can talk you through
it from here… but it’s a little unpleasant.”
Jensen caught sight of his face, and his own optical implants, in the
reflection of a mirrored panel. “I see,” he said.

If removing the artificial eye from Wilder’s right orbital socket with a
scalpel and a pair of forceps was a painstaking task, doing the same to
himself in reverse without cutting open his face was one of the more testing
things Jensen had ever had to do.

He willed himself to ignore the queasy sensations churning in his gut as
he pulled on his implant until the self-seeking optic nerve connectors
detached, and he went partially blind.

Jensen called on the same careful skills he had cultivated building model
clocks during the months he had been in recovery, after the attack at SI that
nearly killed him. It helped to think of this action in the same way, of pieces
coming together in uniform order.

Wilder’s cybereye shared the same universal jacks as Jensen’s, and he
cautiously inserted it into the gaping socket, taking care not introduce any
blood or dirt along with it. With a moist, unpleasant click, the dead man’s
eye snapped home and half of Jensen’s vision became a fuzzy blur of start-
up displays.

“Did it work?” said Pritchard. “Are you seeing anything? An Atid eye
will be compatible with your neural hub. You should be able to go through
the menus and navigate to the memory buffer.”

“Getting there,” said Jensen. The sickly feelings faded away as his body
quickly accepted the new eye, and he soon found the subroutine Pritchard
referred to. The buffer was still intact, and Jensen drew it up into replay
mode.

It was disorienting for his brain to parse two different visual inputs at
once – one from his real-time view of the interior of the ambulance and the
other from Wilder’s recent past – but he managed.

Jensen blink-clicked the buffer, spooling down the time index into the
recent past. He rocked back slightly as he suddenly saw himself standing in
front of a glass panel, a gun in hand. He watched his lips silently mouth the
words ‘keep going’ as the moment unfolded. “Too early,” he said aloud.
“Gonna run it ahead.”

Jensen forced the replay to run on fast-forward, becoming a blur of
motion. He glimpsed himself taking the pulse-gun hit; then Wilder’s point
of view sliding around as he left the apartment in Ravendale; the interior of
a bot-cab; the lobby of an expensive hotel—

Switching back to normal speed, Jensen began a ride as a passenger
through Wilder’s meeting at the Yukon Hotel. His breath caught in his
throat as Wilder’s gaze met that of the person he had come to meet.
“Thorne?” It was absolutely the same woman that had interrogated him
at the WHO facility in Alaska.

- Deus Ex: Black Light, Chapter 10 pgs. 188-189