Stone & Steel (NaNo'16)

# STONE AND STEEL

## Chapter 1

It was supposed to have gone so simply, an easy extraction with no strings attached, but I keep having to remind myself of that old recitation: *shiki so ku ze ku*. "Form is void." In other words, nothing is ever as it seems. This simple fact was one of the primary driving forces behind my job.

The night sky over Redmond was overcast with scattered showers as I sat quietly in the back of the delivery van with Zoey and Mike. Our leader Johnny was up front riding shotgun, while Travis was behind the wheel; our destination was prohibited by the AutoDriver, so we had to get there the old-fashioned way. I felt the weight in the pockets of my trench coat to reassure myself that Goldhart was there to protect me when I needed him. I usually never felt anything on operations like these, but tonight there was a certain sense of unease that everyone was trying to ignore, as if bringing it up would curse us with bad luck.

The trademark red logo of Icarus Industries was emblazoned on the side of the office building in a bright neon sign that lit up the skyline, almost visible on the horizon several minutes before we arrived anywhere near it, taking the service entrance through a basement parking garage.

We quietly piled out of the van, Travis remaining at the wheel while Zoey slung a long duffel bag around her shoulder to head to the surface, making her way to the rooftop of a neighboring building. Johnny, Mike and I were left to take the service elevator, using our expertly forged passcards to gain access to the lift. None of us felt the need to say anything to each other until the elevator started to move.

With his comm device, Johnny used an augmented reality overlay to project the image of the building's layout plans onto the elevator door in front of us. Then, in one corner, he opened up a call to our informant.
"Vykarius? Johnny Blade here. We're in. Are you sure the floor plans you gave us are up to date?"
"As recently as last week." A slightly fuzzy voice replied. "Pardon the audio quality; I'm using a lower signal to reduce the chances of our detection. Icarus has been upgrading their G.R.I.D. security around the Redmond area, so I can't afford to leave too big of a digital footprint around here. There's only so much I can help with in cyberspace without raising suspicion."
"That's real reassuring." Mike scoffed and shook his head. "So what the hell were you having us do here?"
"You're in the service elevator, right? It only goes up to the third floor. The primary data server is on the fourth and fifth."
"Wait a minute-" Johnny adjusted his wraparound mirror shades and ran a hand through his magenta mohawk, a nervous habit of his. "There are two whole floors of servers? That's ridiculous, Icarus would never have such a big server farm this far out in Redmond without me knowing about it."
"It's a single server, tall enough to take up two stories." Vykarius replied. "Yes, it's a Colossus class server, not many around like them anymore, but if they wouldn't keep such an unruly beast around if they didn't have something worth storing on it in the first place."
I felt around in my coat until I could find the portable datadrive in the right pocket. "I only have a single exabyte stick for extraction. Is that going to be enough for a data heist of this magnitude?"
"It's going to have to be, Joseph." Vyke's voice was starting to get more faint. "Look, I'm running out of time here. I'll establish another connection when I can lock onto your datadrive's download processes. Good luck, all of you. This may be our only chance at this; don't fuck it up, Joe."
I felt a smirk coming across my face as I heard this. "Have I ever let you down before, Vyke?" All of us present knew better than to answer that, and the call line was dropped.

The floor plan vanished from our AR overlay as the elevator doors swung open at the third floor, and the three of us filed out into the office space. It was after hours, so the lights were out, leaving the only illuminating sources the city lights pouring in from the windows and the searchlights from the on-site patrol drones. One of these trashcan shaped bots rolled on by us without incident. It appeared that our forged passcards made them recognize us as employees. Johnny and Mike made a break for the stairwell to the fourth floor. I was all set to follow them until I noticed that the lights in the break room were still on. What was more, with the enhanced vision afforded by my cybernetic eye, I could make out shadows moving within.

Mike and Johnny were already at the stairwell, so I dipped my left hand into my coat to draw my comm and send them a text message: "Checking out the lights on in the break room. Will catch up soon." And with my mechanical right arm, I drew out Goldhart, my solid white cyborg revolver to hold at my side as I drew near the door to the break room, leaning against the wall as I peered through the door's window.

No one could be seen from here, but the coffee machine was running, and the microwave door had been left open. I carefully grasped the knob of the break room door and turned it as I held my gun steady. The door swung open and I leaned around the doorway, pointing Goldhart in the general direction of the room.

No one was there.

I slowly stepped into the room and checked the tables. An electronic cigarette had been left on a tray, and it was still lit. The only other source I could find that would cast shadows was the antique ceiling fan. Its dull hum was the only sound filling the break room. And the coffee machine. And the footsteps coming from behind me.

Footsteps. I swung around just in time to find a squat, portly man in Icarus uniform step into the doorway, holding a flashlight in one hand and a small pastry in the other. I pointed my gun at his fat head and ordered him to drop both. Startled, he threw his hands up and complied.

"You see this?" I motioned to the massive revolver I had trained on his head. "You recognize this? It's a revolver from the cyborg wars, made to take down soldiers with machine bodies, like the ones your company is known for making, bodies way tougher than your flesh. If you make any sudden moves, your custodial robots will be mopping your guts off the break room walls and floor for a week. If you don't want that to happen, tell me...why shouldn't I waste corporate scum like you?"

I could see the man's eyes dilated like a very bright light had been shone in them, and his raised hands were trembling as if he had backed into a freezer. "N-no! Please, sir! I-I-I know n-nothing!"

"Well, isn't that a shame?" I calmly replied to him. When I took a step closer, he jumped back in fright. I used this to my advantage and backed him out of the break room, into the office space by the windows. "You're just some lowly Icarus goon? They won't miss you. You'll be replaced within just a few days. You're just as expendable to them as I was!" Without giving him any further warning, I lunged closer and jammed the foot-long barrel of Goldhart right up against the guard's forehead, wrapping my pneumatic index finger around the trigger.

"Wait! Wait! No!" The man screamed with the familiar cadence of desperation. "There are more of us here. If you shoot now, they'll hear you." He told me in between deep, panicked breaths.

I slowly lowered the gun from his head. "Is that so? How many? Where are they?"
"They're all upstairs. About two dozen of them."
"Funny how everyone else seems to be taking the night off."
"There've been threats...threats of an attack on our...a project...something big...!"
"Big...the project, or your attack threat?" The man didn't say anything to this, but the look on his face told me that it was most likely both. "Maybe I am that threat. And I'm willing to take a chance with your boys upstairs."
"You'll never get up there! Whatever you did to get up here won't work. It's a high security clearance level that not even a lowly guard like me would have."
I decided to call his bluff. "Right, I'll be the judge of that. Why don't you empty your pockets right now, or do I gotta go through them myself after I blow your fucking head off?"
The man waved his arms in the universal "no" motion. "All right, all right! There's a passcard in my right pocket. It'll get you anywhere!"

I kept Goldhart trained on him while I slowly reached down for the man's pocket, eventually fishing out a high-clearance passcard. I was about to place it in my coat when my comm device suddenly buzzed in my other pocket, perhaps a text from Johnny and Mike. Their message could be important, but I shouldn't have taken my eyes off of the guard.

That moment of hesitation was apparently all he needed. I caught a glimpse of him pressing a button on his belt before my vision was enveloped in a bright flash. I felt a shock reverberating through my body, an illness that brought me to my knees. My electronic eye had stopped working, and my mechanical right arm went limp, dropping my gun on the floor. I couldn't believe it; an EMP projector had short-circuited all of my on-board hardware. The guard kicked me in the stomach, knocking me onto my left side, and continued to kick me several more times while I was down.

"Hah! Fuck you, anarchist pig!" The guard shouted at me, punctuating more obscenities with kicks and stomps. "Like I'd give in to the demands of a terrorist!" He was significantly less afraid now that I was reeling on the floor, and saved the last kick for my face before pressing my head against the floor with one boot, now pulling out his own comm device.

"Security office? I've got an intruder here on the..." The guard paused as he and I heard loud noises over the comm. "H-hello?" He was responded to with crashing sounds that got louder and louder, followed by more noises that sounded like gunfire and screams. I could even start to hear them coming from the floor above me.

The guard stepped off of me and stumbled backward, somehow looking even more frightened than he did when I had shoved a gun in his face. He turned his eyes to the ceiling as the noises upstairs grew to a rumble, then he reached up to his head and pulled on his hair in a frantic gesture.

"Shit! Oh shit...it's here...! It's here...oh my god! It's going to kill us all!" The man's ramblings started like this before he started to hyperventilate, and he eventually decided to make a run for the elevator we came through, mashing the down button frantically until the doors swung open, and again with the panel on the other side until the doors closed. I could do naught but lay there on the floor while my bioware systems rebooted.

How did a lowly Icarus patrol guard get a hold of an EMP projector? I had to wonder if he had been saving it for whatever was now happening upstairs while control returned to my mechanical arm, and vision to my electronic right eye. There was no pain in my chest, either, so the nanites in my bloodstream must have managed through the pulse. Able to move my right arm again, I picked my gun up off the floor and pulled out my comm device to see if it too had finished rebooting. It seemed to work fine, and its interface indicated I had one text message still waiting for me, the one that caused my lapse in concentration.

It was from Zoey. "Unknown party entering from rooftop. Appears heavily armed." It was a reconnaissance report that she felt important enough to report, and from the sounds coming from above, these feelings had been rightly justified.

As I was picking the rest of myself up from the floor, Johnny and Mike burst in from the stairwell door, rushing towards me.
"Joe! You look like shit. More than you usually do. Are you all right?" I just noticed that Johnny had his razor gauntlets drawn, and Mike had his shotgun at the ready.
"What the hell's going on upstairs?" I replied. The gunfire was continuing, and now it was being accompanied by loud metallic footsteps.
"Whatever it is," Mike began, raising his voice over the noise, "The stairwell doors to floors four and five are locked. I'm not going up there now!"
"Well, we've got a way up there now." I held up the passcard I retrieved from the guard. In his haste to abandon his post, he had neglected to take it with him after I fished it out of his pocket. "The Colossus server could be in danger. It's now or never, Mikey."
"Fuck no! I didn't agree to walk into a warzone!"
Johnny lifted his wraparound mirror shades and turned one reptilian eye to Mike. "It's just one person, according to Zoey's intel. That person is giving us the perfect distraction we need from the tight security up there. You got a big gun, don't be a pussy."

Mike gave a defeated sigh and trotted after us as we made for the stairwell, using my new passcard to open the door to the fourth floor. It opened to another long, dimly lit hallway, one strangely empty. Then, at the end of it, we could see the distinctive silhouette of an armed Icarus enforcer, slowly walking backwards as he kept a rifle pointed at whatever he was walking away from. At the sound of some metallic footsteps from around the bend, the corporate soldier fired off a volley of shots from his rifle, making short, concentrated bursts as he stepped further back towards the wall.

Almost immediately after, the sound of some large machinery whirring to life echoed down the bend, followed by a roar of heavy gunfire as a hail of heavy caliber machine gun bullets suddenly tore the enforcer to shreds in a matter of seconds, splattering his entrails against the wall behind him.

The sound of metallic footsteps resumed, this time getting softer, as if moving away from us. We raised our weapons and slowly proceeded down the hallway towards the eviscerated enforcer. "Someone brought a whole fucking war up here." Johnny commented as he brought up the comm signal interceptor onto our AR interface, courtesy of Vykarius. Radio messages were firing off from all over the fourth and fifth floors,  corporate soldiers desperately trying to neutralize some target that was mowing them down with extreme prejudice. We listened for the messages on their enemy's whereabouts. It seemed to be moving away from us...for now.

Mike started muttering something about our plans, presumably in an attempt to retain some sense of calmness. "These hallways have these four bends around the edge of the floor, right? That means, according to the floor plans, the server room is right in the middle!" He was right, though. Just beyond the bend, we could see a large set of double doors that had to lead to the server room, amongst a hallway strewn with shell casings, bullet holes, blast marks, and a half dozen enforcer corpses.

Even in my line of work, and as much as the corporate bastards may have deserved it, I still found it to be a pretty gruesome sight. I really did not want to meet whatever was doing this, and quickly shuffled to the large double doors, using my stolen passcard once more to make them slide open. Beyond these doors was a two storied atrium with a small network of catwalks hanging above our heads, and in the center of the large room was a tall, black, monolith of a machine towering over us, its smooth jet surface dotted with blinking lights as a tangled web of thick wires connected this monstrosity to the ceiling. Mike blurted out what the rest of us had been thinking: "Holy fuck, who still needs a computer this big in the 2080s?"

The server didn't seem to be damaged, so luck still seemed to be on our side. I began to search the base level of the server for an acccess port, and eventually found a locked panel on the other side, which I pried open with the strength of my servo arm. Much to my delight, among the ports hidden beneath that panel was exactly the kind suited for a datadrive. I slotted the one I had brought with me into it, and I could almost hear the icebreaking protocols that Vyke had prepared for it working their magic. My cybernetic eye's AR interface notified me that I had an incoming call. Johnny and Mike gathered around me as I ducked into the shadow of the server tower to answer it.

"You made it in! I'm able to access the building's local GridSpace now!" Vyke's voice came in crystal clear this time. "Our custom datadrive is copying all the relevant data as we speak and...oh god, what the hell is happening out there?"
"Someone else is attacking Icarus." I told him. "We're risking a lot sticking around here, but we figured we could at least use the distraction. I hope you don't want anything else, because we're getting the hell out of here afterwards.
Vykarius seemed a bit distracted on the other end. "Oh no...they know we're digging around inside their treasure hoard. G.R.I.D. telemetry is showing me that multiple enforcers are converging on the server room now!"

It was as I had feared. From the double doors we came from, and along the catwalks above us, what must have been at least a dozen Icarus enforcers burst into the server atrium, clad in their trademark red on black armored uniforms, face concealing helmets, and full featured autorifles in their arms. There was only one way we were getting out of this.

We stepped into the blind spots beneath the catwalks to keep most of the upper level from seeing us, but it wasn't very long before one enforcer turned his head to notice me slinking towards the doors. I drew my revolver Goldhart and let a shot ring out, letting my servo arm absorb the recoil. The enforcer didn't have to alert his comrades to my presence; he didn't have time to, but the sheer loudness of a cyborg pistol of this caliber and the puff of fine red mist bursting out of his chest cavity did the job just as fine as he crumpled to the floor.
His two buddies beside him turned their attention on us, and Mike responded with two quick, successive blasts of his automatic shotgun, scattering buckshot across their torsos and collapsing them into bloody heaps. This left us with a clear path to the doorway, as the other enforcers on our level had spread out. We made a run for our exit, but that gave away our location to the guards on the upper level. They didn't hesitate to open fire upon us from the catwalks above. Mike slowed down to cover our escape by returning shotgun fire. As I made it through the double doorways, I glanced over my shoulder to see a volley of assault rifle bursts knock him over.

"Mike? Shit, we've lost Mike!" I called out to Johnny as the two of us bolted down the hallway the way we came.
"What? Damn, their media's gonna have a field day with this!" Johnny replied as we came around the bend. More enforcers had shown up, blocking our exit entirely. I haphazardly let off another shot from my revolver in their general direction as we doubled back the other way. Besides the server room, there was another staircase, and this one only lead upwards.

As we ascended the steps, I witnessed Johnny hurriedly opening his comm and starting a conference call with our entire group. "Vyke! We're out of time! You're gonna have to extract the data remotely now! Mike is down! Travis, get the engine going!" He barked out his orders as quickly as he was running.
"Johnny! There's more coming from below, move up!" Zoey's voice now came from the conference interface. "You'll have to extract from the rooftop now. I have a plan!"
It better be a damned good plan, I thought to myself. We just dodged a bit more rifle fire as the enforcers rounded the corner to catch up with us, and now they were ascending the stairs behind us. When we reached the fifth floor, the ones from the catwalks had caught up to us in the hallway.

They raised their rifles to open fire on us when all of a sudden, one of the walls in the hall space between us and them burst open, and from the space behind the wreckage stomped out the most metallic person I had ever seen. It was a tall, bulky framed figure with a completely mechanical body from head to toe, its servomotor limbs and cybernetic torso outfitted with military grade weaponry. I wasn't sure if it was a cyborg or a hominid assault robot at first as one of its arms shaped itself into a gatling gun and revved up to mow down the entire hallway of enforcers, the lot of them scattering and trying to fall back before they were mashed into bloody chunks at several thousand rounds per minute. Johnny and I left this mechanical creature to deal with the guards coming up from the stairs below us while we continued further upwards to the rooftop.

"Is that...?" Johnny was nearly out of breath as we stumbled out onto the roof, leaving the carnage beneath us.
"It's the other intruder. Looks like a heavy Class X cyborg with surplus war arms." I replied. "God help us all."

I would have had something better to say at that moment, but a guard posted on the rooftop was there to greet us, having apparently ignored everything that happened to his coworkers below. He immediately paid for this act of cowardice when a bullet hole suddenly burst through his helmet, leaving him to tumble backwards and off the roof entirely. I rushed to the roof's edge, and with the magnification lens in my cyber eye, I could see Zoey on the nearest adjacent rooftop, one story below us, the long range rifle from her duffel bag set up for a sniping post. She waved at me as we approached the roof's edge, and reached into her bag for the cable gun I knew she had to have packed. I didn't get to see her pull this out, however, as something else suddenly flew up in front of her and obscured my vision with a bright searchlight.

"This is the Cerberus Security Systems police force! You are under arrest!" An authoritative voice echoed out from the loudspeakers coming from a VTOL patrol copter bearing the Cerberus and Icarus logos hovering over the rooftop between our building and Zoey's. "Lay down your weapons and lie down on the ground at once! Resistance will be met with lethal force!"

Before we could meet either of these demands, however, the searchlight suddenly went out as the glass was shattered, and the copter's altitude wavered as a flurry of bullets danced across its body. Behind Johnny and I, the massive Class X from below had just made its way out to the rooftop, its metal frame now spattered with blood. The roar of the VTOL copter's propeller blades must have drowned out the thunderous mechanical footsteps of the heavily armed cyborg, and the spinning of its minigun chambers.

The police copter responded with its own onboard gatling gun tearing a swath of bullets straight across the rooftop, leading Johnny and I to scatter away from it in opposite directions. The cyborg had been directly in its line of fire, but when I had finished diving out of the way, it had somehow moved quickly enough to avoid the barrage as well.

"Firing upon Icarus officials is a capital violation of Cerberus legal policy! We are now authorized to utilize lethal force against you!" The copter's speakers blared over the sound of its gatling gun revving up.

**"I WILL NEVER HONOR ANY FORSAKEN EDICT CREATED BY THE HANDS OF YOUR WICKED TYRANTS!"** A low, deep metallic growl resembling a mechanical beast imitating human speech came from the cyborg as a compartment opened up from each of its shoulders, two racks of small missiles sliding out. Each one fired off a projectile into the air, making spiral motions towards the VTOL before briefly lighting up the night sky when they impacted, releasing their explosive payloads and reducing the copter to a burning wreck diffused over the streets below. I instinctively raised one arm to shield my eye from the brightness of the blast, despite the flare reduction feature on my cyber eye.

As Johnny ran across the roof to meet back up with me, the cyborg turned to face us, its missile compartments having retracted.
**BEAR WITNESS TO THIS RIGHTEOUS SLAUGHTER, FOR IT IS BUT A WARNING! RETRIBUTION IS COMING, AND THE WICKED OPPRESSORS SHALL PAY FOR THEIR SINS IN FULL!** The mechanical figure took steps backward towards the edge of the rooftop as it growled out these words, eventually stepping off entirely. Johnny and I ran towards it, expecting to find the cyborg fallen onto the streets below, but instead, we heard the sound of something resembling a jet engine soar past us. Two large metallic wings had extruded from its back, each one lifting it into the air with a rocket blast.

As Johnny and I watched the cyborg disappear over the Redmond skyline, we heard another metallic sound clanging against the rooftop. A long sturdy cable was now connecting this rooftop to the one that Zoey was on.
"You two remember how to zipline, don't you?" Zoey's voice came in over the conference comm. "Travis is waiting for us in the van down at ground level. Reinforcements are going to be here any minute. Let's cut our losses and beat it!" For once, I was willing to agree with her on something.


## Chapter 2

The ride back home, much like a teenage couple's first sexual encounter, was awkward and stressful, and not at all fulfilling. When Travis heard the news, his nerves were too shot for him to drive property, and after the initial getaway, he relinquished control of the van to the AutoDriver while he paced back and forth in the back, appearing quite troubled.
"Mike!? How did they get Mike? Just how many guards were on duty? Icarus Industries is the foremost robotics corporation in the world; You'd think their offices would be all staffed by robots, not people!"
"It's true." Zoey added from the front passenger's seat. "The total number of worldwide staff on Icarus's payroll is the smallest of the Big Three, and is estimated to fall well below the ten million mark by the year 2100. At the same time, the company has seen the highest profit margins of any other business in the world in the past four years, beating out Asclepius Medical and Mitashi Technologies by a slight margin. Because more lower level jobs are being automated by their robots, more money gets to be kept in the hands of the elite."
"And if we had been dealing with robots instead of those enforcer goons, Vykarius could've disabled them like he did with the surveillance systems, and Mike would still be alive!" Travis planted his fist against one wall of the van in a bout of frustration. "Damn those Icarus bastards! They're gonna pay for what they did to him, and judging by what Zoey just said, they can afford to pay a hell of a lot!"
"I will say this." Johnny finally piped up after having spent the rest of the ride up until this point in silence. "Mike was a brave man. He stood back to cover our escape. If it weren't for him, Joe and I probably would've been the ones not coming back instead. Drinks are on me for Mike's memory tonight!"

Mike's photo would be added to the Redmond Razers memorial wall tonight. Physical, two dimensional photographs were a rarity these days, but Johnny was a sucker for tradition. Dozens of other photographs of young faces also adorned the memorial wall, several of whom I had once known. Too many promising young lives were being snuffed out by this gang war, a gang war where one side was listed on the Stock Exchange, and I had been complicit in the conflict once more tonight.

"Hey, wait a minute..." Travis interrupted our fond memories of Mike. "It's that Vykarius guy's fault for giving us bad intel! I oughta give him a piece of my mind!" He angrily punched in Vyke's number on his comm, and our AR overlays sprung to life as the digital avatar of Vykarius, currently appearing as a well-groomed young man in a fresh new business suit, the stereotypical yuppie, materialized before us in the back of the van.
"Hey fellas!" Vyke flashed us a cheesy grin and pointed in our general direction with both index fingers. "I managed to salvage a huge chunk of data from the Colossus Server before the Icarus officials found out and cut us off! It's all heavily encrypted, though, and I've never seen an encoding method quite like it before! Even with my Q-DECK, it's going to take me quite a while to brute force it!"

The Q-DECK, or Quantum DECryption Key. This one of a kind device is what put Vykarius a cut above every other hacker in the West Coast Sprawl. With quantum superposition, he could simply try multiple combinations at the same time until he found the right decryption key, and in only a square root of the time it would normally take a standard device. An hour long process would only take a minute. A day long process could be completed in less than five minutes, and if this encryption code took a whole year to break, the only Q-DECK in the world could do that in less than two hours.

"I don't give a damn about your Q-TIP or whatever!" Travis tried to punch Vyke in the face, but his fist only travelled through the AR projection of his avatar. "I wanna know why you sent us to an Icarus establishment crawling with flesh and blood people instead of their usual tin can robots! We could've handled robots! You can't disable people from the G.R.I.D.!"
"Believe me, I'm almost as surprised as you were." Vykarius responded with a playful smirk. "By the time you had arrived on site, I already crippled the entire building's surveillance protocols. Even as we leave the scene, no machine on the premises has any records of any of us ever being around. And as for the living guards on staff...well...it doesn't seem like any of them are doing much living anymore to tell the tale, thanks to that unexpected third party. With another quick trip to their G.R.I.D. space, I could alter the security records to make it look like the patrol drones malfunctioned and killed the guards instead. The only evidence we left behind are a bunch of bodies, after all."
"Yeah, and Mike's was one of them! The first responders probably already found him by now! Icarus controls the media...they're gonna blame it all on the Razers once they see his tattoos!"
"That's hardly new, Travis. Icarus Industries and the Redmond Razers have been sworn enemies for years. You're exactly the reason why Icarus hasn't sank their talons into this town by now, despite owning pretty much the rest of Washington. It's quite an embarrassment for them to not have a control over a town so close to their central stronghold in Seattle. Isn't this why you joined the Redmond Razers, Travis? To keep your hometown free from a corporate takeover?"

Redmond had the distinction of being one of the very few towns left in America, and the rest of the world for that matter, where small businesses had a chance to thrive without the threat of a buyout from multinational conglomerates like Icarus Industries. In most cities these days, everything you bought, everything you worked for was all provided under a single corporate umbrella. You were born in a corporate hospital with a privatized health care system. You were educated in a corporately owned school with a privatized education system that taught you how to do a job working for that particular company, so that you could live in a house built by that corporation, buy the necessities and luxuries of life produced by the corporation with the company credit they paid you, and if you were lucky, you would eventually die in a corporate retirement home, and your organs and implants would be salvaged for spare parts before the rest of you was cremated, your ashes used to fertilize a plant in your employer's private gardens. This was the cycle of life for much of the world in the latter half of the 21st century, and looking to continue well into 22nd. Your entire life had a single sponsor, and your eternal soul was probably judged by the impact you had on their quarterly reports. For billions of people, these brand names were literally the meaning of their lives, but not mine. Not Redmond's. A tough enough street gang could scare away the big businesses and protect the smaller ones. This particular gang was called the Redmond Razers, and to me, they were the last hope in the entire state of Washington.

"I have a few theories as to why there were more people than robots here." Vykarius continued. "The first of which being that this building seemed to be dealing with a lot more administrative level duties, and as far as I am aware, most Icarus robots can't do white collar jobs. My second theory is that Icarus is trying to be better people...persons. Sure, robots are the company's bread and butter, their meat and potatoes and various other food related metaphors, but for everyone unaccustomed to the Icarus way of life, a public relations manager made of warm flesh does a lot better with the target demographics than one made of cold steel, and Icarus hasn't established much of a presence here in Redmond, courtesy of Ours Truly! This ties into my third theory...that Icarus is saving its robots for something else going on in the rest of their empire throughout Washington and Oregon. I've been following quite a few news and social media outlets both on and off the G.R.I.D., and a lot of them in the Seattle area are abuzz with rumors and speculations about new lines of service robots and cybernetic implants that they're trying to keep under wraps. Bringing them out to a controversial area like Redmond would cause quite a stir. Staffing an office building with mostly humans was probably one of the stipulations the local government made them agree to. The mayor of Redmond and her staff are not as easily bribed as most career politicians."
"Well holy shit. Political integrity isn't completely dead." I remarked, trying to suppress some memories of the 2080 election that were painful to me in more ways than one.

The official hideout of the Redmond Razers, ironically enough, was inside of another office building, this one having been abandoned for decades. Apparently, it used to belong to the American branch of some Japanese electronics company that no one can quite remember the name of, because it was probably swallowed up by the Asian megagiant Mitashi Technologies long ago. I'm the building's only occupant that actually uses the place as a proper office in the traditional sense on the ground floor, the rest of the gang's hideout being further back. Running a business in an abandoned building was a challenge of its own; it's hard to expose yourself to new customers without meeting them in person or on the G.R.I.D. and giving them your card, but in my line of work, that was just the way I liked it. It didn't hurt that I had the Redmond Razers at my literal back for additional protection, too, provided I did them small favors like tonight's run in return. Johnny Blade was a lunatic that lived up to his own name, but he was still pretty reasonable as far as gang leaders went, and knew how to pick his fights more often than not. Unless my customers were specifically spoiling for a fight, the Razers left them and my business alone, and I left theirs alone. Johnny and the others didn't have any more words for me when we got out of the bus, so I was clearly off the hook for the night. They returned to their hideout beneath the building while I stepped back into my own office. I was glad that they finally got my name on the door, both in paint and in an AR tag that popped out on people's overlays as they approached it.

### OFFICE OF DETECTIVE JOSEPH STONE
### INVESTIGATIONS INTO PRIVATE MATTERS

The inside of my office was sparsely furnished with few physical pieces of furniture: three chairs, one of which was behind my desk in the center, an antique coat rack, a vintage wall poster for some old buddy cop movie from the 2D film era, and a lounge couch great for napping on during multi-night cases. My desk was a top of the line computer workstation like the ones used in Icarus's executive offices. In fact, Vykarius helped me get this desk after I resigned from Cerberus Security Systems, though I never found out how he managed to lift it out of a Seattle high rise, or which poor sap in a suit we swiped it from. He probably replaced it with a month's wages anyways.

The central computing unit was somewhere in the center desk, just beneath the top surface, which served as the primary screen, while AR displays were projected all over the rest of my office space, centralized right above my desk like a traditional computer monitor, but I preferred to keep a lot of my case notes along the walls and rearrange them into charts with a few waves of my hand as more information was gathered. I didn't have a lot of case notes to project onto the walls lately, as most of my recent and ongoing clients seemed to be finished doing business with me. They either had all the information they wanted me to find, or were too afraid to dig any deeper when they saw what I initially discovered for them.

I opened my G.R.I.D. mailbox to confirm that there were no new cases from my clients, and found it mostly full of advertisements for MitaTech products, they were responsible in part for the G.R.I.D.'s inception to begin with, and one other piece that I would have thrown aside had it not come with an attachment. It was a free, genuine backstage pass for an upcoming concert in the Seattle sector. The performers were a classical music group calling themselves Burning Chrome, a group that I was all too familiar with. I knew them well enough that they only gave out backstage passes to people they wanted to specifically talk to, often for non music related business.

I checked the virtual backstage pass object out in AR before I was to add it to my personal G.R.I.D. inventory. On the back side was some virtual handwriting I found strangely familiar: "Meet me after the show sharp! I know who your Class X is! -- Aaron"

## Chapter 3

It was as I and the rest of the Razers had feared. While on the AutoBus ride to Seattle, I got my first glimpse of the news story concerning the attack on an Icarus office building out in Redmond. And while the Icarus News Network didn't have any footage of the attack itself, Vykarius having crippled the building's security prior, they showed an old mug shot of Mike's as they had recovered his body and linked the attacks to the Redmond Razers, a longtime thorn in the company's side.

There were no mentions, however, of the Class X cyborg clearly present at the scene, the one that gunned down the entire staff of enforcers present with heavy artillery. Citizens with cybernetic implants were classified as different categories of cyborgs based on what percentage of their body was made up of synthetic parts. A Class I cyborg has less than ten percent synthetic implants, a Class II has been ten and twenty percent, and I barely meet the Class IV criteria, with just a little over thirty percent wetware. Cyborgs at or above my class were quite rare even in the West Coast Sprawl, so a Class X, one with less than ten percent of their original body, was almost entirely unheard of outside of the cyborg wars, and those ended in 2060. The news reports could not have missed this figure after it trashed so many of their enforcers...so why would they neglect to report anything about it?

The lead I had gotten from Aaron was suddenn and very convenient, almost too convenient, but a lead worth following nonetheless, even if I had to visit Seattle to follow it. I stepped off the AutoBus and onto the streets of the capital of Gibson Springs, where the Space Needle had been highlighted with red neon lights, and the G.R.I.D. projected the Icarus Industries logo over top of it in AR. It was only just the proverbial cherry on top of all the brand stamping they had done all over the city; on the street level, there were many other signs bearing the logos of Icarus brand products, ranging from their trademark cybernetic implants and robotic servants to firearms, automobiles (AutoCar services were slowly phasing out personal owned vehicles, but the American drive for individuality dies hard), and everyone's favorite fast food chains, now staffed entirely or almost entirely by robotic fry cooks, robotic waitresses, and robotic janitors. Even the streets themselves were patrolled by wheeled robot drones with display screens on their bodies, advertising how great Icarus Industries and their subsidiary Asimov Robotics were, and whatever wares they wanted you to buy this week. A few of them even singled me out as I passed by them on the sidewalks, detecting the wi-fi signals sent by my own implants and calling me out by name, or at least by one of the pseudonyms I went by in areas of heavy corporate control, Philip Marlowe.

"Mr. Marlowe, I can tell from your 2079 model Icarus brand cybereye and pneumatic cyberarm that you are a man of taste!" One of the bots went on with its flattery routine as it rolled in front of my path. "For your loyalty to the Icarus line of cybernetic implants, I am pleased to offer you a ten percent discount on the new 2084 models when you upgrade your implants!"
"Sorry, not interested." I told the bot and moved on past it. The hardware in my body was not only different from the usual consumer models (even before they were modified for my personal use, but that's a different story), they were also keepsakes from another time, a reminder of the past that I carried with me, as a literal part of myself.

A few more blocks of wishing I had taken the time to install advertisement blocking software onto my cybereye and AR overlay, and I finally arrived at the Arena of Pleasure, the hottest new entertainment venue in Seattle, or so the advertisements would have had me believe. A long line of retropunks, many of them Class I and II cyborgs, waited eagerly at the entrance, looking like an entire rainbow of deliberately outdated hair and clothing styles. Fashion trends are cyclical, so what was popular roughly a century ago looked to be coming back into vogue for this crowd. The slate gray trench coat I had been wearing didn't seem out of place here. A few of the rainbow mohawked punks commented that I was just a fedora away from looking like a cyborg Sam Spade. How did they know about that other pseudonym I used?

I tried presenting my backstage pass to the robot running the ticket booth, but it told me that I would have to wait in line to present it and for the doors to open like everyone else. Looks like I didn't get any special privileges for the show itself. Maybe Aaron didn't want to draw too much attention to my special invitation. At least, that was the justification I kept telling to myself during the wait. In the meantime, I used my comm to send a text to Vykarius, to find out if he had finished decrypting whatever it was we found yesterday.

The doors finally opened, and I got stuck somewhere in the middle of the crowd when the show started. A network of laser lights lit up the stage, and the AR projection of a massive dragon flew over the crowd before landing on the stage, breathing a blast of flame as the stage was engulfed in smoke. Once it had cleared up, the entirety of Burning Chrome was standing there, their instruments at the ready as the crowd cheered. The lead singer raised his arm as a burst of pyrotechnics lit up the stage and the band launched into their first song.

Burning Chrome's sound was known for their style of classical music that was once known as "heavy metal", invoking a century old tradition of electric guitars and drums and combining it with more 2080s sensibilities, such as the use of both vintage and contemporary synthesizers. The practice of involving electronic instruments with traditional metal was often considered heresy back in its original days, but since this sort of sound also happened to be popular around the same time, the two styles were combined to give Burning Chrome a very retro futuristic vibe, performing songs about the social issues of the current year as if they had been written a hundred years in the past.

Most of the band members themselves had been bionically enhanced for their performance, a trait that probably got them in the favor of performing at venues in such heavily corporately controlled cities around the West Coast Sprawl. Their lead singer Rob Byford had a special set of lungs and vocal chords to augment his singing, allowing him to create vocal distortion effects by himself, without the help of further devices. Such enhancements were popular with actors and performers, while vocal alteration surgeries remained popular on the black market for spies and con artists that needed themselves to sound like someone else.

Lars Travis's gleaming chrome arms stood out from the rest of his brown toned physique as he worked away at the drums. He was living proof that prosthetic arms could be just as articulate as the real things, maybe even more so in some cases. Prosthetic arms were common in job markets that required lots of heavy lifting, at least the ones that hadn't been replaced by robot workers yet. My own right arm is able to lift one thousand pounds without issue, a feature that has prevented a lot of bad messes in the past. I'm just glad that it can absorb all the recoil of such a massive, high caliber cyborg pistol such as Goldhart. I tried firing it with my natural left arm once, put my shoulder out of commission for a week. Mechanical arms were great for handling heavy firearms too, and that made the weapons coming out of the cyborg wars in the 2050s quite scary indeed.

In between that bassist Lenny Hawkwind and that new keyboardist that I can never seem to remember the name of, Roland Something, there was my contact, the lead guitarist Aaron Steel, a real piece of work on and off the stage. Unlike the rest of the band, he had no apparent cyborg implants, although he did have a tendency to be able to set things on fire with little more than a hand gesture and a thought. The left half of his face was currently a mess of circuits and wires indicative of a classic mechanical cyborg that, on closer inspection, was actually just face paint; it was a common style for him to wear makeup that made him look like a cyborg without actually being one, perhaps as an act of defiance against the consumerist nature of modern transhumanism. The facepaint barely even stood out from his full head of deep red hair that reached all the way down to his shoulders, slightly lighter than blood in color. His long jacket, aside from the spiked shoulders and studded forearm sleeves, was usually a solid black like his leather pants and steel toed boots, but this jacket was actually electrochromic in nature. He could change its color at will, or display various moving images that would dance across its surface. During the show, it was displaying a trail of flames that rose up from the bottom edges of his jacket, and would intensify whenever he launched into a wailing solo on his crimson red guitar. He spent most of the show near the front and center of the stage, as everyone knew he was the real star of Burning Chrome, or as much of a frontman as he could be without being the singer.

As the show was wrapping up, I slipped my way through the crowd towards the backstage, showing my virtual pass to the security guard, a human one for a change, and he quickly stepped aside as if he were expecting my arrival. I found Aaron with the rest of the band in one of the backstage prep rooms, where he was using a cloth to wipe away the cyborg makeup from his face.
"I've been led to believe that you have information regarding the Class X cyborg that attacked an Icarus Industries office in Redmond." I didn't feel like announcing my presence with any greetings, so I simply approached Aaron with this.
Aaron turned to me with an amused grin, taking the cloth out of his face. "Well, aren't you just straight and to the point, Stony Joe! Some of my groupies are very direct like that, too. Except that they usually just walk up and grab me by the-"
"If you know about the presence of a Class X cyborg in Redmond, then you must also already know that the leader of the Redmond Razers and I were also present during the attack, because that wasn't reported by the media either. What else do you know?" I had to wonder if it was simply Vykarius that was sharing this information with Aaron, or if he had his own sources. Probably the latter, considering what else I already knew about him.
"Ah, so you did have the pleasure of meeting the Angel Of Retribution in the flesh...so to speak?"
"The Angel of...what?" At last, I was starting to get a name of some sort.
"The Angel Of Retribution is what they're calling him. He talks about retribution and revenge a lot in his manifestos, and eyewitness sightings of him reminded me and other classical music fans of an old album cover with a similar name, so that name's kind of stuck. The reports and sightings of this Angel go all the way back to the early 2060s."

Aaron and I were only children in the 2060s. Growing up, I could vaguely recall rumors and hearsay of a killer cyborg attacking corporate establishments, but I always thought the other kids were just talking about some holo-comic superhero at first. Part of the reason I joined the Cerberus Security Systems police force was to find out if there was anything behind these rumors.

"Does this Angel of Retribution have some kind of vendetta against Icarus Industries?" I asked Aaron. "His entire body looked to be Icarus built, and he was carrying military grade arms the likes of which only Icarus's own private army would have."
"He's got a beef with all of the Big Three, judging by his actions over the years!" Aaron replied, putting away his guitar and pulling out the case of what initially appeared to be a similar looking guitar, were it not for the rifle barrel in the headstock, and the trigger and magazine loader in the body. I noticed that Lars was also holding a pair of electric stun batons that from a glance appeared to be only an ordinary pair of drumsticks.

Known only to myself and a few others in the business was the fact that Burning Chrome was more than just a retro rock band; they were also a band of mercenaries, and going on tour was the perfect cover for their global operations, which often involved the Big Three. In this case, the Big Three was the triumvirate of Icarus Industries, Asclepius Medical, and Mitashi Technologies, the multinational conglomerates that collectively controlled almost the entire West Coast Sprawl from Washington and Oregon down to Nevada and northern California. Corporations tended to stay out of each other's way when monopolizing the commerce in individual cities, but territory disputes were common and frequently dealt with behind the scenes, and not all of their problems could be dealt with by their own private militaries; to maintain plausible deniability, the corporations enlisted outside help from anonymous, expendable third parties like mercenaries and spies. Burning Chrome often did their business with anonymous representatives that probably represented each of the Big Three at some point or another.

"The Angel of Retribution..." Aaron continued, "...each of the Big Three has put a pretty huge bounty on his head for the destruction of their property and the murder of hundreds of their employees, most of them high level executives. According to the rumors, he leaves behind a digital manifesto at most of his attack sites, talks a lot about corporate corruption, wanting revenge for the cyborg wars, that sort of thing. The corporate media's been trying to suppress this, but word keeps getting out. His fanbase on the G.R.I.D. social networks is probably even bigger than my band's!"
"Do we have any history of his augmentation procedures? Becoming a Class X cyborg would have to put you on some kind of registry..."
"That's the thing. No one has ever come forward to claim that they worked with the Angel or were involved in his cybersurgery procedures. Some think that he's a veteran of the cyborg wars. It would explain the military grade weaponry and the classified nature of his very existence, and his hatred for the corporations..."
"The Angel of Retribution...the enemy of my enemy." I thought aloud. "You seem to know a lot about him, Aaron. Have you ever been in contact?"
Aaron was examining his cleverly disguised guitar-rifle. "For the protection of my current client...I cannot confirm or deny this at the present moment. I'm sure that you, Joe, as a private investigator, will understand."
"I thought that Burning Chrome didn't do wetwork."
"We don't. Maybe at least one of the Big Three wants the Angel alive."
"Then you must have some leads as to his whereabouts."
"Maybe we do, maybe we don't. I can't say I know where he is, but I do know where he was." Aaron reached into a pocket under his jacket and handed me a folded piece of paper, an uncommon sight in the 2080s. "He was recently seen in the warehouse district by the docks, trying to get into a specific one of them. Maybe whatever he was looking for is still in there. Who knows what he might do if someone else got to it first?"


## Chapter 4

Row after row after row of identical looking warehouses, all lined up the exact same distance apart from each other. All of them differentiated on the outside with nothing more than a serial number, yet all of them having completely different contents on the inside. Every time I went near the warehouse district, I couldn't help but think of it as a perfect metaphor for society's enforcement of uniformity and conformity onto the outward appearance of its citizens, despite how much uniqueness every one of them had to share on the inside. Things that had to be shelved and locked away, to be used instead by the powers that be for who knows what selfish purposes. What made this whole scene especially ironic was that this warehouse district resided by the Seattle docks, the capital city of Gibson Springs, controlled by Icarus Industries, a company born in 2030s Detroit by the mind of an entrepreneur with the American dream of standing out far and above all the rest as an individual. In the process of that dream becoming a reality, this individual became a collective, his vision of unification forcing a uniformity on all of his subjects. Are you really an exceptional individual when you make everyone else like you?

Some bad weather coming in from the Atlantic, as well as the Angel's previous visit, had knocked out a portion of the district's security systems recently. I used the information Vykarius had given me on this to find the gaps between their surveillance parameters and let myself in through a big enough hole in the fence. From there, all I needed to do was follow the numbers to find Warehouse 893.

I expected the place to be more heavily guarded after the Angel's attack, but instead the front doors were left wide open, and I had yet to find a single patrol, outside of some security drones whose sweeping patterns were easy enough for me to evade. No human guards were present that I could see. Even though the interior was dark, I doubted anyone would want to do their rounds with the lights out. I didn't want to risk tripping any alarms by turning them on, however, so I simply flicked on the built-in flashlight on my cybereye and started having a look around.

The warehouse's ceiling must have been at least fifty feet high, and the place was filled with rows of metal shelves that went up at least half that height, so I started looking at the ground level shelves first. Anything higher than that and I would have to operate some noisy lifting machine. I had to hope that whatever I was looking for would stick out from the rest of the storage. Most of the shelves contained featureless brown crates differentiated only by serial numbers that meant nothing to me.

Eventually, as I reached the back end of the shelving area, I found my first distinct stored items: a half dozen black coffin sized containment capsules with glass windows over a top section. Five of them appeared empty to my investigations. The sixth, however, contained a woman. She looked to be sleeping or comatose. If there were any life support systems on or inside the capsule keeping her alive, they were awfully discrete about it. It made sense; the interface wouldn't need to be displayed if the pod was being kept away in storage, with no one to interact with it. At the same time, however, I couldn't immediately figure out how to activate this unit. It was probably for the best, as the onboard software could send a wireless signal that would be detected by the district's G.R.I.D. security for all I knew. If this girl was what the Angel was looking for, I would be better off trying to haul the entire capsule away, and getting Vykarius to open it for me.

As I was reaching for my comm to send a message to Vyke about what I had found, however, I suddenly felt something cold and sharp pressing against the back of my neck, followed slowly by a heavily accented voice commanding "Yameru! Turn around! Slowly!" I did so, raising up my hands as I rotated myself in a half circle to find five black haired men in business-casual attire, with guns and swords all pointed at me, the one in front holding a katana up to my throat with an arm heavily tattooed with images of serpentine dragons and Japanese kanji.

"I had no idea this was Yakuza territory." I stated calmly. "Or have I pissed off your Oyabun bad enough to track me down all the way here?" To anyone living an even slightly nonstandard lifestyle in the West Coast Sprawl, It was a poorly kept secret that the notorious Hazunomo-Gumi played an instrumental role in the rise of Mitashi Technologies as a corporate superpower in Japan, with many backroom deals between this Yakuza syndicate and company founder Ken Mitashi believed to be responsible for many mysterious accidents and deaths of key employees of rival companies at inopportune times. When MitaTech expanded their empire overseas, the Hazunomos came with them. In the West Coast Sprawl, MitaTech's primary area of influence was around the Autumn Falls region in Nevada, so finding some Yaks here in the middle of Gibson Springs was a bit of a surprise.

"Why are you here?" The man with the katana asked.
"That's a good question. I don't think there's any reason for us to be anywhere at all. No one belongs anywhere, we're just riding the currents of a chaotic universe that couldn't care less about our significance or lack thereof."
It was generally a good idea not to piss off a man with a sword, but I had an angle. "Well, you certainly don't belong here! You forget you saw anything and leave!"

The group started to part and motioned for me to leave the way I came. I slowly headed out between them, and got a few paces past them when-

"Wait!" One of the men shouted. "He has a cybereye! He could be recording this!" So they noticed that my right eye was still projecting a light.
"We can't let him do that." Another one said. "Cut his eyes out!"

I knew I needed to reach into my trench coat for this, and at hearing this, I spun around to draw my white revolver to blast the nearest Yak as he ran at me with a sword. His head burst open like a crushed watermelon, his sword clattering to the floor as he fell, and three of the remaining four returned fire at me with machine pistols. I ran behind another aisle of shelves for cover.

I managed to round a corner just before another one of them could reach my aisle, and I leaned around to tag him in the shoulder with another revolver round, blowing his arm clean out of its shattered socket. None of the others came around this way. They must have been approaching me from other directions, so I ducked into the next aisle over, where I had enough time to reach for my comm device and press my panic button before a trail of gunfire tore itself through the wooden boxes of the shelves next to me. I fell prone and tried crawling under the line of fire, using my mechanical arm to punch the boxes out of the way until I had a clear sight of my assailant. Just as he seemed to figure out what I was doing, I raised Goldhart to punch a massive hole through his chest cavity.

As I scrambled back to my feet, I felt a blade slice across my back as the man with the katana struck at me from behind. I spun around and tried to take a shot at him, but he was too close and I couldn't put any distance between me and him. He lifted his blade and struck at me with a downward slice, and I blocked it with my metallic forearm. I tried forcing him away from me this way, but he continued to push his blade against my arm, trying to force it down. In a risky move, I let go of Goldhart with this arm, and caught it with my left hand, pressing the nose of the barrel into the man's side before blasting the shot clear through his torso. The gun's recoil dislocated my left shoulder something fierce, but the man with the katana had been stopped.

I dropped Goldhart onto the floor as the pain coursed through my back and left arm, and as I leaned down to pick it back up, a burst of bullets sailed by me, grazing my right side and striking me in the right shoulder. I lost all sense of my cyberarm as the injury knocked out my neural control over its functions, and looked up to see the last man, slowly walking towards me with a machine pistol trained on me.

"What do the Yakuza want with this place?" I asked the man as he approached. "How did you get this far out of MitaTech territory and slip right under Icarus' noses? Is the Hazunomo-Gumi in bed with them too?"
"Hazunomo?" The man snorted out a derisive laugh. "Baka ne, don't even compare us to them." As he said this, I noticed a set of tiny red lights approaching through the aisle behind him, accompanied by a faint whirring sound. He seemed to notice this just in time to turn around and be riddled with machine gun bullets from head to toe, turning his body into swiss cheese.

I shone my cybereye light onto the red lights, and found them to belong to the body of a hovering security drone armed with a small machine gun cannon. "Sorry I'm late, but I have good news as to why." Vykarius's voice came out of the drone. I'll be damned, my panic call actually went through.

"And I've got some more news right here-" I returned to the stasis capsules at the back of the warehouse, but this time all six of them were empty. I noticed the hovering drone turn away from me to one side, and I followed my gaze in that direction. There, leaning around the corner of the aisle, was the woman from inside one of the capsules, with a frightened look on her face as she stared at my wounded frame and the armed drone beside me.


## Chapter 5

"So, you don't remember anything? Not a damned thing?" Of course, it wouldn't have been that easy, I thought.
"I'm sorry, I don't remember anything since I woke up." The woman replied, looking sad. I had taken her the stealthy route back out of the warehouse district, and now we were waiting for the next AutoBus to Redmond.
"You at least remember a name, right? Your name?"
She looked like she was thinking about it long and hard. "Andria." She finally replied. "Andria with an I. Andria Turing."
"Joseph Stone. Do you know what you were doing in that pod? Have you heard of anyone called the Angel of Retribution?"
"I don't, and I don't know anything about such a person."
"They were looking for you, Andria With An I." I replied just as the bus was arriving, and we stepped on. "If you're not an employee of any of the Big Three...maybe you were a test subject for one of them, willing or otherwise. I knew they were dirty and corrupt, but I never thought they would so nonchalantly ship people around like cargo, after wiping their own memories."

Once we were on the bus, I opened my comm to open contact with Vykarius. He said that we would get back in contact after he was finished operating the security drone. Perhaps inspired by this, his G.R.I.D. avatar had changed to that of a bearded, goggled man in a baseball cap, welding mask and overalls, a stereotypical American drone engineer. "Howdy, what can ah do ya fer, cousin Joe?" He spoke with a southern drawl. "That was some mighty good shootin' ya did back there, slick! Ya hardly needed me an my metal bird!"
"Vyke, can you do a sweep through the Icarus employee databases for anything on an Andria Turing, Andria with an I? Maybe try digging through the Asclepius archives as well. They seem more likely to have human test subjects."
"Can do, pardner!" Vyke's avatar flickered out of my AR overlay for a moment, then returned. "Oh, and by the way, ah haven't heard word from dear old Johnny Blade or any of the Razers since yesterday. Ya might wanna stop by their hideaway an give em a holler fer me, ya hear?" His avatar flickered out a second time.

"Who was that?" Andria asked, a question quite startling to me.
"Who was what?"
"The guy in the overalls, the hologram."
"You could see him?" I leaned in to Andria to get a better look at her icy blue eyes. "You're not wearing any AR glasses or goggles. You must have a pair of cybereyes...but they look just like the real deal to me. You can see augmented reality objects?"
"You mean all these holograms all over the place?"
"Yes, the G.R.I.D. projects two and three dimensional objects over the real world in real time. You can view this AR overlay with AR glasses, goggles, or if you're like me, cybereyes. Damn, you didn't forget all about the G.R.I.D., did you? You're not going to function well in society if you don't know about it."

She gave me a sad, confused look and a shake of her head that told me everything and confirmed at least a few of my worst suspicions. I responded with a disappointed sigh and began to explain. "All right, the G.R.I.D. is the Global Reality Integration Domain. Earlier in the century, they had a computer network called the World Wide Web. Then MitaTech and a few other companies came along and integrated virtual and augmented reality into it, and now we call it the G.R.I.D. It's a VR world that uses satellite positioning to overlay itself onto the entire planet on a 1:1 scale. The AR and VR overlays are two separate layers. Some digital objects appear in both layers, most others in one place or another. Most of the time we're passively viewing the AR layer, since we can still see the real world around it, but VR is a realm of its own."
"Does this MitaTech company own the G.R.I.D. and everything on it, then?"
"I sure hope not. As far as I know, they were only involved in its creation. Whoever owns the real world property also owns the corresponding G.R.I.D. space overlaying it, both the AR and VR layers. Most of the appliances and security systems in your home can be interacted with on your G.R.I.D. space."
"Your appliances are all online? Does that mean...what if someone were to hack into them?"
I gave a knowing smirk as she asked this. "Electronic security systems are a pretty big business. At least...they would be if the likes of Icarus and MitaTech didn't create AI programs that write their own encryption algorithms. Access to privately owned G.R.I.D. spaces is heavily restricted and controlled by the owners of said spaces. You can make the visibility and interactivity with any given AR object in your domain exclusive only to yourself or certain people. There are quite a few security measures in place on the G.R.I.D... and my friend Vykarius knows his way around most of them."
"Vykarius? That was the man you were talking to before, right?"
"Yes. He and I go way back."
"Does he always...look like that?"
"No, of course not. Your G.R.I.D. avatar can look like pretty much anything you want it to. Men, women, children, animals, cartoon characters, buildings, monuments, abstract symbols...Vykarius has been most of these things at some point or another."
"Have you ever met him in person? What does he really look like? In the real world, I mean."
"I have met him in person. He doesn't look like anything in the real world."
"What do you mean?"
"It's complicated. I'm not sure even I fully understand it." I replied, testing out my cyberarm by bending the joints and balling the fingers into a fist. Control over it was returning as the nanite colony in my circulatory system was working to heal the injuries I sustained from my brush with the Yakuza. One benefit of having a hundred thousand microscopic robots in your bloodstream was that they could repair your body at a rate far faster than the human body normally allowed for. Any other foreign objects stuck under my skin, like bullets, were broken down and absorbed as an energy source for the nanites, in addition to blood sugars. "If you were listening to my conversation with Vyke, then you know that we're going to see the Redmond Razers. Don't worry, they won't lay a finger on you if I'm the one that sends you."
"The Redmond...Razers?" Andria started to look worried. "Are they...a gang? What are you doing with a gang?"
"I've been in some pretty tough circumstances the past couple of years. The Redmond Razers, and their sister gang the Redwood Razers from SoCal, happened to be the ones to bail me out of it. I've been indebted to them ever since. I still owe them a few more favors."
"What kind of...work do you do that would get you into so much trouble?"
"I'm a private investigator. It's a very dirty job when you really get down to it. In a world where people are telling their own stories on the G.R.I.D.'s social networks, and the corporations all have their own media outlets that sell you their own version of current events, there is a market for people looking for something that's becoming harder and harder to find these days: the truth. The truth about someone's personal affairs. The truth about a corporate employee's dealings. The truth about a politician's agenda. Hell, these days the media could get away with lying to you about the color of the goddamned sky, and if someone wants to pay me to find out what color it really is, so fucking be it! So long as I'm well compensated enough for all the unsavory characters I have to rub elbows with to dig for that truth, I'll find it for them. I'm not even kidding about the sky part, either. I once met a junkie who spent so much time in VR that he had forgotten which world was the real one. He was burned out on Alice, a trendy new street drug that overstimulates your audiovisual perceptions. Of course, Asclepius tried to make a legal, watered down prescription version of Alice, but a lot of desperate lowlifes in Winterton are still clamoring for the real deal. These are just the sorts of things I learn as a PI, Andria. The more you learn about the true nature of this world, the less you want to live in it. The more you'd rather escape to VR."

It was probably a lot for Andria to take in, and I didn't blame her. She didn't look like she knew what to say for the rest of the trip, only that she was confused and didn't know where to go. The Redmond Razers may have had a bad public reputation to everyone outside of Redmond, but they were one of the few people left in this world that I could still trust, despite their violent behavior. It wasn't like I was very much better with that. What have I become?

The walk from the bus stop off to our destination was eerily quiet, even for the dead of night. When we returned to my office, my desk computer had been left on, all of my case files open. I hadn't done any of these things when I had left. I drew Goldhart out from under my coat, staring at the name carved down the left side of its barrel as I feared the worst, and held the gun to my side as I made my way further back into the building, into the Razers' hideout.

"Johnny? Travis? Zoey?" I called out as I noticed the iron door to the hideout proper had been blown off its own hinges and lay on the floor of the hallway, and motioned for Andria to stay inside my office. The inside looked like a war zone, the walls and furniture riddled with bullet holes and drying blood stains. The floor was littered with shell casings, smashed electronic components, and dismembered body parts. I recognized one of the corpses as Travis, and glimpsed another figure moving in the corner. It was Zoey, slumped up against the wall, covered in blood and ballistic burn markings.

"Zoey? Oh fuck, Zoey! What the hell happened here!? Shit, where did they stash the first aid kit? You need help!"
Zoey tried to speak, but was unsuccessful at first as she coughed up a mouthful of blood. "Don't bother." Her voice was strained and weak. "It was a raid. We were outnumbered. We never had a fucking chance."
"Who did this? Who the fuck did this!? Was it those Cerberus fuckers? Where are the others? Where's Johnny!?" I started frantically searching around the wreckage for that first aid kit. The place was a lot emptier than I remembered last seeing it.
"Johnny...he ran away like a fucking coward. Maybe I should have, too. It wasn't Cerberus, no. These guys...they were something else. They could...do things, with their minds. Move things, crush things, make things explode. I've never seen anything like it."
"Who were they, Zoey!? I'll make every last one of those fuckers pay!"
"There was a lady with them. One with red hair. Send her to hell for me. Tell her, I'll be waiting there to fuck up her shit..." Her eyes rolled back into her head, and her breathing slowed to a stop. I tried to do everything I could, but my cybereye's bioscanner made it clear: her vital signs were gone.

It was then that I had received a new message on my comm. It wasn't from any one of my contacts, it was from someone simply called Simon. "I know of your affiliation with the Redmond Razers, Joseph Stone." The message began, "They are now the most wanted criminals in all of Gibson Springs, and are being hunted down by the Sprawl's greatest bounty hunters as you read this. There is a ten million Icarus Credit reward for information leading to the arrest or execution of all Redmond Razers associates. Yours is not known, but unless you do exactly what Simon says, it will be."


## Chapter 6

Much to my surprise, it didn't look like Cerberus Security Systems, the private law enforcement branch of Icarus Industries, had much if anything to do with the attack on the Redmond Razers' hideout. I couldn't think of very many other enemies that the Razers had that would have the motive, means, and opportunity to carry out such an attack, especially not one that would happen the way that Zoey described it, unless her trauma and blood loss had left her delusional in her final moments. Considering that my computer desk appeared to have been gone through, there existed the possibility that they could have been after me instead, and would tear down everything in their way to get to me. I knew I couldn't hide from my own past forever; a certain someone must have found out about me, and now everyone I knew was in danger. I had to get the hell out of Redmond, out of Gibson Springs, as far away from the reach of the corporate powers as I could. I had to get to Winterton.

The Winterton region was where those too poor to afford the extravagant, materialistic, consumerist lifestyles of the other three corporate controlled regions of the West Coast Sprawl would end up. It largely consisted of mile after mile of slums and shanty towns, with a few oases of luxury in this desert of poverty, like the San Diego sector. With no corporate law enforcement, the peace, if you could call it that, was protected by local gangs and crime syndicates carving out territories for themselves, drawing borders that would get redrawn after every one of the frequently occurring skirmishes. If a private enterprise could succeed in Winterton, it could only be through the help of one of these syndicates and their influence, such as the notorious Marconi family and their dealings with several small businesses that helped San Diego to flourish. I might have a slim chance of survival there as long as I didn't give the Marconis a reason to be suspicious of my presence. If I was lucky, they might only have me dispose of a few bodies rather than be the one that makes them dead.

Even if the Marconis were to put me on such a leash, however, I was already collared first by Simon, holding my involvement with the Razers over my head. If Simon knew about this, he should also know about the Redwood Razers, and what they might do if they found out what happened to their brothers in Redmond. They could be the next targets, and I had to warn them, but I didn't have any method of contacting them; they burned their last G.R.I.D. contact information, and Johnny was supposed to give me their new ones today, but now Johnny was nowhere to be found, and wasn't responding to any of my calls. What will happen to you, Johnny Blade?

All of my personal data was already backed up on my comm, so I wiped my computer desk to make sure no one else could trace it back to me, and set off with Andria on the next AutoBus line to Portland. It just so happened to be closer to my destination, but Simon had just sent me the coordinates to the I/O Port, a local bar in the area. Whether he was sending me to my demise or a chance to continue living by following his orders, I could only find out when I got there. I was a whole day's AutoCar ride to get from Seattle to San Diego, after all, and there were enough toll booths and security checkpoints along the way that I would surely be detected by at least one of the people trying to kill me. A plane ride seemed a bit out of the question as well, as I couldn't afford to get into the Icarus Airlines passenger database. I needed a private jet. Maybe Burning Chrome might let me ride theirs if their tour took me in the right direction.

Padmir was a Russian ex-soldier that had opened the I/O Port after the cyborg wars had ended, and had been running it ever since. He was a tough man, and lots of tough individuals frequented his establishment because he knew he could deal with them. Or at least that's what I had assumed growing up. He had two cybernetic arms with which to serve drinks and throw out unruly patrons, and a pair of red cybernetic eyes. A bit like myself in this regard, but more symmetrical. I would have spoken with him to catch up on old times, but I was here on business, and my contact was waiting for me.

"You are...Hera Erisson, correct? Joseph Stone. Simon sent me." I stated. Hera looked to be in her early thirties, with a deep purple head of hair tied up into a bun, and a pair of black horn rimmed glasses on her face. She was dressed in something more upscale than one would expect to find in a seedy dive bar like this one. She certainly looked out of her element, as if she had been coerced into coming so far away to a place like this by someone like Simon. I felt concerned for her safety, somehow.
"Oh, Joseph, it's just awful!" Hera looked distraught. "It's not me, it's my darling, Albert Drake!" She pulled out her comm and an AR object appeared in front of my eyes, its visibility set only to mine and hers. It was a donation certificate from Albert Drake, the CEO of Asclepius Medical, to the Singularity Church, a cyborg cult that was gaining a certain prominence and notoriety in the West Coast Sprawl. "Do you see it, Mr. Stone? There's been increasingly frequent reports of cyborg attacks around the Sprawl, and people are thinking that members of this Church are involved. If the public were to think that the leader of Asclepius was supporting a suspected terrorist group, well, the merest allegation could mean a disaster for his entire company and his employees!"

The document looked genuine, as far as I could tell. Donations of large sums of money to organizations were no longer required to be made public in the United States, since these were one of the most obvious ways to discover conflicts of interest between corporate bodies. The law was abolished shortly after the cyborg wars, and with it, the specifications as to how and what extent the Big Three were involved in those wars had also vanished, and by pulling the strings of more and more career politicians in Congress and the Courts, more laws were changed to make things easier for the corporations to perform clandestine operations.

"Asclepius owns the media in Summer Heights." I told Hera. "They'll be able to spin this story into something positive and damage controlling, I'm certain of it."
"In Summer Heights, maybe." Hera admitted. "But the media outlets in Gibson Springs and Autumn Falls wouldn't sell the same narrative. Icarus and MitaTech would jump on this opportunity to eviscerate Asclepius in the court of public opinion!"

I would have almost preferred it that way, myself. Anything to shake the common folk's trust in these corrupt corporate bodies. I wanted to leak this information myself right then and there, but...I felt some sense of fear that I couldn't quite place. Was I afraid of the possible ramifications of innocent employees losing their livelihoods when their employers took a nosedive? No, it would be better for all of them in the end. This could have been a fear of what Simon might do in retaliation. It was fascinating how he was extorting a corporate figure as well as a lowly investigator such as myself. What could his motives be? I would have to get Vykarius to do some digging to try to figure out the identity of this mysterious extortionist.

"Did Simon send this to you instead of Drake? Wouldn't he have more to gain from him instead?" I inquired.
"Drake and I...well, we're an item. I took Simon's messages in his stead. I couldn't bear to let him come under such stress!" And I was oddly compelled to feel sympatheic to her plight. "I want this whole thing dealt with before he can ever find out!"
"What is it that Simon wants you to do, then?"
"He wants me to bring this to the Singularity priest that is arriving at the Portland International Airport tomorrow." She produced a small data drive and thrust it into my hand. I slotted it into my comm and tried to open its digital contents. The drive contained a single massive file in a format that neither I nor my comm recognized, and seemed to be written in a code completely unfamiliar to myself and my device.
"Miss Erisson, what the hell is this?" I unplugged the drive in defeat.
"It's written in a machine language created by the Singularity Church. They will know what to do with it. Simon didn't tell me anything else, and threatened to leak the donation certificate if I questioned him further!"
"I'll deliver this to the priests in your stead, Miss Erisson. We can't afford to have you being seen with anyone from the Singularity Church either."
Hera's worried expression started to evaporate, and she began to smile. "That's a great idea. Thank you so much, Mr. Stone." I was feeling glad about it too.
"However," I began, "I would like to know if there is something else that you could do for me in return."
"What is it, Mr. Stone? Whatever could I do to make this worth your while?"
"I need a private, untraceable flight to San Diego. One way trip, no questions asked."
Hera thought about this for moment, then gave a nod. "It will be waiting for you at the airport on the same day, after you deliver the drive."

Andria, who had been waiting for me at the bar, approached me and tugged on my shoulder, pointing to a group of Asian men with tattooed arms walking in through the entrance towards us. Shit, the Yakuza had found me again. I reached for my gun under my coat, and I could see the Yaks reaching for theirs, when suddenly a young man with a scar across his left cheek approached from behind them, raising his hands and giving them some commands in Japanese. Just like that, they lowered their guards and stood aside for the young man to approach me, greeting me with a bow.

"Stone-san, it is a great pleasure to finally meet you in person. I knew you were someone to pay attention to when you slew a half dozen of my men in Warehouse 893!" I could hardly believe it. It was Ryuji Hazunomo, the Oyabun's own son.
"I wasn't seeking your attention, you can take it elsewhere." I told Ryuji. "Are you going to kill me right here, in the middle of this bar, in front of all these roughnecks?"
"That is for you to decide." Ryuji replied. "My father would be greatly displeased if he found out what happened to some of his finest men. The truth has been kept a secret from him so far. Whatever really happened, he would trust my word on the matter over anyone else's."
"You're a long ways away from Autumn Falls, and an even longer ways away from Tokyo. It's quite strange that you Yaks would be operating as far out as Gibson Springs."
"We live in strange times indeed. So strange, in fact, that I would be willing to let such an insult to the Hazunomo-Gumi slide if I could make it work in my favor."
"Whatever you wanna do to me, Ryuji, just make it quick, all right? I'm on a tight schedule here."
Ryuji gave a hearty laugh. "Always a busy man, aren't you Stone-san? Well then, you would be interested in knowing that my father and I have not been seeing eye to eye lately. If you want to keep your head on your neck, you would do best to listen to my own loyal men, and not my father's."
"What do you want me do about your personal family issues?"
"Nothing, Stone-san. Nothing at all. I must call all the shots for the Hazunomo-Gumi, and my father shall see who is truly fit to run the empire! My loyal subjects are the tools of my bidding. And you, Stone-san, I know what you are capable of. You will be a valuable weapon in my arsenal, and the time for you to be drawn for battle will be coming very soon. I can only hope, for your sake, that you will be a well sharpened weapon when that time comes."

Ryuji gave another bow and motioned for his men to follow him back out the way they came. I had no intention of doing anything that he would want me to, and hoped that he wouldn't be able to find me once I got to Winterton. My gut told me, however, that avoiding the wrath of Simon and the Yakuza wouldn't be that easy.


## Chapter 7

The Portland International Airport had been acquired by Icarus Industries sometime in the 2040s, and became a primary waypoint for shipping American soldiers out to the cyborg wars in the 2050s, helping establish the company's dominance throughout Oregon and Washington in the post-war economic boom. As the place continued to be a busy center of travel in the Gibson Springs region, it was only a small surprise that I would encounter Aaron Steel and the rest of Burning Chrome on my way to meet some priests of the Singularity Church that had just flown in from Japan.

"Aaron, I need to talk to you." I told him as I approached him and the band by one of the terminals, and led him into one of the security cameras' blind spots by one corner. "I've come into the crosshairs of an extortionist calling himself Simon, and like a total smartass, he wants me to do everything that says or he'll leak my involvement with the Razers to Icarus. Worse yet, when I followed up your lead to Warehouse 893, I found her being stored in a containment pod, for some reason." I pointed to Andria. "That's not all. A half dozen Yaks were there trying to kill me, and now the Oyabun's own son says I owe him a favor for defending myself against the Hazunomo-Gumi."
Aaron looked quite amused at hearing all of this, his face lighting up into a grin. "Sounds like you've been quite busy, Joe! Where are you going now? Are you on a tour of your own or something?"
"It's the Razers, Aaron. The Redmond Razers were pretty much wiped out by what sounds like bounty hunters while I was finding Andria. You're a mercenary, Aaron. You and the rest of Burning Chrome. You wouldn't happen to know anything about it, would you?"
Aaron raised his hands and shook his head. "No, we don't do wetwork, Joe! I've told you before! We only take living prisoners."
"Do you also take VIPs to protect? Because I've dragged Andria through a lot of danger as a result of all this. She doesn't deserve to get into what I've gotten myself into." I asked, looking back to the confused girl. She didn't seem to know what to make of everything, and appeared very unfamiliar with anything and anyone in the Sprawl.
"The Chromes and I are heading off to the San Francisco sector in Summer Heights for the next leg of our Sprawl tour. If there's anything weird about her, she'll be accepted in the biomod capital of America!" It was probably true, Aaron's words. Asclepius Medical held exclusivity rights to countless medical procedures, lifesaving and cosmetic alike. An entire generation of designer babies had grown up with more than ordinary human attributes since the company's founding in 2050s Germany, having rocketed to corporate superpower status with their development of biomodded supersoldiers during the cyborg wars.
"If you can keep her safe, I just might be able to have enough hands free to figure out what happened to the Razers. Their leader Johnny Blade has gone missing, and I'm going to check up with the Redwood Razers in the Winterton region to see if they know anything. I'll get Vykarius to manage whatever payments you want for protecting Andria."
"Don't worry about, Joe." Aaron held up a thumb in an assuring gesture. "I'll give you the loyalty discount for this one! We got plenty of room in our private jet, you sure you don't want to come with us to Summer Heights?"
"I'm quite sure, Aaron." I replied. "I'd rather not test the patience of Simon or Ryuji this early on."
Aaron gave a shrug. "Suit yourself, Stony Joe. I hope you know what you're doing, going at this all by yourself."
"The last group of people that relied on me for support are all dead, and I paid for that mistake with nearly half my own body." I raised my mechanical right arm, and used it to point to my cybernetic right eye.
As Aaron recalled this memory, his usual cheerful and fiery personality appeared to evaporate right in front of me as he struggled to find any further words to say about this. He hastily excused himself, Andria, and the rest of the band to head towards their runway, leaving me alone to get back to the rest of my business. It was time to meet a representative of the Singularity Church.

It wasn't very difficult to pick out the robed priests out of the crowd, their artificial bodies a shiny metallic chrome, still very humanoid in shape but obviously without any hair, making them look like mechanical versions of old monastic monks. I singled out a group of three of them and approached the middle one, holding out the data drive in my mechanical hand to them. "Albert Drake wants me to give this to you." I told them as I made my approach.
"Does he now?" The cyborg priest looked quite intrigued as he took the drive and held it up in his own cybernetic hand. He and his fellow holy men appeared to by at least Class IX's, with almost or about the same amount of hardware and bioware as the Angel. Despite this, they projected more of a human outward appearance than that walking artillery arsenal did. "Mr. Drake has been quite generous in his contributions to our humble cause already."
"So you're not denying that he has been donating money to your churches? What would the CEO of the largest biotech company on the planet want to do with your cult of machine people?"
"Why, the same thing that all disciples of the Singularity Church wish to attain: transcendance!"
"Transcendance? Transcendance of what, exactly?"
"Transcendance from the physical realm to the spiritual realm, through digitization of the soul, of course! Your mind is the seat of the self, and as the technologies of our era have advanced, we have finally created a device as complex as the human brain: the computer. And with it, we can use our minds as interfaces to the digital realm, allowing ourselves to exist independently of our mortal bodies. The Singularity Church exists to fulfill the prophecy of an eternal paradise for our wayward souls."
"You mean uploading everyone's brain scans into a private Grid simulation, is that right?"
"Man and machines will become one and the same, and through our inventions, we will no longer be bound by the limitations imposed upon us by a universe of chaos! To build a newer, greater reality with our own hands; that is humanity's destiny! It is through visionaries like Albert Drake and his inventions that this destiny can be realized!"

Albert Drake was a businessman first and foremost, actually. The only thing he actually invented was the infrastructure to support biotech research, development, and commercialization of the results. The genetic modification treatments offered by Asclepius Medical were a product and a service. I was about to say that the priests were bullshitting themselves when they said that a for profit corporation was looking out for the best interests of a transhumanist cult, but the donation certificate's existence suggested that there may have been something to this claim after all.

I noticed the priest slot the data drive into a port hidden in the back of his smooth chrome head as I left, remembering that my private flight to Winterton was scheduled to leave very soon. I had to book it down the runway to board the jet in time.

As I was stepping in through the door to the plane, I heard a loud rumbling in the distance, and turned back in the direction of the airport to find smoke and fire rising up from a significant portion of it. An explosion had rocked one of the terminals.
"Shit, there's been an explosion!" I exclaimed, starting to descend the stairs back down to the runway.
"Come back here, we've already been cleared for departure!" The pilot called back to me over my comm.
"There are probably people buried under rubble that need our help right this instant!" I replied as I frantically scanned the other runways for any sign of Burning Chrome's private jet, but none could be found. I could only hope that they had already left before any of this had gone down.
"Cerberus security and rescue squads are already on site to help, Mr. Stone. I wouldn't get involved with them if I were you." The pilot's voice was starting to get more commanding. "Get back on the plane. We're going to San Diego."
"How do I know this flight's not rigged to explode too?"
"That's a risk you're going to have to take, Mr. Stone. Simon says so. Simon demands it."

I could hear the faint sound of a gun being cocked from behind me on the top of the stairs, where one of the onboard stewards now stood. They waved a handgun at me until I slowly turned around and ascended the stairs, where they kept the gun trained on me until I got to my seat inside.

"The circumstances are unfortunate," the pilot continued, "But Simon isn't giving me a choice either. The game isn't called Simon Gives You A Choice, after all."


## Chapter 8

News travels fast. So fast, in fact, that it caught up for me to catch it on the G.R.I.D. during my flight. Remaining seated so as not to provoke a steward with a gun, breaking news bulletins were popping up as windows on my cybereye's AR overlay, showcasing videos and stills of the very moment of the explosion that had rocked the Portland International Airport, which I had only departed from less than an hour before. By now, the reports had already concluded who was behind this bombing: the Singularity Church.

At least one of the security cameras at the terminal had caught footage of the incident itself. One of the robed cultists that I had met before, and presumably the one that I had given the data drive to, had waded out into the center of a large crowd before raising his chrome arms and appearing to shout something unintelligible, startling those nearby just a second before his entire synthetic body had suddenly erupted into a violent white fireball that engulfed the entire crowd, taking the camera with it and ending the recording.

The news report continued with a review of other, similar incidents throughout the West Coast Sprawl involving robed cyborgs having apparently turned their biomechanical bodies into bombs and detonating themselves in public areas of high commerce and industry. At first glance, the Singularity Church, if they were indeed behind these suicide bombings, seemed to be like any other violent religion that converted its followers at the business end of a deadly weapon, but the locations of these attacks also made me hypothesize that they could have been rebelling against the corporate commercialization of transhumanism, a process that was a holy doctrine to them. I swiped the news feeds aside and called Vykarius on my comm to exchange information on these events. His digital avatar appeared before me as a chrome cyborg dressed in the robes of the Catholic Pope. By no means an accurate portrayal of the Singularity Church, but this was far from the most tasteless avatar in Vyke's ever growing digital wardrobe.

"I just completely and utterly don't understand it one bit!" Vyke said in a tone of mock bewilderment as he grasped his forehead with both hands to sell the act. "Why doesn't anyone believe that our religion is about peace and acceptance of others? I just can't think of a single reason why! We have such good public relations!" A lit wick suddenly appeared on his hat, and his avatar burst into a shower of fire and scrap when it had burned through, only to reform itself a moment later.
"Vyke, it's a bit too damn soon, even by my standards." I began. "A woman by the name of Hera gave me a data drive and had me give it to the cultist shortly before he blew himself up. It was in a format that my comm didn't recognize."
"And you think it was the software for the bomb mechanism? How did you get it through all of the airport's security checkpoints? Why were you needed to bring it to the bomber in the first place? Why didn't he already have it?"
"I'm probably not regarded with as much suspicion as a member of the Singularity Church, at least for the time being. I don't think anyone airport knew what was on the data drive either, but if I was wearing a Singularity robe, they probably would have turned me away just to be safe. The single data file on the drive was pretty huge, almost three petabytes. I don't think that any software for a bomb would need to be that large..."
"Probably not. There had to be a lot more to it." Vykarius conceded. "The Singularity Church probably developed its very own operating systems for the cybernetic hardware of their elite cyborgs. I wouldn't it put it past those technophiles. Regardless, we don't know if this has anything to do with the bombing. The bomber might have been able to pull this off regardless of whether you gave this to him."
"Hera made it pretty important that I bring the drive to the priest, and it was most likely destroyed in the explosion. I think I've been made into an accomplice to this attack, Vyke. Hera Erisson is an associate of Asclepius Medical CEO Albert Drake, who has been donating to the Singularity Church. I think the bombing is part of a sabotage on Icarus by Asclepius. Their Sprawl territories are neighbors, this could be part of another border struggle.
A series of screens manifested themselves around Vyke's avatar, showcasing other bombings by robed cyborgs. "These are incidents of suicide bombers in all three corporate territories. Icarus, Asclepius, and MitaTech. None of these companies would back a group that damages their own assets, or at least I wouldn't think they would. Are you sure the donation certificate you saw was real? Give me the archived footage of the moment you saw it with your cybereye, Joseph. If it is genuine, we could prove to the public that Drake is supporting terrorists, even if they are attacking his own company. If it's fake, well, who would want to frame him for this?"
"I can think of a hundred different answers to that one, Vyke."

Before Vykarius could respond, the words **CONNECTION LOST** suddenly blinked over my entire AR overlay before the whole interface cut out, and I was left staring at the passenger cabin. The steward was standing in the doorway as he reached for the power switch on a display screen in front of me. "You have an incoming call, Mr. Stone. Due to the urgency of this call, we have suspended all other incoming and outgoing signals to your comm network. Communications will be restored at the conclusion of this call." He gave a slight bow and marched out of the room just as the image of Hera appeared on the flatscreen display.

"Oh, Joseph, it's just awful!" Hera looked devastated, and had been tightly clutching a handkerchief as she wiped tears and running makeup out of her eyes. Her hair bun looked slightly frazzled, and was a more blueish color than I last remembered it. "I...I heard about the explosion and I've been so worried ever since! Who could do such an awful thing!?"
"The data drive that you gave me, Hera. The one that you had me deliver to the priest. The one that blew himself up. What was on it? Where did you get it?" I felt my cybernetic hand unconsciously tightening itself into a fist atop the armrest.
"I don't know, Joseph. I don't know!" Hera pulled on her hair bun nervously, giving me an idea of how it was looking frazzled in the first place. "The drive appeared in my home the other day, and I have no idea how anyone could have gotten in! Simon only told me to give it to the priest that was arriving at the airport. I was too afraid to, and in my cowardice I gave it to you instead. And now you're the one in danger!"
I've been in a lot of danger for quite some time already, so I was already used to it. "Is Mr. Drake aware that he has sponsored terrorists that have waged attacks against his own company?"
"No, Mr. Stone! We had no idea! In fact, I don't think that these attackers may have anything to do with the Singularity Church at all! The High Priest of the church in Summer Heights has already publicly disavowed any involvement or approval of these actions! He claims that a group of followers have splintered off from the main church over a disagreement with their doctrine, and are pursuing...alternate methods to salvation."
"Well, wouldn't that be convenient?" I remarked. "That can say that the attackers were not *true* followers of the Singularity Church all they want, but that just sidesteps the bigger issue. Speaking of which...I bet Simon has something to do with all of this. I hope my hacker friend gets his number real soon, because I'd like to have a word with him. What the hell does he want us to do next?"
"I...I don't know, Mr. Stone. It could already be too late for me. I may have already disobeyed his rules by having you do what he set out for me instead. I do fear for my safety, and for the safety of everyone suspected of having anything to do with the Singularity Church!"

To my surprise, the San Diego airport let us land our jet, but as soon as I stepped off the runway, I was immediately grabbed and handcuffed by some security guards and dragged away into some holding room for a while before I was brought in for interrogation. Almost immediately, they brought up a clip of camera footage from the news, this one shortly before the attack. They could see me handing something over to the priest. I simply told them that I knew nothing about the attack or about the Singularity Church, and asked them why I didn't simply flee the country if I was guilty. The guards did not seem amused.

Just as it appeared that they were about to work me over by force, an orange skinned man in a pinstripe suit suddenly stepped into the room, handing out a credit stick to each of the guards present. They all accepted one, and quietly shuffled out of the room, leaving me alone with him.

The suited man leaned forward to look me close in the eye, scratching his moustache with one finger. "You're in a real spot of trouble, mister. The San Diego Airport Security thinks you're involved with terrorists. Have you heard about them? It's been blowing up on the news lately! Hahahaha, get it? Blowing up?"
"Are you offering to make these allegations go away?" I asked, trying to figure out whether my cyberarm was strong enough to break my handcuffs.
"That depends, mister. Do you know who runs this place?"
There was no major influence from any of the Big Three out in Winterton. This airport was run by a much smaller business that would never have a chance operating out in San Diego without the say so of a certain family. "The Marconis." I told him.
"Heheh, you're smarter than you look, mister." The man leaned back and straightened his suit. "With a single text message, we can have the airport's records report that your plane never made it here in the first place. Your trail would come up to a dead end, nobody knows where you are anymore, you got a fresh new start. Waddya say, mister?"
"What are the Marconis going to expect from me in return?"


## Chapter 9

Tensions with the Singularity Church had quickly escalated since my arrival in San Diego. As I was leaving the city in a rented AutoCar for a favor with the Marconis, Vykarius had been sending me more news feeds of the events as they were unfolding. The primary church in Gibson Springs was being swarmed by mobs of angry protestors, all but threatening to throw molotov cocktails as a Cerberus Security Systems police blockade kept them away from the front steps. I was honestly surprised that the police had picked sides, and had to wonder how valued the church was as customers to Icarus Industries in order to get police protection. Probably very highly, as sophisticated cybernetic implants were highly sought after by the church, and cybernetics were the specialty of Icarus Industries to begin with. The incidents in the Autumn Falls and especially the Winterton regions, however, were not so lucky for the church, as there was no real police presence to protect anyone in Winterton, forcing the church members to retaliate with their own self-defense weapon implants. Or at least that's what I assumed they were doing, as the local news reports had spun them to look like they were attacking Winterton civilians completely unprovoked. A very similar thing seemed to be happening in Autumn Falls, as the church had, for whatever reason, yet to gain much in the way of favorable coverage from Mitashi Technologies.

Away from the bustling, neon lit San Diego sector, the drive through the slums and shanty towns of much of the rest of Winterton was slow and sorrowful. Houses were cobbled together from scrap metal taken from the dumps and scrapyards of other cities, and populated by lots of desperate people wearing ragged clothing and old, cheap cybernetic and bionic implants that often appeared to be falling into disrepair due to a lack of maintenance. I drove past an old legless man begging for money for a pair of cyberlegs at one point. The world's oldest professions were also alive and well in Winterton. With the rise of biomodification, there were all manners of working girls and guys with extra bionic features catering to almost every single fantasy that a person could think of, and plenty of ideas that they couldn't. Prostitution wasn't exactly illegal in the 2080s; there were no laws specifically prohibiting the practice, so they were merely kept out of the immediate sight of the more prudish demographics of America, but even the corporations could turn a tidy profit from selling these services so long as they were separated from their public image with enough layers of plausible deniability. Besides Winterton, these services seemed to thrive most in the Summer Heights region of northern California, the American home of Asclepius Medical and their genetic modification services in biotechnology. Many people there would do something to themselves to make their appearances stand out from an ordinary human's in some form or another, in the spirit of America's reverence for individuality.

Those that would find themselves landing in dire financial straits in northern California, however, would no longer become good customers to Asclepius and find themselves having to seek cheaper housing until they eventually plummeted into the Winterton region of southern California, a region which stretched south of the San Francisco Bay all the way to the Wall Of Triumph, the official, heavily drone guarded border between the United States and Mexico. Many of these genetically modified hybrids that had fallen on hard times would end up here and be left to the mercy of the local gangs and smaller businesses, and one of them just so happened to be targeted by the Marconis: the Redwood Razers. Of all my possible sources, the location of at least one of their operations had just fallen into my lap when I had arrived in San Diego, courtesy of the Marconi crime family. They had sent me, along with one of their own enforcer thugs, to send a message to the Razers for cutting in on at least one of their prized business ventures: the manufacture and distribution of Daydream, the Memory Drug.

Daydream was a neurochemical cocktail that fired off the memory centers of one's brain, causing them to intermingle with the sensorial areas and give the user vivid, bizarre hallucinations spawned from their own memory banks, similar to dreaming but while wide awake. If you were lucky, you would get to relive a fond moment from your own past, or the best parts of multiple moments stitched together into a new one. There was also the chance that you would find yourself in a waking nightmare created by your own past traumas; it was a roll of the dice every time you took a shot, but gambling was also a large part of many areas of Winterton as well. Heavy users of Daydream could get quite psychotic and violent during their hallucinations, and their memories could be eroded to the point to where they can no longer remember what was real. Many people these days would gladly pay this price, to trade in their actual memories for fictional ones.

Despite being with the Marconi enforcer during the entire ride, I was able to discretely send Vykarius a message regarding the Razers' whereabouts, and to tell them to expect us. For the first time in a while, things would start to go my way, somewhat, as the moment the AutoCar pulled up in front of the brothel, a bullet sailed in through the windshield, and directly into the forehead of the enforcer, leaving him slumping forward against the dashboard as a crimson trail poured out across it.

"Jesus fuck... you didn't have to kill him!" I yelled out to the building as I stepped out of the AutoCar. "We could have interrogated him first."
Out from the window stepped Molly Hatchet, a part time working girl and full time Redwood Razer, handy with a gun, an axe, and quite a few other instruments she could hold in her hand. "It's good to see you again too, Joe." She casually replied.

Molly and I happened to first cross paths back when I was working as a field officer for Cerberus Security Systems. She was running a business out in Gibson Springs back then, and managed to bust her for Daydream trafficking, another business she had never quite given up. Daydream was originally one of the failed prototypes for a memory recollection medicine. When a disgruntled Asclepius Medical doctor leaked a preliminary formula onto the streets, its wild hallucinogenic properties caught on. Drugs were a very profitable venture for private law enforcement just as well as black market dealers. The law made a tidy sum from prisons filled with drug addicts, and they blocked all legislative measures to legalize the substances instead, because that would have been bad for their business. Asclepius Medical, meanwhile, would sell many watered down versions of these street drugs under different names, and gain the best of both worlds, while the rest of us were given the worst of theirs.

"Have you seen or heard from Johnny Blade yet?" I asked her.
"Not a thing, Joe. The heads up from Vykarius an hour ago was first we've heard from any of you in a long time." Molly replied.
"Where's Charlie Chaine? I have a lot to tell both of you."
"Right here." A familiar deep voice rung out. Charlie had traded his afro in for a set of cornrows since I last remember seeing him. He still had his favorite yellow muscle shirt, however. I didn't meet him until after I started working as a private investigator. Whenever I was working on cases around the Winterton region, Charlie Chaine always seemed to be there to pull my ass out of the fire whenever I needed it, which, even in rough neighborhoods like these, was embarrassingly more often than I would have liked to admit. I would have been dead at least a dozen times over had Charlie not happened to have been around in the area. And tonight, I was hoping he could do me at least one more favor.

"Vykarius told us everything, Joe." Charlie continued. "Heard you were in a big heap of trouble with the Marconis."
"And the Hazunomo-Gumi." I added. "And Simon. And at least one of the Big Three is probably going to get onto my case if I piss either of them off."
Charlie gave a hearty chuckle. "You just can't seem to stay out of trouble, huh boy?"
"It seems to run in the Stone family, Chuck." I tipped an imaginary hat at him. "The reason I never met my father Jules was because he went off to serve in the Cyborg Wars. Never got to learn exactly how he was killed, as the war details were classified. Even his closest comrade in arms, Jacob Goldhart..." I sighed, feeling the weight of the gun in my coat. "I've never been sure whether what he told me was true." I started walking back to the car, gesturing to the punctured windshield. "Now then, what am I going to tell the Marconis about their dead enforcer? They're going to be expecting me back at the Rocka Rolla Cola bottling plant real soon. I'd hate for my problems to become your problems, but..." I gave a shrug. "I haven't been left with very many choices lately, Chuck. Everyone's trying to get me to do their song and dance at gunpoint."
"If you can give us an opportunity to fuck over those dirty Marconis", Molly swung a fire axe over her shoulder, "We'll consider it a fair trade. We're also looking for Johnny. That bastard owes me, and I'm not letting anything happen to him until then."
"So what's the plan? I return to the bottling plant and tell them that the job is done? That their enforcer got capped during the struggle?"
"That's your side of the plan, yes. Charlie, Vyke, and I have a plan to ambush the rest of the Marconis while they're distracted with you. Isn't that right, Vyke?"
Vykarius's voice suddenly came in over a call on my comm. "Guys, guys!" He came in frantically. "I was just casing out the G.R.I.D. space around and inside the bottling plant, and you'll never believe what I just witnessed! I think it's still happening right now! You gotta get there quickly!"
"I'll be the judge of that, Vyke." I replied to him. "What is it that's got you so worked up?"
"It's the Angel, Joe! The Angel of Retribution! He's here all the way down in Winterton, and he's attacking the Marconis right on their own home turf!"


## Chapter 10

The three of us gathered up our weapons and piled into the AutoCar, setting a route for the local Rocka Rolla Cola bottling plant with all due haste. Ever since the plant had closed down a few years ago, when the Rocka Rolla company had fallen on hard times, the Marconi family had taken over the facility to manufacture Daydream and other substances that came and went out of style on the black market. One of the few things we didn't have to worry about were security drones; the parent company took all of their drones with them when they closed the plant, and the Marconi boss didn't seem to trust AI, so his security and enforcement would consist of loyal flesh and blood henchmen whenever possible. With these facts in mind, one could imagine our surprise when we pulled up to the entry gate to find it completely unguarded, the gatekeeper having apparently abandoned his post in a hurry. Whether he retreated into the plant or fled the site entirely was another question, as an opening large enough to drive a train through had been blasted through one side of the plant's outer concrete walls, plumes of smoke and fire rising out from within.

We eventually did find the Marconi lackeys staffing the plant as we made our way inside, however. They were either buried under blast debris and broken machinery or slumped over the factory equipment, covered in blood and ballistic perforations. It appeared as if an entire Cerberus SWAT team and demolitions squad had just marched through the plant at the same time. The walls, floors, and machinery were covered in bullet holes and explosion craters, the bodies of Marconi enforcers leaving a visceral trail for us to follow straight into the Daydream packaging area.

A good chunk of the bodies we passed were on fire, or appeared to have been on fire at one point, and very recently too. I kept my revolver Goldhart at the ready, in case any of the attackers had still been around. Visibility was partially obscured by the smoke from these fires, and my vision was starting to become hazy; even my cybereye was starting to see things somehow. Whatever chemicals were burning into the air must have been getting to me. One of the fires must have been burning through a stash of raw Daydream powder and was releasing it into the air. Inhalation was a common method of administering Daydream into the body, I just didn't realize it in time as I was stumbling into the main bottling area.

"Are you okay, Joseph? You don't look so good. We can't function as a unit if we're not all firing on every cylinder!" The voice coming from behind me was so unexpected yet so familiar that it startled me. I spun around to find not Charlie Chaine, but Jacob Goldhart himself, in his Cerberus Security Systems uniform and red beret.
"You're not real, Jacob." I replied. "You're dead." I tried to raise my gun to him, only to find that it wasn't in my hand anymore. I didn't have it anymore, Jacob did. He held the gold trimmed white revolver in his own two beefy arms, and had been using a chisel to carve his own last name across the left side of the barrel before holstering the gun.
"Not if I can help it, Joe. Not if we can all keep cool heads in times when it really counts." Jacob replied, suddenly redirecting his gaze away from me and towards someone else. "Isn't that right, Kia?"
"Roger that, Captain Goldhart." Right next to my own dark skinned mentor stood the pale, Asian complexion of Kia Sakuraba, holding a large marksman's rifle in her arms.
"You see, Joseph? With Kia's eyes, we'll be able to see whatever comes our way! You're almost as good a shot as she is, too!" Goldhart exclaimed, reaching out to slap me across the back. I felt the impact quite vividly, and nearly lost my balance. I shut my eyes and opened them again, but two of my former colleagues were still standing in front of me somehow. Kia's cybernetic eyes locked on to mine, her mechanical gaze still much more expressive than many natural pairs of eyes I had seen. They were just like my lone cybereye. One of them was my own cybereye. I reached up with my left hand and gently pressed a finger against my own right eye, only to feel pain; natural, real pain. I frantically fished around in my coat to find my comm, only to pull it out from the pocket of the Cerberus uniform I had been wearing instead. I flipped on the device's selfie camera and stared into my own face. I had two identical eyes now, all natural. I looked back to Kia with a growing sense of horror.
"I got these eyes to become a better sniper, Joseph. Their magnification lens is almost as powerful as my rifle's. Sped up my promotion record in the Cerberus force faster than anything else." She said rather matter of factly as she slung the rifle's strap over her shoulder.
"Are you ready for this next operation, Joseph?" Jacob asked me. "Reynold Goodman is a menace to society, a threat to our future and the future of Icarus Industries and all the people that depend on its stability. At least, that's what the stories say. Are you ready to take him out before the election?"
"No! We can't!" I found myself grabbing at Jacob's uniform in a pleading gesture, grasping at the fabric as if it were really there.  "We already killed him! Or...someone else did! They killed both of you too!"
"Ain't gonna happen as long as we got Red on our side, Joe!" Jacob cheerfully replied. "No one's gonna mess with the likes of our squad!" As he said this, I heard a set of heavy, mechanical footsteps approaching me, and spun around to find none other than the tall, bulky, heavily mechanized figure of Red stepping up to me, silently staring into my eyes and waiting for directions. "Don't get so worried, Joe. He's a Class VI cyborg with a lobotomy and a remote neural interface. He can't do a thing unless we give our command. Well, maybe he's a Class VII now after his new hardware upgrades!"
Red, how could I have forgotten you. You were quite the violent criminal back in your day. Since your real identity was redacted by the Cerberus penal system, we always called you red because of how much blood you were covered in from all the witness testimonies. We couldn't ask for your name, either, as they lobotomized half your brain and replaced it with a mechanical interface for controlling your every move and thought like a drone. What autonomy you had left, you knew how to handle yourself when threatened, but not enough to speak. They fitted most of the rest of your body with the highest quality military grade cybernetic limbs that ever came out of the Cyborg Wars, then we made you use them to tear apart so many enemies to Icarus, and quite literally at that. When you were killed during the Goodman bombing, they found your mechanical arm intact in the wreckage. The right arm that I have now--

I held up my right arm to find it being as much tissue and bone as my left. I reached out to feel the skin with my other arm, then looked back to Red and his set of metallic arms and legs, and half of his face. He was still staring blankly at me, awaiting a command.
"Red is the brawn of our outfit, but we also got the brains right here." Jacob continued. "Victor Armitage, the fastest code slinger on the G.R.I.D.!" He motioned over to a bearded man with a VR headset strapped to his forehead, the gloves of his Cerberus uniform replaced with VR gloves.
"Please, call me Vykarius. It's the alias I go by on the G.R.I.D. I'm building up quite a reputation there." Victor said, making gunslinging motions with his hands.  "I'm like a ghost, I can crack my way into anything in cyberspace! Just you wait until I finish building that full sensory immersion VR interface! Then I can live on the G.R.I.D. 24/7!"
"But, you're all dead!" I exclaimed, shutting my eyes and hoping the visions would go away. "They...someone killed you all in the bombing! You can't be here now...I shouldn't be alive either!" I found myself tumbling onto the floor as I struggled to focus, trying to control my rapid breathing. I could hear the four of them calling my name now. Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph...

"Hey Joseph!" At last, it was Molly's voice that was coming through to me instead. She was coming into focus as I opened my eyes and I was able to get back onto my feet. My mechanical arm was still there, as was my gun. the AR overlay in my vision showed that I still had my cybereye installed. Molly was the only one standing there, and Charlie was catching up to join us. "Are you okay, Joseph? You didn't inhale too much of the Daydream smoke, did you?"
"Maybe a little." I admitted. "Let's get out of here, I can't defend myself in this state." The nanite colony in my bloodstream was working quickly to remove the substance and minimize its effects. The altered immune systems of most cyborgs made the effects of mind altering substances more powerful, but much shorter acting.

Charlie was waving around a small device as he approached us. "They're gone. They're all gone! Whoever was here just blasted all the Marconi workers and left! I don't know if they even let anyone escape! I think they left this behind!" He held out the device in his hand. It was a holographic recorder. Creating an AR video message was much easier, but the holorecorder could project the footage without the need for any AR overlay. Whoever left this behind, and I had a pretty good idea already, wanted to make sure that this would be clearly seen, even by people who didn't have AR glasses, goggles, or cybereyes.

As we made our way out of what was left of the bottling plant, I grabbed the holoprojector that Charlie was carrying and pressed the Play button. The machine whirred to life, projecting before us the very image of the Angel of Retribution, standing before us and staring us down with glowing red eyes, his mechanical arms having converted themselves into a machine gun cannon and flamethrower, missile racks protruding from his shoulders, and jet wings extending from his back. His voice came out as a low, metallic growl, expressing a profound rage and indignation that was surprisingly primal for a being seeming to be made almost entirely out of metal and weapon compartments.

"**BEAR WITNESS TO THIS TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION WITH YOUR OWN EYES, FOR YOU HAVE SOWN ITS SEEDS WITH YOUR OWN HANDS. I AM CYBERSOLDIER 4N-637, A VETERAN OF THE CYBORG WARS. ICARUS INDUSTRIES, ASCLEPIUS MEDICAL, MITASHI TECHNOLOGIES; THEY ARE THE COLLECTIVES OF ROBBER BARONS THAT HAVE STOLEN MY HUMANITY, WELDED ME INTO A TOOL OF WAR AND DEATH. THE BLOOD OF THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT LIVES WERE SPILLED BY MY HANDS, AT THE BEHEST OF THE CORPORATIONS, THAT THEY MAY PROFIT FROM THE SLAUGHTER OF FOREIGN LANDS. AFTER THERE WAS NO MORE LEFT TO KILL, AND THE CYBORG WARS CAME TO AN END, THERE WERE MANY SOLDIERS LIKE ME WHO HAD SACRIFICED THEIR LIVES AND THEIR HUMANITY ON THE ALTAR OF GREED AND DESPAIR. OUR MECHANICAL BODIES AND INHUMAN SOULS NOW LEGALLY BELONGED TO THE CORPORATIONS. THEY CREATED US, THEY OWN US, THEY CARE NOT FOR WHAT WE ONCE WERE.**"

"**BUT WE WILL NOT REMAIN SILENT. WE WILL NOT REMAIN COMPLACENT TO THEIR CORRUPTION. WE ARE NOT SLAVES, WE ARE SOLDIERS. WE ARE HUMANS WITH INALIENABLE RIGHTS THAT HAVE BEEN VIOLATED; AN UNPARDONABLE SIN FOR WHICH THEY MUST BE PUNISHED. THEY HAVE GIVEN ME INSTRUMENTS OF DEATH, AND NOW THEY SHALL BE THE TOOLS TO THEIR OWN DESTRUCTION. NOT ONE OF THEIR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY SHALL BE FORGIVEN. FOR EVERY INNOCENT LIFE THAT WAS SLAIN BY THEIR COMMANDS ON THE BATTLEFIELD, THEY SHALL BE AVENGED TENFOLD. THE IVORY TOWERS THAT OUR OPPRESSORS NOW RESIDE IN SHALL SOON BECOME THEIR OWN TOMBS. HEAR MY WARNING: RETRIBUTION IS COMING. YOUR SINS CANNOT BE CLEANSED IN REPENTANCE, BUT IN FIRE.**"


## CHAPTER 11

If there was more to be found at the bottling plant, the scene of the vicious attack, Charlie and Molly didn't tell me about it as we made our return trip. Vykarius opened up a conference call with us while we were riding back in the AutoCar, his digital avatar dressed in the fedora and pinstripe suit of a Marconi thug.

"Looks as if you were right, Vyke." I was the first to tell him. "The Marconis must have indeed been attacked by our Angel of Retribution. He seems to have left this message at the scene of the attack." I pulled up the holoprojector and opened up its communication channels, sending the message over to Vykarius through the G.R.I.D. call, waiting a few moments for him to receive and watch the recording.
"Ah ha, I had a feeling that this was the case all along! Do you know what this means, Joe? This confirms most of the rumors and theories that have been surrounding the Angel for the past several years!" Vykarius had exclaimed when the recording had concluded. "There were lots of supersoldiers like him during the Cyborg Wars. Most of the mechanical ones like him must have been built by Icarus Industries, and continued to work for them after the war ended in 2060, since interchangeable mechanical limbs hadn't been a thing back then; they were pretty much stuck with the augments they were given during the war. Most of them are still stuck with them, and the implants are officially property of the manufacturer and distributer."
"But you said that the earliest Angel attacks started in the early 2060s, right? How could this soldier go off the radar for so long without Icarus remotely detecting their own hardware being used against them?" I recalled the nature of my own cybernetic implants as I rose this inquiry. The arm and eye originally belonged to someone else, so when I recovered them from their original owners, I needed Vyke's help resetting the registry software and remapping it to my own bioware systems, making them compatible with the circulatory nanite colony. All cybernetic and bionic implants were equipped with metric software that remotely sent back information to Icarus and Asclepius, respectively. This feature was ostensibly intended for quality assurance and feedback purposes, but many implant hackers would soon discover that these remote signals went both ways. The parent companies received information about their customers and the status of their implants, and they could send back software updates for the augmentations to remotely upgrade themselves without any need for the augmentee to go back under the knife. In other words, your own prosthetics could be altered while you were still wearing them, their available functions and features subject to the whims of the company that outfitted you with them. It was all in the fine print of every surgical contract, but you needed hardware like this just to even have a chance at getting a job anywhere in most of the Sprawl, with the vast majority of America's work force consisting of cyborgs and robots, always upgrading themselves to stay one step ahead of other job applicants. Yes, biohackers that were smart and clever enough could modify their own implants to make them better than factory regulations, but this also voided their warranty and capabilities for further remote software updates, and the corporations do not like hiring people that they cannot control. Indeed, if machines were not easier to manipulate than people, Icarus Industries would certainly not have nearly as tremendous of a robotic work force as it had today. I was very lucky to have known such a skilled hacker as Vykarius, who was able to use the G.R.I.D. to remotely jailbreak my cybernetics software, allowing it to run independently of Icarus influence. Most cybernetics would simply refuse to run if they had detected that they had been modified, or the parent company could remotely detect the modifications and shut down the hardware with a server command.

"I was able to access the signal networks of most of the machinery and bioware present at the bottling plant at the time of the attack. The Angel's entire body of cyberware is either so archaic or so heavily modified that pretty much all of it could not be properly identified or even detected on the current version of the G.R.I.D. That, or it's possible that his cyberware simply wasn't broadcasting any signals during the attack, or...ever, really." Vykarius seemed to have difficulty believing what he was explaining.
"Have you had any luck decrypting whatever it was that we found back in Redmond, by the way?" As I asked this, my comm's AR interface was suddenly interrupted by a priority message being sent to me.

**SIMON SAYS: You have incurred the wrath of the Marconi Syndicate. For Simon's sake and your own, their empire must fall tonight at your hands, or there will be consequences. Due to the severity of this predicament, assistance is on the way.**

The message came with an address, directing me to Lucky's Casino, assumed by many to be the Marconi family's central hideout, and the office of Don Marconi himself. I didn't know what the message had meant by "assistance" until we arrived back at the Redwood Razers home base, where an old friend had been waiting for us. It was Aaron Steel, and the rest of Burning Chrome.

"Joseph? Joseph Stone? You're the reinforcements my client had sent!?" Aaron looked just as incredulous as the rest of us when we had arrived. "I'm surprised to find you out here this far into Winterton."
"I could say the same thing about you, Aaron." I replied as we stepped out of the AutoCar. "I thought you had gone to Summer Heights, not Winterton. And where the hell is Andria?"
Aaron's eyes darted off to one side as he sought out an answer to give to me. "She's safe, in good hands, trust me."
"That doesn't tell me where she is."
"If you really want to know, Joe, how about you come with me and the rest of Burning Chrome to collect our next bounty? It's right here in San Diego, in fact."
"Why don't you just tell me where she is right the fuck now?" I felt like I was losing my patience in short order, to the point where I nearly reached for my gun.
Aaron's eyes went wide, and stared into mine as he leaned forward towards me. "I can't tell you right now, Joseph. The circumstances will not allow it right now."

I had known Aaron for a while, long enough to know when there was something he wasn't telling me. It didn't look like he was going to tell me at any time that wasn't when he wanted to, either. I had to hope that he was holding good intentions for withholding this information. He usually didn't keep anything from me unless he had a very damned good reason for doing so.

Burning Chrome had with them an armored tour bus for their road missions like these. With its electrochromic plated surface, the band's promotional logo could be displayed or hidden on the outside of the bus at the press of a button; a button on a dashboard equipped with all manner of weapons systems for their mercenary work. Along with the impressive gun cabinets inside the bus itself, all of us were quite well equipped to have a fighting chance against the Marconis as long as we played our cards right, a fitting metaphor considering how we were about to shoot up a casino.

It was about time. Aaron and I hadn't done such a run together in a while. We rolled up to the front of Lucky's casino, perpetually lit up by spotlights, neon signs, and holographic marquees. Gambling establishments were still more common in the Autumn Falls region of Nevada, but there was still quite a market down in Winterton for those who ran afoul of MitaTech and the Yakuza, people like myself if I had a gambling problem. Maybe I did and didn't know it yet. I've been betting my life an awful lot lately.

Once inside the bustling casino, we cooly made our way past the rows of tables and video machines, keeping our weapons concealed from the crowds as much as possible, before we arrived at the VIP lounge. No Marconis seemed to be present, but we did find Chip Diaz, the alleged owner of the casino. Lucky himself.

He wore a flashy white suit that looked a little gaudy even by the casino's standards, but at least it went well with his slicked back black hair and shades. Despite having a shapely woman around each arm and an electronic cigarette in his mouth, he didn't look particularly happy. Oddly enough, he seemed to cheer up as soon as we walked in, and he turned his attention to Aaron, who approached him first.

"We're here to speak with Don Marconi. Is he in?" Aaron began, slinging the strap of his guitar case over his shoulder. "We're the band performing here tonight, and we would like to have a word with him first.
Lucky dismissed the women at his sides, and looked back to Aaron over his sunglasses as a smile crept over his face. "And who are these you brought with you, Aaron? These your backup dancers?"
"In a manner of speaking, I suppose you could say that. We're here to collect the Don's payment up front." Aaron opened up his guitar case and held up the cleverly disguised rifle, loading a magazine into its body.
"Fine enough for me. I'd like to come with ya, Steel. Now that I'm not alone, I've got some things I wanted to tell him too."
"You know this guy?" I leaned in to ask Aaron.
"He used to own the casino before the Marconis took over. He ran into a gambling debt of his own and was forced to sell it to them." Aaron explained to me while Lucky took us into the back rooms with his access key. It sounded as if he had been planning some manner of revenge scheme for quite some time, but didn't have the means to carry it out by himself, until now, and we were those means.

Lucky led the way as we filed into a long, narrow hallway. He reached into his chest pocket and drew two playing cards, a 6 and 7 of Diamonds, holding them aloft as a Marconi thug stepped out from around a corner. Just as he was noticing us and raising his gun, one of those two cards had suddenly cut him across the throat, and the other lodged itself into his forehead as he fell forward. "Novelty throwing knives?" I wondered aloud as we came to a fork in the hallway. Lucky, Aaron and myself continued on straight ahead, while the rest of us went on to the side, presumably to secure the other thugs around the hideout.

The door at the end of the hallway lead to a private bar, where at least a dozen of the pinstriped suits had been hanging out. With Lucky still in the lead of the narrow corridor, he leaned against the door, nudging it open just a crack as he reached into another pocket, producing a pair of dice and tossing them into the room, keeping the door shut. I was about to ask what he was doing when an explosion shook the room on the other side, Lucky squeezing past us in the hallway to let us have our turn.

A sizable blast crater covered the center of the bar, the air now covered in even more smoke than before. Aaron kicked open the door and stood his ground in the doorway, spraying down the entire room with his guitar gun, leading me to take aim and make killing shots with Goldhart while their movements were suppressed with Aaron's storm of bullets, turning the entire bar into a fireworks display of blood and broken glass. The three of us proceeded into the bar, only to find more suits marching down a staircase beyond us. Aaron was the first in position to fire another salvo from his rifle and send them tumbling down the stairs as they came. Stepping over the broken glass and fallen bodies was just a bit of an inconvenience as I started to make my way up the stairs, Lucky coming up behind my while Aaron stayed in the back to load a new clip before joining us.

The hall beyond us was being watched over by high end security turrets, something that Vykarius had warned us about but wasn't ready to disable just yet. Since time wasn't on our side, Lucky apparently brought another trick up his sleeve, and quite literally at that. He held up a few poker chips in his hand, and with amazing aim he tossed them onto the ceiling turrets. I expected them to bounce off, but instead, the chips stuck onto their bodies before enveloping the machines in a fountain of sparks, shorting them out entirely. Lucky would repeat this procedure on every other ceiling turret with terrifying accuracy. I would hate to play a game of darts against him.

According to the intel from Vykarius, the door to Don Marconi's office was at the other end of the next hallway, but the large steel door had been sealed when we got there. I tried giving it a punch with my cybernetic arm, but only succeeded in making a modest dent. Maybe it was made of something harder than steel. Something almost as tough as whatever the Angel of Retribution was made out of.

"Get back! All the way back!" Another Burning Chrome member, Lenny Hawkwind the bassist, was carrying what looked like another guitar case, a large barrel sticking out of the head as he mounted it over his right shoulder. At his insistence, the rest of us gathered behind him as he squeezed a trigger on the case, sending a rocket sailing down the narrow corridor. When the smoke started to clear up, the four of us proceeded through the metallic rubble that used to be the security door, and found ourselves standing in the office of Don Marconi, the man himself seated calmly behind a large mahogany cased computer desk, flanked by three fedora wearing bodyguards on either side of him, a submachine gun for each of them trained on us as we pointed our weapons back at them in a standoff.

"Gentlemen, please, calm down. Let's be civil about this, shall we?" Don Marconi broke the intense silence as he held a cigar that appeared to be worth more than the salary of the average resident of Winterton. "You're making a real big ruckus in the back of Lucky's Casino, Lucky. My customers don't like that, it's not good for business. You've wasted a lot of perfectly good men on your way up here. What's the matter with you?" He sounded incredibly calm for someone whose fort was being stormed.

"You fucking know that we're way damn past that point, Marconi." Lucky yelled, making an angry gesture with a raised fist. "You damn well know that you put me under duress when you made me sell this place. As far as I'm concerned, that contract you made me sign is null and void, just like your life is about to become!"

Lucky was the first to open fire with a holdout pistol he had been concealing under his suit, taking aim directly at the Don. The rest of us followed up with our own firearms of choice. In the heat of the moment, it took me a few shots before I realized that neither Marconi nor any of his bodyguards were firing back. In fact, our bullets seemed to be passing through them entirely, their bodies flickering with each round that went through.

"Wait! Stop! We've been set up!" I called out, waiting until the rest of us held their fire before I stepped in front of the bodyguards as they stood motionless, then to Marconi behind his desk as I waved my gun through their faces. Don started to repeat his speech. "They think they can fool us with some holograms? Who told them that we'd be here!?"

I went to examine the computer desk, opening up the display screen only to be faced with a holographic window showcasing a countdown timer, and the words **NICE TRY, LUCKY**.

There were only a few seconds remaining on the timer, so I went in the only direction I could: through the window. Feet first. Luckily, it was only a couple stories down, and the collapsing roof of an AutoCar in the parking lot below broke my fall as I landed on both feet. If I hadn't made that jump, and if parts of my skeleton hadn't been metallically reinforced, I would have been in much worse shape as the top floor of the casino burst into flames, the shock wave from the blast knocking me off the roof of the car. I picked myself up off the pavement and turned to see the fire coming out from the window. Gambling patrons were now pouring out of the front doors in a mass panic. I hid myself behind another car and waited to see if anyone that I had come here with would walk out next.

While I was waiting for that answer, I got a priority message on my comm from Vykarius. It came to me in text form: "Sorry about not being able to be present at Lucky's. I made a big breakthrough with the data mined from the Colossus server from Redmond. My decrypter just uncovered a series of messages mentioning the Goodman bombing. Icarus officials were in contact with the Psycho Squad. They had to have been involved with the incident. You were right, Joe. It looks like we have a fresh new lead for our case, and I have just lost a bet. Speaking of bets, how are things going over at Lucky's? More of the emails I have decrypted seem to suggest that Don Marconi has been dead for some time. So who is controlling the Marconi syndicate now? Let me know if you find out."


## CHAPTER 12

"Aaron, what do you know about the Psycho Squad?" This question seemed to disturb him way more than anything else that had happened last night, including narrowly evading a bomb at Lucky's Casino with the rest of Burning Chrome and the Redwood Razers. It certainly damn near traumatized me all over again. The last time I had come so close to a bomb was four years ago, and it took nearly half of my body with it.

"The Psycho Squad...what the hell do YOU know about them!?" Aaron pointed at me accusingly, making a bit of a scene between us as we were recovering back at the Razers hideout. "Who told you about them!? Oh fuck...you're not working for them too, are you?"
"I think this is the first I've heard of them, Aaron. Calm down." I extended my arm in his general direction. "All I know is that they may be connected to the Goodman bombing four years ago."
"I didn't have anything to do with the Goodman incident!" Aaron exclaimed, as if I had just accused him of such a thing. "I was just a kid when I left, I hadn't had the chance to join them yet!"
"You were to join the Psycho Squad at such a young age, Aaron? I'm surprised."
"Well don't be. It's something about the neuroplasticity of younger minds. They spent a lot of my childhood poking around in my brain with all their instruments until I could do something like this." He snapped his fingers and a spark of fire lit up the room for a second. "I tried burning down the whole place to be sure that they wouldn't come after me when I ran away!"
I was rather impressed to see him do this. "You're telling me that you're a pyrokineticist. Well I'll be damned, the rumors must have been true all along." In my four years as a private investigator, and even in the years before that as a Cerberus officer, I had been involved in some very strange arson cases with suspects that couldn't possibly have had any means to start a fire. A lot of these cases ended up going cold, ironically enough. The ones that did not would be closed with a lot of questions, or we would apprehend the suspect with very little evidence stacked up against them. I always wondered if we had the right one. The rest of the time, however, I would be assigned to a different case instead, as if someone higher up found out something and didn't want me to discover it as well.

Vykarius must have been listening in on our conversation, as his G.R.I.D. avatar suddenly manifested itself into AR between the two of us. Aaron could see him too. Perhaps he was wearing AR contact lenses. "The Psycho Squad! I was just doing my research about that. A lot of the information I could find comes from disgruntled former employees of Asclepius Medical and tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy bloggers, but I did find a few things that were very consistent between many of them, even in completely separate communities that are at odds with each other. A lot of homeless and orphaned children go missing in the Winterton region. Conventional wisdom says that they get killed by thugs or gangs, but some people believe that a lot of them also get abducted by a secret Asclepius organization that then performs experimental neurosurgical procedures on them. You know, the kinds of procedures that got banned in the Humane Research Act of 2064. Asclepius Medical specializes in biotechnology, so they were hit the hardest by this. The Act was never fully overturned even after Asclepius sued the United States government for their loss of revenue, and used their winnings to buy out a third of the national debt."

Of course, how could I forget. America had racked up a tremendous debt since the beginning of the century, but as the corporations started rising to power, they bought out large portions of this debt in the same manner that a shareholder would buy stocks. Roughly 99 percent of the US national debt was owned by corporations today, and nearly 90 percent of that was from the Big Three and their subsidiaries. This is part of what gave them power over governments, and gave them a bigger say in what politicians to elect to office than every other US citizen combined. The other component came from the Global Trade Partnership Agreement of 2025, which had its roots in the Trans Pacific Partnership of the 2010s. This gave businesses the authority to hold entire countries legally liable for damages to their profits, and for all legal matters pertaining to these businesses to be settled in a private corporate court. In other words, the only possible way for a corporation to be found guilty of any wrongdoing would be for it to declare itself guilty in a court run by itself.

"I was very young when it happened to me, but from what I can remember, it's all true." Aaron replied to Vyke. "I don't remember what happened to my father, but my mother...well, I wasn't kidnapped as the conspiracy theorists say in this case. She sold me for  drug money to some people in green lab coats. They kept me and a bunch of other kids in cells, some of them tailor made for their particular abilities. One of them tried to hang himself because he couldn't stop hearing everyone else's thoughts. Another one could see into the future, a million possible futures at once. I remember asking him if there was one where I got out of here. He saw several, and that gave me the idea that lead to my escape. Another one...oh man, he could make things move with just a thought, but the experiments left a lot of kids like him quite delusional. He was always trying to lift and manipulate things that weren't there while talking to people that weren't there. I guess I was just one of the lucky ones."
"Do you, by any chance, remember anything about a girl with red hair?" I asked, remembering Zoey's last request.
"No, not with red hair, I don't think so. But there was this one girl that was pretty strange...whenever I was around her, and only when I was around her, I would feel strange mood swings. I'd be happy or sad or upset for no goddamn reason. Everyone else seemed to go crazy around her as well. I've known a lot of women since then, and not a single one of them got me emotional like that."

I started getting my things together to leave the hideout. "If there's anything else you can tell me, let me know on the G.R.I.D. I'm going to the San Francisco sector in Summer Heights." In other words, I was going to the heart of Asclepius Medical's operations in the West Coast Sprawl. It was starting to sound as if they were the ones behind almost everything I had been chasing after, like the Marconi syndicate and the Redmond attackers.
"Do you need a ride?" Aaron piped up, walking into my path. "Frisco just so happens to be where we're headed next. We were originally headed there from back in Portland, but, well, something had come up."

The long ride from Winterton to Summer Heights was a lot safer than a lot of the previous trips I had taken in the past few days. Instead of being chauffeured around by an associate of Simon or a Marconi thug, I took the opportunity to travel in the Burning Chrome armored tour bus for a second time. Now that I had both the band and the Redwood Razers at my back, the odds against me were starting to even themselves out.

Somewhere halfway between Los Angeles and San Jose, we crossed the border between the two regions, the run down buildings and shanty towns slowly giving way to more well kept urban development in the sprawl as we came into the territory of Asclepius Medical, their private police coverage doing wonders for the sector. As we approached San Francisco, the skyline started to light up with the trademark glow of Asclepius Green, signalling our proximity to the region's capital sector. The streets were alive not with as many robots as one would expect to find throughout Gibson Springs, but with living things, people being among them. Most of the upscale buildings were decorated if not surrounded by genetically modified flora, their genome sequences specifically picked out for aesthetic appeal as well as for a controlled growth within an urban environment. On leashes held by people and drones alike were a variety of small genecrafted animals created as pets, most of them being variants of dogs and outdoor felines, alongside many more exotic choices that did not occur in nature before Asclepius started selling designer pets. The people themselves were as heavily modified as the life around them, whether grown from birth or modified midlife through gene therapy, to have unusual hair, eye, and skin colors or even extra limbs such as tails and exotic appendages usually seen on other mammalian life forms, ears being a popular choice. We had just left the realm of the poor downtrodden rejects and were now entering the land of the rich overprivileged bourgeoisie that were desperately searching for significance and prestige in a world of materialism. And on the next night we were about to head straight into the belly of the beast: The Double Helix.

The Double Helix was a night club reserved specifically for cyborgs and genetically modified hybrid people. As a Class IV cyborg, I would be admitted without much more than a curious look, but Aaron, for all intents and purposes, was a full bodied natural human. Pyrokinesis wasn't exactly a thing that anyone outside of perhaps secretive elite groups had heard about, so creating fire from his fingertips would more likely raise an alarm than his chances of admittance. And that's not even getting to his celebrity status; that alone could probably get him inside the club, but it might draw more attention than we wanted to. I was already taking a bit of a risk going in myself; cyborgs, while not disallowed, were more often than not frowned upon for being products of rival company Icarus Industries, and in the West Coast Sprawl, brand loyalty was often taken as seriously as hometown sports teams. Johnny Blade and his lizard eyes would have helped me a great deal here. I would hope that I could find him here, but I wasn't expecting to find him. I was expecting to find Cammy Leon, and to tell her that Aaron sent me.

The dance floor was ablaze with a kaleidoscopic spectrum of colors on display, every one of them undulating and pulsating to the beat of the music echoing throughout the hall. It was a mix of old sounds and styles from the entire past century, but with 2080s sensibilities, celebrating the past in how it has shaped the present. Many of the wildly varied dancers themselves were wearing electrochromic clothing, like Aaron's jacket, but for many other articles, all of them wirelessly synchronized to the beat and creating intricate psychedelic patterns that stretched between multiple persons. And in the middle of it all was Cammy Leon herself, clad in a skin tight full body suit, all of it electrochromic.

Combined with some extensive facial bioware that made her facial features malleable to the point to where she could pass off as almost anyone from a distance, Cammy cut out a reputation as one of the sneakiest bounty hunters on the circuit, combined with her full body electrochromic suit that could pass off as all kinds of disguises. Neither of her two signature claims to fame were available to the public, of course; they were supposedly based on stolen prototypes used by bionic infiltrators during the Cyborg Wars, and probably now used by some secret Asclepius enforcers for clandestine operations. I never asked exactly how she got her hands on such technology; mercenaries and bounty hunters never revealed their secrets, for fear that they may be used against them. I had known Aaron for four years and still felt like I knew very little about him, and sometimes wondered if perhaps the both of us were better off that way.

"Aaron Steel sent me, and the rest of Burning Chrome." I said to her over the music, having slid my way through the crowd to stand next to her. "If you don't believe me, you can step outside and ask for yourself. They're waiting in their own tour bus."
Cammy turned and looked to me through a large visor that covered most of her face, its surface displaying a color pattern similar to her suit. "That's cute. What does he want from me this time? I told him, it was only a one night kinda thing."
"No, it's not about him." I corrected her. "Well, not directly, anyways. It's about the Psycho Squad. We have reason, from personal experience, to believe that they exist, and that Asclepius is behind them. Did Aaron ever mention that to you before?"
"Maybe once or twice over coffee." Cammy replied over coffee. For some reason, I wasn't sure I bought this. Maybe I was simply better at deduction than she was at subterfuge.
"Did he ever mention that he was going to be one of them?"
"Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. What do you want me to do, and what are you willing to do to get me to do it?"
I was glad that she had asked. "The entirety of Burning Chrome will be happily covering the charge. According to a very...unique source of mine, Asclepius has a research facility on Treasure Island where all the good ideas for their next biotech products come from. Well...all of their ideas, period. I'm sure that infiltrating the secluded island would be a trivial task for someone as skilled as yourself, Ms. Leon."
"I'm just interested in the money, sweetie. You can keep the flattery for yourself." Cammy replied. She seemed to stare off into space for a few moments after this, perhaps checking her visor's AR overlay, before turning back to me again. "Just got another message from Aaron. Lucky for you, your story checks out. You'll have your results by the end of tomorrow. By the way, there are some old friends of yours waiting for you at the Museum. Aaron wanted you to know that."

I carefully stepped my way out from within the raving crowd, heading towards the bar to check my G.R.I.D. interface without getting bumped into. Sure enough, I had one recorded video message waiting for me, from none other than Hera Erisson herself.
"Mr. Stone, I hope you're doing well!" She said, her hair having turned to a certain shade of dark green since I had last seen her. "I ran into your friend Andria who was staying right here in San Francisco! Poor thing's like a little lost lamb that's so new to the Sprawl! I thought I'd help her out by taking her to the Cyborg Wars Memorial Museum, and get her an idea of how these cities came to be! You'll be there too, won't you? I told her that you would be showing up, so now she wants us to wait for you. Hope you're not in too much trouble to not make it!" She gave a sort of cold smile before the recording ended, one that seemed to give me chills. Andria, I'm sorry to have left you alone like that. I hope you're okay.


##CHAPTER 13

I initially left the Double Helix in a hurry, hoping I could find Andria near the Cyborg Wars Memorial Museum, but she was nowhere to be found, and it was already past closing time for the museum itself. I used my comm to call Vykarius and Burning Chrome, asking if they had seen her. In his unusual state of being, Vyke didn't need sleep, so I asked him to search the G.R.I.D. for any traces of her digital footprints. If she didn't have a comm, hopefully someone would have provided her with one. People who were too poor to afford comm devices, even the cheapest models, did not last long at all in the Sprawl, and would usually end up in Winterton, or worse. If she had any cybernetic implants, chances are at least one of them would be emitting a traceable signal that could be detected on the G.R.I.D., and that would also mean that we would not be the only ones that would be able to find her.

I don't know if I had gotten much sleep that night, being wracked with worry about where Andria had gone; Aaron had mentioned dropping her off at some shelter in Summer Heights, but she wasn't there when I called the place. The most I could do was get up the next morning at the local hotel to arrive at the museum's entrance just as it was opened. To my relief, Andria was waiting there by the front desk, Hera standing cooly beside her.

"Andria!" I called out as I arrived, dashing towards the two. "Are you all right? What have you done with her, Hera!?" I asked, turning to the green haired Erisson.
Hera simply looked to me with a smirk and shook her head. "Oh, Stone, don't be so upset, now." As increasingly wary of Hera that I was, I was beginning to feel my anger towards her slowly subside. "I found her lost and placed in a shelter further north, so I took her to stay with me in one of my Albert's mansions."
"How did you find her!?" I tried shouting out, though it felt quite halfhearted as I found myself unable to stay angry.
"Why, she simply gave me a call! She did have my number, after all. If I had known you were going to leave her somewhere, you could have simply told me."
My mind was telling my that Hera didn't seem very trustworthy to me, and yet, I felt oddly compelled to simply nod my head in agreement, and did just that. "Fine then. Is this all true, Andria?"
Andria gave a weak nod. "Yeah. The shelter manager suggested I call her, so I did. She took me to a mansion to stay. There was no one there except some service robots." I was going to ask her if she had remembered anything else about herself since we had first met, but not when we were in front of anyone else, especially not Hera.

"I thought I would...remember something if I went here." Andria continued, looking away from us and towards the rest of the museum. I couldn't blame her. The Cyborg Wars had become a large part of recent history crucial to the development of the West Coast Sprawl, and had left ripples that had since gone on to affect the rest of the world in some manner of another.
Hera looked to me and nodded in agreement. "My dear Albert funded most of the development of this very museum out of his own pocket, so I'm quite familiar with it myself. For all the sacrifices made during the war, it did give rise to the success his company enjoys today." The three of us stepped on in to the first room on the right from the lobby, where the guided tour began.

The first room brought to the scene of a ravaged desert town, populated with animatronic figures of turban clad dwellers carrying old fashioned assault rifles. When we approached the center of this scene an automated recording began to play, and the robots began to walk around, pointing their guns at each other.
"The Cyborg Wars have their roots in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, going back as far as the early 20th century and encompassing all manner of social and political struggles and disputes throughout the Middle East. Many highly developed nations from throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas would assert themselves into the conflicts by siding up with one faction or another, sending military support in order to fight proxy wars with the other developed nations. It began as a cold war between governments, but that was soon to change in the 21st century."

We stepped into the second area of the museum, depicting the assembly line of a weapons factory, a line of robots along a conveyor belt filled with various firearms popularized by mid-20th century soldiers. In our AR overlay, the details of each gun model were displayed in pop-up windows. I had just noticed an ancestor to my cyborg pistol Goldhart among the displayed reproductions until the automated voice-over cut in.
"Even before the advent of 3D printing, the military industrial complex benefited massively from the production and sales of the latest weaponry to all sides of the ever escalating conflicts throughout the Middle East. Even before delving into the field of cybernetic implants, the robotics company Icarus Industries quickly rose in power and influence to the giants they are today through the development of new firearms, using the battlefields as the testing grounds for their latest creations. More corporations would soon follow in Icarus's footsteps, leading to what would eventually become known as the Cyborg Wars in the 2050s."

The third scene was that of a mobile field hospital in the middle of another desert, staffed by medics, doctors, and surgeons in minty green uniforms bearing an earlier design of the Asclepius Medical logo. Some of the soldiers that were their patients seemed to have unusual features, such as unnatural skin tones. One such subject was placed inside of a vat of green gel, wires connected to his body inside, the container tank surrounded by more Asclepius scientists and machinery.
"In the early 2050s, as the Middle East conflicts were just beginning to reach a fever pitch, A startup from Berlin known as Asclepius Medical began offering its medical services to all willing soldiers involved in the field. The finest doctors and biologists from throughout Europe would get involved with the effort to develop new biotechnologies for the soldiers. This would lead to the creation of over a hundred separate research facilities on site throughout the Middle East, wherever such construction and study was permitted. Due to the emergent technologies that would come from the hard work of the scientists staffing these establishments, the protection and control over these facilities would become a crucial key to all competing factions during the Cyborg Wars. Today, less than a dozen of these remote research sites remain standing, and of those, only three remain staffed and in use. Many of the everyday modern conveniences you now enjoy are a result of field products that were developed in these hidden laboratories, which shifted the tide of the Cyborg Wars tremendously over the course of the 2050s."

The fourth area of the guided tour was perhaps the most interesting one to me. It was a long hallway divided up by a long glass window, on the other side of which were several of the various models of the famous super soldiers that everyone remembered the Cyborg Wars for the most. In front of the windows were display cases containing what appeared to be entire catalogs of cybernetic implants from throughout the 2050s, together and in pieces to display the moving parts. While Andria looked taken by the cyborg soldier mannequins, I found myself quite intrigued by the mechanical arms, and found myself comparing them to my own. At one point I was eventually able to find a model that looked like a crude, bulky version of the one I had. I glanced at the display case next to this, and noticed that it was full of various builds of cybernetic eyes, all creepily staring back at me. As with the weapons room, I could see the details of every implant and cyborg model in my AR overlay. I eventually noticed one cybernetic body that bore a striking resemblance to the Angel of Retribution just as the virtual tour guide was starting to speak up again.
"Much like nature itself, the Cyborg Wars were a competition for the fittest. Every army knew that they had to evolve and adapt to survive the ever changing ecosystem that was the battlefield. When even a modified version of what would eventually become the modern Global Reality Integration Domain, introduced by Mitashi Technologies, and their military gadgets would not make the cut during the boiling point of the war, these brave soldiers began to integrate these new gadgets into their own bodies, with the help of the quickly growing fields of bionic and cybernetic implantation surgery procedures. It was a mad arms race to create better and better soldiers, warriors that could travel for days without tiring, withstand the dangers of the battlefield, track down their enemies quickly, and efficiently eliminate the opposition with extreme prejudice, using more and more deadly weapons. This would eventually lead to the birth of one of the deadliest weapons that mankind could ever dream of creating since the nuclear warhead."

In the fifth room was a series of different models, lined up to us in sequence. I would walk past each of them as the digital guide explained them in the order that they were arranged, starting with a collection of insectoid shaped robots, resembling some species of beetle. "What you see before you is an extremely enlarged model of one of the first nanomachine robots, which are usually less than a tenth the size of a human red blood cell. While they are used in microbial medicine today, these nanobot colonies had their origins at the very end of the Cyborg Wars."
The next model I walked by was that of a series of desert buildings, appearing to be enveloped by a gray ooze that was dissolving them completely. "In the early morning of October 23rd, 2060, the first known nanobot swarm was unleashed within the city of Jerusalem, starting as a thousand microbe sized robots programmed to consume the matter around itself for power to self-replicate, the swarm of thousands of nanomachines grew into millions and then billions, and by high noon, the entire city and all of its inhabitants had either been evacuated or swallowed piece by piece by the gray flood, which then proceeded eastward at an exponentially rising rate, consuming Syria, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and half of the war torn -Istans. It proved to be an unstoppable force that not even incendiary weapons could vanquish. As the gray plague threatened to engulf India, the world's governments saw only one remaining solution."
The third model was, quite simply, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. "With an ever-growing swarm of countless multiplying nanobots threatening to consume the entire Eurasian landmass, the American and Russian governments simultaneously agreed to unload their nuclear missile supplies across the Middle East, the nuclear blasts immediately vaporizing the majority of the gray plague. As this model of nanomachine could not properly function under radioactivity, the ensuing radiation ensured that not a single microbial machine would survive to replicate itself anymore. All of the land that had been fought over throughout the Cyborg Wars had been lost in one day, now irradiated and uninhabitable. The wars had ended in an unceremonious draw. As of 2084, not one group has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the creation and release of these deadly nanomachines, though Asclepius Medical has since recovered surviving prototypes for use in medicine. This dark day in history, October 23rd, has since come to be known as the Day of the Gray Plague."

There was only one more room left in the main tour area, one that would bring this history lesson back to the present. The walls, floor, and ceiling were entirely black, painted over with neon green grid lines. Directly in the center of this was not any models, but simply an animated holographic model of the entire San Francisco peninsula. The Asclepius Medical logo was plastered on top of every high-rise building, which wasn't very far off from the real thing. Above this model city was another hologram of a pair of double helixes running parallel to each other, their protein sequences periodically swapping themselves out. It would seem that the voiceover would have one last thing to say.
"In the aftermath of the Cyborg Wars, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Americas all enjoyed considerable growth in the technological renaissance that followed, and continues on to this very day due to the widespread appeal of companies that helped with the war effort, including our very own Asclepius Medical! Thanks to the brave souls of a million soldiers and scientists that sacrificed for the well-being of the world, we now get to enjoy the fruits of their labor, Many of the conveniences of everyday life that you now enjoy right here in San Francisco were made possible due to the technologies developed during the Cyborg Wars. The genetic modification process available at every Asclepius clinic was pioneered during the war to make our soldiers more capable on the battlefield." And of course, there was the G.R.I.D., which the room's design was hinting at. It wasn't given much fanfare as it was mostly developed by rival company Mitashi Technologies. Earlier versions of the G.R.I.D. had existed prior to the Cyborg Wars, having its origins in the World Wide Web, being developed as a collaboration between several different companies that have since gone defunct or were subsidized by one of the Big Three. It was MitaTech that had developed the AR/VR overlay during the war that had become so crucial to the current iteration of the G.R.I.D. Most of the cybernetic implants and robot drones maintaining the Sprawl, on the other hand, all had their roots in the ones that were developed for Cyborg Wars armies sponsored by Icarus Industries, but you wouldn't hear much about that in this particular museum, since it was funded by and located in a heavily Asclepius controlled region of the West Coast.

"It's very strange..." Andria finally spoke as we were returning to the museum's main hall. "When I started to see all of this, I suddenly feel as if I had already known all of this all along. We were right, it's like a lost memory just came back to me. I also seem to remember...that the other companies had a big part in the war too. Icarus and MitaTech...they were involved."
I gave a nod at this. "And that's the biggest reason why they are collectively known as the Big Three around the Sprawl." I then turned to Hera, feeling unable to be upset with her anymore. "Hera, we appreciate this opportunity, but now we must be taking our leave."

I tapped Andria on the shoulder to indicate that we should go, but as I turned around, I heard Hera cry out "Wait!" and ran up in front of us. "If you're going anywhere with that Mr. Steel and his Burning Chrome band, I must warn you..." She looked worried, and I was starting to get concerned myself. "Watch out for Simon. I think he's working with them. If you do anything out of Simon's wishes, I...I'm afraid Aaron just might be the weapon he'll use if you anger him."
"Well, this Simon guy has another thing coming if he thinks he can tell me what to do. You know what I'm gonna do next? I'm gonna find him, and give him a piece of his mind." I was starting to feel my temper boil as I proudly declared this to her, but before it could go anywhere, I felt my growing anger subside once more. My pulse was still racing, but in a colder manner.
Hera simply smiled in a manner that seemed to give me chills. "How much do you know about Simon, that you are confident enough to test his limits? You seem to be in a very precarious position to be taking such a risk?"
"What the hell do YOU know about S-Simon?" I felt myself trembling, for no reason that I could ascertain.
Hera simply returned a shrug. "Not enough to tempt fate. I am merely saying that I wouldn't suggest such a rash decision at this time." She stepped out of our way, and began walking away, speaking to us one last time before she stepped out of the front door.

"I hope you know, for your own sake, just what you think you are doing."


## CHAPTER 14

I had heard absolutely nothing from Cammy Leon that night, or the following morning. I could not get in contact with her comm at all, Vykarius wasn't able to detect her presence on the G.R.I.D., and Aaron told me that he hadn't heard anything from her either. She could have very well skipped town and I wouldn't find out about it; Treasure Island had become a heavily guarded military complex that was off limits to citizens ever since Asclepius Medical had any presence in San Francisco. There was no way in hell that I would be able to get in there by force, even if I brought the entirety of Burning Chrome and drove their armored tour bus inside, all guns blazing, and the Angel of Retribution himself was for some reason helping us. The island was constantly watched over from the skies by flying security drones and VTOL helicopters, to say nothing of the armored trucks that were always driving into and out of the complex. Cammy Leon would certainly have to live up to her own name, without fault, if she were to have any chance disguising her way inside and through Asclepius's state of the art bioscanning systems.

At mid day, I finally got another lead as an anonymous text message was sent to my comm: "*WE FOUND YOUR CAMMY. COME TO JAPANESE TEA GARDEN IN GOLDEN GATE PARK AT MIDNIGHT. BRING ANDRIA AND NO ONE ELSE. FAILURE TO ATTEND IS UNWISE.*"

Golden Gate Park had been a fixture of San Francisco for centuries, though many of its contents had changed over the years. Most of the buildings and structures around at the beginning of the century had been demolished, replaced, or were bought out by Asclepius. The Japanese Tea Garden was one of the rare exceptions to this, almost entirely preserved and carefully maintained for over a century. Even at night, the city lights seemed to illuminate the garden grounds from afar with an almost otherworldly green glow. As soon as Andria and I crossed in through the strangely opened, unguarded entrance, I received another text message on my comm: "*IF YOU WISH TO FIND CAMMY, SEEK ENLIGHTENMENT.*" I took this opportunity to send a message of my own to Aaron's comm: "Going with Andria to have tea with Buddha. Would like for you to join us."

We crossed the awkwardly shaped drum bridge over the water to reach a large stone statue of Buddha, his meditative trance illuminated by fluorescent lights beneath his seat. Standing in front of the ancient guru was a somewhat familiar looking silhouette. I wanted to reach for my gun at that moment, but I couldn't tell if they were armed as well, and didn't want to risk raising a commotion so prematurely. I motioned for Andria to stand behind me, and the two of us slowly approached the statue, the figure in front of it slowly turning around to face us. It was Ryuji Hazunomo, dressed in a ceremonial kimono.

He gave us a warm smile that felt oddly chilling. "It is quite a pleasure that you could make it, Stone-san."
Following pure instincts now, I drew my revolver, daring Ryuji to even make me point it at him. "What the hell did you bring us into, Ryuji? Are you here to kill us? Where are the rest of your damn Yaks!?" With a thought, I turned on the flashlight in my cybereye, searching my immediate surroundings but not wanting to let Ryuji out of my sight. Anything could have been hiding on the other side of the Buddha statue. I waited, but nothing jumped out at us.
Ryuji took a deep breath, having a calmness about himself that he seemed struggling to maintain. "The last time we had met, I told you that you owed me a favor. I'm afraid I have to call that favor in right now."
Like I ever owed you shit; that's what I wanted to say, but I simply held up my gun and let him continue speaking.
"What? You think your favor was simply to die by my hand? I would have done that already, had it been the case. No, I am afraid someone else is going to be having that pleasure. Someone else who is out for your blood...and mine."
"Someone like who?" Before Ryuji could answer my question, I heard the sound of something whiffing through the air, and caught sight of a small object bouncing across the ground before landing between the three of us.

It was a concussion grenade, armed and live.

I immediately turned around and grabbed Andria with both arms, shoving her away from me as hard as I could before a bright flash engulfed my vision, a shockwave knocking me off of my feet and sending me tumbling into the nearby bushes.

I must have regained consciousness just a few moments later, waking up to the sound of rustling foliage and scattered gunfire. Andria and Ryuji were both nowhere to be seen. I quickly sprang to my feet, retrieving my dropped revolver and began running back towards the drum bridge, using the local flora for cover. I called out for Andria, but this only seemed to alert another figure from across the water, who extended his arm and, before I could figure out what was going on, one of the trees between me and him has suddenly been fried by a bolt of lightning. Lightning that had flown sideways, from the man's body.

I retaliated by firing off three shots with Goldhart. Even with my cybereye's zoom feature, the distance between the two of us was pretty significant, especially at night. Still, I only missed narrowly enough to send the man running for cover. This gave me the opening I needed to cross the drum bridge...or so I had hoped. When I had climbed onto its apex, what looked like a rock from a distance went sailing towards my head. I ducked it just in time to realize that it was a hi-ex grenade, only to have its course abruptly change in midair and fly back towards me. I jumped directly off of the bridge and into the water below just a moment before the whole structure burst in to flames.

Not good, I wouldn't want to be in the water when the man with the lightning found me again. With all haste, I swam and waded to shore, running out of the water to duck behind a stone lantern for cover. That was, until the lantern suddenly uprooted itself from the ground, wobbling itself into the air as if it were being haphazardly dangled from strings before it reeled away from me, holding still in thin air for a moment before it suddenly hurled itself directly at me.

Tossing my gun into my left hand instead, I pulled back with my mechanical right arm and threw a straight punch, slamming my metallic fist into the oncoming stone lantern, the impact shattering it into a thousand pebbles showering themselves around me.

On the road in front of me was another man, a pair of green goggles on his face, a bowl shaped chrome helmet over his head, and two grenade bandoliers crisscrossed over his torso, one missing from each belt. A third grenade suddenly unhooked itself and began to float away from the man as he raised one of his hands. Not waiting to find out what was happening, I took Goldhart in my right hand once more and squeezed the trigger, aiming directly at the floating grenade.

The ensuing explosion knocked the man to the ground some several feet away. I stepped onto the road to close the distance for a killing shot, only to feel a sharp jab strike me in the back, and course through my entire body. I fell forward onto the path as the surge protectors in my cybernetics were activated, my biosoftware systems shutting down and then promptly rebooting. I had been hit by an electrical charge, and a damned strong one at that.

While face down on the ground, I turned myself over onto my side just in time to see the other man with the lightning, his full head of spiky blue hair pointing up towards the heavens. He had the grin of a slasher, and was cackling like a hyena as he held out his hands in front of him, electrical sparks arcing out between his open palms. He pointed one of them in my direction and thrust it outward, creating a bolt of lightning that hammered me in the chest, sending me skidding several feet backwards across the ground.

It felt as if I had been hit by a train, a train that spontaneously converted into pure energy and drove itself right through me. I struggled to get back to my feet as the blue haired man approached me, looking to ready another bolt to throw. I had dropped my gun from the force of the last strike, and my cybernetic arm was still recalibrating its software. The man was now almost standing over me, raising his electrical hands skyward, when I noticed something lit coming from behind. It landed on his head, and his blue spiked hair was ignited in a red flame.

Immediately, the electrical arcs on the man's hands ceased as his laughter was replaced by frantic screaming. He danced around in panicked circles with his hair ablaze, and eventually made a run for the water. There was a splash, and then an electrical storm rising out from the waters, the man resurfacing and floating motionless on its surface. Behind me, I heard another voice: "Hope I'm not too late for tea!"

It was Aaron Steel. He was holding up one index finger as he trotted up to me, a small flame dancing atop it. With his other arm, he pulled me up to my feet. I was trying to shake off the dazed feeling from the electric shocks. "Andria..." I grunted out in pain. "I was with Andria, where is she?"

Before I could hear any answer out of Aaron, we instead both heard footsteps coming from the other direction. It was the man with the grenades. He was stretching out one arm in the direction of a ten foot tree, uprooting it from the ground and causing it to float into the air above us.

"Aww, shit! You didn't tell me you were with a telekinetic!" Aaron cried out, jumping forward and extending his arm. The flame on his fingertip grew in size and intensity before shooting out in a plume at the tree, lighting up the garden around us as the floating flora burst into flames. It looked as if we were now going to be attacked by a flaming tree, but Aaron suddenly brought forth his other hand to create another stream of fire to completely immolate the tree into a pile of ashes and cinders that rained down over us.

Aaron ran ahead of me to close the distance between him and the telekinetic man. He let loose with another spray of red flames, but the other man held up his hand and the fire seemed to part around him. Aaron then tried tossing a sphere of flame at the man, only for its trajectory to be altered before the fire was suddenly snuffed out. Aaron may have been a pyrokinetic, but the other man's telekinesis was manipulating even that.

By now, I was in control of my cyberarm again and had retrieved Goldhart from the ground. I fired a shot at the telekinetic man. The heavy round seemed to travel around him. I fired another shot, and it veered away from his body at the last moment. What was worse, Aaron suddenly stopped moving. He looked as if he were about to throw a punch, but he would not lower his fist. Instead, his entire body was lifted off the ground, floating helplessly. Then, like a ragdoll, he was flung directly at me. I dove into a bush to avoid being slammed into.

The telekinetic man continued to walk towards where we had landed. Every one of the remaining grenades on his bandoliers had unhooked themselves and were floating around him in a circle. I raised my gun to take aim at any one of these, only to find my mechanical arm suddenly lock itself up, then start to bend the forearm. I tried reaching out with my left arm, only to find it suddenly immobilized, while my right arm slowly repositioned itself to press the barrel of my revolver against my right temple. The goggled man's face had been completely expressionless up to this point, but now, as he stood in front of me, his mouth contorted itself into a smile as I felt my mechanical right arm slowly tighten its grip around the trigger of Goldhart.

Blood started to pour from that mouth. One by one, the grenades around him started falling to the ground, and I felt control returning to my own body while the telekinetic man went limp. A sharp blade had driven itself clean through his torso. Its wielder kicked him to the ground hard enough to make his chrome helmet fall off.

Behind him, Ryuji stood with a now bloody katana drawn in his hands, his kimono now full of dirt and leaves. "That...was just two of the people that were trying to kill us, Stone-san. They are the Psycho Squad. There is more where they came from."

"Now where the hell is Andria?" I asked, almost feeling like pointing my gun at Ryuji once again. Instead, I ended up pointing the barrel of Goldhart down at some bushes as they started to rustle from behind us.

It was the man with lightning hands, half of his blue spiked hair burnt off, and looking quite perturbed by it. In one arm, he was holding Andria in a headlock, holding her in front of him as a shield while his other hand sparked furiously with electrical impulses, threatening to touch Andria's face with them. "Nobody...fucking...move! Or this girl...gets it!" Water dripped off his green-striped black uniform, the man's eyes bloodshot with a psychotic sort of fury.

He apparently noticed me pointing my revolver in his direction, causing him to shout "Don't you fucking dare!" as he suddenly extended his arm outward, his entire body glowing with an electric current before sending large bolts of lighting in every direction. Aaron and Ryuji, I saw both of them get knocked off of their feet before I went down, yet Andria herself seemed oddly unaffected by the electrical discharges, as far as I could tell before I completely lost consciousness.


##CHAPTER 15

I awakened to a nearly featureless white room, perfectly cubical in its shape. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all lined with black lines, all forming a grid of perfect squares approximately one foot across each side. Aside from this, the room had been completely featureless, and to my own surprise, I found myself standing when I woke up, not laying down.

On the wall in front of me, several of the grid tiles formed themselves into a door, and swung open. In walked a tall, dark skinned man in his 50s, wearing a beret to cover his balding, and the uniform of Cerberus Security Systems, the name tag on his chest reading "CAPT. GOLDHART".

"Well done on your training, Joseph!" Jacob Goldhart gave me a smile as he walked up. "Now then, are you ready for the real thing?"
"I think so. Vykarius sure has programmed some realistic simulations into here, huh?" I don't know why I said that, but those were the words that came to mind. Words that came from four years ago.
"Glad to hear it, Stone! The chopper is waiting for us. Let's not keep the party waiting, shall we?" Jacob put his left hand out on my right shoulder. My right arm was every bit as natural as my left, and both of my eyes.

Together, the two of us began to walk in through the door that he came out of. "I'm real proud of you, Joe. Your daddy would have been real proud of you too. I was right there in his squad during the war, you know. He may have had to leave for war before he got the chance to meet his son, but he treated his unit like any respectable father would, with discipline and encouragement. Always pushing us to our limits, and then to exceed them. Serving with your daddy was truly an honor. Raising you in his stead was the very least I could do after he didn't make it back home."

The two of us walked through the doorway and immediately found ourselves in the back of a helicopter in flight. Benched beside us were Kia, Red, and Victor "Vykarius" Armitage, the rest of my Cerberus squad.

"Everybody here? Good, let's go over the briefing one more time." Jacob said as he stood in front of us, a holographic display of three buildings forming a U shape, the model of an ampitheater in the courtyard in between each of them.

"Reynold Goodman is holding his next speech right here, in the courtyard of the Gibson Springs Convention Center. He will be drawing the biggest crowd that he's ever had in his entire campaign so far." The holograms then switched to a selection of charts and graphs titled "2080 ELECTION POLLS."

"As a minority party candidate, Goodman is doing incredibly well." Goldhart continued, "So well, in fact, that he is no doubt bound to overtake the other candidates in popularity at this rate!"
"So why have we been tasked with assassinating him, especially during one of his own speeches, in front of such a huge audience?" Kia was the first to object. "Such drastic and forceful measures really kind of fly in the face of American democracy. We're supposed to vote for the candidate that's best fit for the job, and we do it with ballots, not bullets."
"That's what everyone has to believe, Ms. Sakuraba." Jacob replied, walking through the holograms to look her in her cybernetic eyes. "But you see, Mr. Goodman is a bit of a...socialist with the way he's thinking. Over half the population of America is employed by one of three companies: Asclepius Medical, Mitashi Technologies, or our very own Icarus Industries. Hundreds of millions of lives depend on them every single day. What Goodman wants to do, however, is limit their power, prevent them from holding monopolies, remove the ability for private interests to financially contribute to political campaigns, and let the government socialize things like roads, schools, libraries, hospitals, militias, you name it. None of the corporations would own these things anymore. It would severely cripple their influence and growth. We're with Cerberus Security Systems, a private militia owned by Icarus Industries. We serve their interests, and their interests are the interests of its hundred million worldwide employees."
"Or maybe just the interests of its handful of boardroom executives." Kia retorted, rolling her electronic eyes. "They're the ones with all the spending money, the ones that make all the executive decisions, the ones that fund the political campaigns of our party's candidate.

For the past few decades or so, The United States government had grown three major political parties: The Icarus Party, the Asclepius Party, and the Mitashi Party. Collectively, the three of them elected candidates that resided over the entirety of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of US government. Every four years, each of them came up with a Presidential candidate that ran a campaign funded entirely by the party's corporation, platformed on the issues that their corporate sponsors wanted them to talk about. Democracy was supposed to decide which one would end up being elected, with you being free to vote for whichever one you wanted, but you would always get more benefits if you could prove that you voted for your employer's candidate. It was incredibly hard to fake that, since your employer always had the connections to view the private ballots. Many independent parties had run against the Big Three over the years, but not a single one of them had ever managed to receive even five percent of the popular vote, or a single electoral vote. That was clearly because every single independent party was made up of bigots, fascists, and just plain idiots, at least if you believed what the corporate owned news networks were always saying about them, whenever they did bother to mention them at all.

Reynold Goodman was quite the game changer in this regard. He had been a philanthropist and political activist since even before the Cyborg Wars, and had funded his own campaign for the 2080 election season, running his platform on the basis that the overly capitalist America was creating too wide of a class divide, to the point to where middle income citizens had been stretched so far thin as to completely vanish around the time of the Cyborg Wars. The mean income of every US citizen was far, far greater than the median income by a long shot, the top 1% of earners making more money than the remaining 99% put together, every single one of that top 1% consisting of executives and associates of the Big Three. No startup company had even a fighting chance against these monolithic giants, except for one person: Reynold Goodman, and he wanted to do something about it, to put power back in the hands of the people, and make the government hold the corporations accountable for their actions again.

"Independent candidate Reynold Goodman has been polling higher and higher with every survey, currently holding fifteen percent, a number that will only continue to grow. The enthusiasm for his campaign is reaching a fever pitch now, and if allowed to continue, he is most likely to win the election. His promises to limit corporate power, returning it to the federal and state levels, would surely jeopardize the entire system that the current parties rely on." Jacob didn't seem to be saying this so much as reciting it by rote, as if someone from upstairs made him memorize a canned briefing.
"Have you ever even been to Winterton lately?" Victor was the next to speak up against Goldhart. "Mile after mile of neighborhood slums and shanty towns. People literally and figuratively killing each other just to get by with jobs more scarce than food down there. Korea probably had it better off during the Kim dynasty than most of America does now. The silent, voiceless majority of America that's no better off now than it was a century ago. They know that the age of small businesses is long since dead. Their only choice now is to cry out for the government that's whored themselves out to the corporate bigwigs for cash."

"Captain Goldhart, if I may...." I found myself beginning to say. "In the past few months alone as a field officer for Cerberus Security Systems, I have been ordered to open fire on unarmed civilians that were peacefully protesting the business practices of Icarus Industries. I have been ordered to plant false evidence of scandalous behavior on ex-Icarus employees who had quit their jobs to work for a rival corporation. I have been ordered to forcibly coerce employees of Asclepius Medical and Mitashi Technologies to quit their jobs and work at Icarus instead. And that's not even getting into all the operations I have done with this very unit, where we have stolen valuable information from these other companies. Captain, I do not approve of the business ethics of Cerberus Security Systems, nor those of its parent company Icarus Industries. If I may speak freely, I believe that Mr. Goodman does not deserve to die, but to carry on with his political campaign, especially if these corrupt practices are cracked down on as a result."

Goldhart looked to me with a cold stare, then a warm smile started to appear on his face. "Sergeant Stone, son, I am very glad to hear that you feel this way." He then turned to Victor. "Officer Armitage, what is your assessment of Stone's statements?"
"I can't argue with any of them really, Jake." Victor shrugged his shoulders.
Jacob then turned his gaze to Kia. "Corporal Sakuraba, what is your take?"
"I would much rather protect Mr. Goodman on his campaign trail, if you ask me." She responded quite bluntly.
"Private Red?" Red simply gave an incomprehensible grunt and a nod in response to Jacob.

Jacob looked back to each of us in turn, then started to walk back through the holographic projections, which returned to a view of the convention center. "We have all reached a consensus, then. We were handed orders from on high to assassinate Reynold Goodman, but now we can all agree that these orders should not be followed, for everyone's sake. Disobeying direct orders from Cerberus HQ on location would be one thing, but there is a second strike team being dropped off at the east building rooftop at the same time that we are arriving on the roof of the west building. They are the contingency plan that this assassination is carried through."
"In other words," Kia spoke up, "We have to stop them before they do what we were supposed to come here for."

The VTOL landed us on the western rooftop of the convention center, where Jacob, Red, Kia and myself filed out. Victor was staying aboard.
"I'll catch you guys soon!" He told us. "With a little bit of help from some friends, I think I'll be able to help you with this operation with the use of an actual BCI! It's a new operating system that connects directly to your brain and operates your own neural network like any computer circuit board! Well, at least that's what I got from the way the chromes at the Singularity Church explained it to me, anyways. I won't just be *on* the G.R.I.D., I'll be literally *IN* the G.R.I.D. too, in a sense!"
I couldn't help but roll my eyes at this. "Whatever, just help us out in your usual way." I turned my head to look over at the East building rooftop. It was empty except for another VTOL copter that was flying away from it. "And your pilot had better get you there fast, I think the other strike team is already on their way down."

I was starting to remember this now. This was four years ago, my last day on the job for Cerberus. It was happening almost exactly as I had recalled it. I looked down from the rooftop we were on. Ten stories below was a large stage and a growing crowd in front of it, eagerly awaiting Reynold Goodman's arrival. I remember how this all ended, and wasn't looking forward to going through all of this again.

It wasn't going to be an easy descent. The convention center buildings were off limits to the public and guarded by Goodman's own personal security guards, and hurting or killing them would be counterproductive to our case of helping him. While Kia was staying behind on the roof, setting up her sniping equipment in hopes of getting a shot at our targets across in the East building, Red used his mechanical arms to punch open the locked rooftop access door where we could begin our descent. The fire exit stairwells and elevators were blocked off and guarded, so we had to use the primary staircases to make our way down.

Part of the way down the West building, the three of us got calls on our comms, and the digital avatar of Victor suddenly appeared before us in AR. It was so startling, we almost moved out of the way to avoid colliding with him.

"Hey guys, I'm in! Sorry to have kept you waiting! It feels like I'm in a whole other world! I don't even feel my physical body anymore, it's like I'm flying! Oh, and watch out, there's an ambush coming towards you right now!" Vyke was not a moment too soon. As those words were leaving his mouth, the next few doors down the narrow hallway swung wide open and a Cerberus trooper leaned out of each one. We each dove to the sides of the hall as they all proceeded to open fire at us with their assault rifles. I saw Jacob take aim with a large white revolver, his own last name carved down the left side of the barrel, and fire off a deafening shot at our nearest assailant. The heavy round pierced through the door that the trooper was using for cover, and left a large hole in his chest (and an even bigger one in his back) as he fell backward. This freed up Red for the opportunity to charge forward, the bullets seeming to deflect off his cybernetically reinforced torso and plated body armor as he got close enough to grab a trooper in each pneumatic arm, violently smashing each one to the floor with a loud crunch.

"Officer Armitage, our cover appears to have been blown!" I heard Jacob call out as his revolver kicked back from another shot, taking down another trooper approaching from further down the hall. "What happened? How are they finding us?"

"It's our implants, Jake!" Vyke called out over our comms. "I knew it...Kia and Red's cybernetic implants are all transmitting information on our locations to Cerberus HQ! Red! Kia! Can you disable transmissions on all of your cyberware? I'll see what I can do about their own signals while I'm in the G.R.I.D. Watch yourselves, we got more Cerberus vehicles approaching the complex!" Somehow, as we were running out on to one of the convention center's show floors, I had a feeling that we were too late. I already knew we were too late.

The show floor was a wide open space dotted with empty booths and display platforms, with full length windows looking outside instead of walls. As we went to secure this area, I heard a faint rumbling off in the distance that started to grow louder as a shadow fell over the show floor. From outside the outer window, one of Cerberus's own VTOL copters, much like the one that we were on but more heavily armed, had ascended to our floor. Even from within the building, I could hear the whine of the copter's own gatling turret winding up, and hit the deck just in time to see Jacob and Red do the same as the roar of minigun fire drowned out everything else, from the windows shattering to the show floor's furnishings being perforated with bullets as we scrambled for cover. I couldn't even here Jacob's orders anymore over the gunfire, and simply crawled on my hands and knees in an attempt to get away from the hail of bullets as it swept back and forth across the room.

All of a sudden, the gatling turret ceased firing after nearly half a minute. At first, I had thought that it ran out of bullets, but then, with the AR contacts I was wearing, I could see messages of Vykarius doing something in the overlay. I glanced over at the copter to see it swaying slowly from side to side in the air, as if it were having difficulty hovering in place. "Run for it! Trying to jam the attack copter's onboard software." Was a text that was sent to us. We got up and booked it to the nearest flight of stairs, away from the windows.

The next floor down looked to be initially safe, as there were no windows. At least, not until a missile suddenly blasted a tremendous hole in the wall, revealing our attack copter behind it. It appeared to be regaining control over itself. "Shit! They've locked me out! I'm sorry, everyone!" Victor's voice came out over our comms. "I did force them to turn off their own transmitting, however. They won't be calling for backup any time soon!"

The three of us ducked behind another wall as the VTOL hovered patiently by the newly opened window, blocking the last open staircase to the ground floor. And even if we did make it to the ground, they would just likely gun us down as soon as we moved out into the open. Jacob tried leaning out toward the opening and fired off a shot from his revolver, hitting the copter's fuselage. This only seemed to make the pilot angry, however, as they immediately responded with another hail of gatling bullets before suddenly firing off another missile that flushed us out from our original cover, the explosion scattering us across the room. My hearing had barely come back to me when I figured out where Red and Jacob had gone. Jacob was closest to the stairwell now, while I was the furthest away. Red was in the center, in front of the window, in front of the VTOL.

Just as it looked like the helicopter was preparing to fire another salvo from its arsenal, I witnessed Red starting to move towards it, dashing towards the wide open hole in the wall with his mechanical legs, which then made a running leap directly outside the building, striking down with one massive mechanical fist that smashed through the windshield of the helicopter's cockpit. I couldn't see anything inside the cockpit after that moment, however; its altitude started to drop as it went into a slow, sideways spin that began to speed up as its descent shifted into an all out freefall when its propellers suddenly failed, crashing into the ground several stories below in a mess of scrap.

"Red...Red!" I called out, trying to process what had just happened for a second time as I scrambled for the makeshift window, looking down to the ground in horror. Red had just crashed himself into a helicopter. I remembered how shocked I was when this had happened.

"Stone! Get away from the open now, son! There could be snipers lining up a shot with us now!" Jacob yelled, prompting me to step away and join him in running for the next stairwell. I saw him opening another comm conference as we made our way down. "Kia! Corporal Sakuraba! Red is down! Our position has been compromised! Get down from up there!" As I was directly behind him, I could see a display of a local video broadcast directly from one of Kia's own electronic eyes, staring down the barrel of her rifle's scope at an infrared scan of the East building. At least a dozen figures could be seen running down through the halls, Kia eventually firing her rifle to take down a few solitary targets that wandered in front of windows, and even a few that weren't. Her rifle rounds must have had an incredible amount of penetration power to pierce through walls.

The infrared view vanished, she stopped looking through her rifle's scope, looking up to see a figure stepping up from behind her. There was a gunshot, followed by Kia falling to the ground, looking down at a bullet hole in her own torso.
"I...I'm down!" I could hear Kia cry out to us as the live feed of her eye looked up to the person that had shot her. It looked to be a woman in her late twenties, scarlet red hair and a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses on her face. She pointed a handgun right at Kia's eye while she was still reaching for her own dropped rifle. There was a bang, a flash, and the video feed was gone, to be replaced by a SIGNAL LOST message.

I stopped in my tracks at that moment, processing the fact that I just witnessed Kia being shot dead by some woman...a woman that was familiar and unfamiliar to me at the same time. It was the first time I had seen her, but later, in 2084, I had seen her before, and very recently. I also didn't have any time to think about this, however, as the two of us made it outside and into the courtyard's amphitheater. The crowd was already fleeing from all the commotion, and the stage was already empty.

"Where's Mr. Goodman? Is he safe?" I called out to Jacob.
"We're going to find out!" He replied as he charged towards the north building, leaving me to follow.
"How are we going to do that? We're dressed as the same people that are trying to kill him! We were supposed to be the ones killing him!"
"Then we're just going to have to shoot down anyone dressed like us that is trying to kill him instead!" Jacob used his revolver to burst open a window for the two of us to enter the north building.

"Victor, where is Mr. Goodman now?" Jacob barked out over our comm conference.
"He's headed with his bodyguards out to another helicopter landing pad through the other side of the north building." Vyke's voice came in through, though it was starting to sound distorted, as if we were getting some signal interference. "I think there's something wrong with that extraction point...hold on, what's happening to our connection?"
"Victor?" After seeing what had happened to Kia, worry was starting to take me. "What's going on over there?"
The transmission came to us very faintly. "There's something going on right here, where I am. More Cerberus enforcers are entering the building...oh....oh god! They've found me! They're after me! I have to get back to my-"
We heard nothing more from Vykarius after that, and we couldn't afford to wait around any longer. We used the 3D blueprint of the convention center that he left for us to reach the back exit of the north building.

Jacob and I eventually reached a large set of double doors, and pulled them open to find ourselves outside. It was just a short pathway to the helicopter landing pad, not more than a hundred feet away from us. I caught sight of the back of Reynold Goodman himself entering the helicopter, assisted by two bodyguards. He turned around to face us as the passenger door swung closed, and the helicopter began to lift off.

Then I realized something just a moment too late. Those two bodyguards didn't accompany him into the helicopter. And I recognized their faces. I had seen them before, at Cerberus Security's own undercover operations department.

One of them noticed us just as the helicopter had lifted a few dozen feet into the air. I saw him pull some kind of switch out of his pocket. I rushed towards him to stop it, but his finger was faster than my feet, even faster than Jacob's draw as he went down from a heavy revolver round immediately after pressing the switch.

And just like that, the very helicopter that was hovering above us, the one that Reynold Goodman was in, had instantly burst into a terrifying fireball that seemed to darken the afternoon sky above us. The last thing I remember was reaching out with my right arm to shield my eyes from the blast, only to have the burning wreck that used to be Goodman's copter come crashing down onto Jacob and I.


## CHAPTER 16

Darkness. My recurring nightmare woke me up to darkness, and an inability to move myself. I turned on the flashlight in my cybereye with a mental command, and found the light not travelling any further than a few inches in front of me, Just a featureless smooth black surface all around myself, like a coffin, but with rounder curvature. I didn't have any space to move the rest of my body; even if I had my comm or my gun on me, I doubt I could have contorted myself enough to reach either of them. It appeared as though I wasn't supposed to have awakened so early. There was little I could do beyond listen.

And listen I did. I heard the faint hum of a motor nearby, and the sensation of motion every now and again. I got the sense that I was inside of a moving vehicle. Then, a minute later, I heard a loud thud coming from directly above. This was followed by some softer noises that seemed to travel off a short distance in one direction, then the horrible metallic groan of something steel grinding against something else made of steel. A few moments later, the blank wall in front of me suddenly lit up with a fluorescent glow. I could see the confined space I was in, but nothing else for several seconds until the wall in front of me swung open like a lid. It was a lid to a person sized capsule. And beyond, it was a pair of eyes staring at me through a hooded shinobi mask, the black clad ninja extending one gloved hand out to grab me by my mechanical arm, pulling me out of the metallic coffin and on to my feet.

The ninja and myself were standing inside what looked like the cargo unit of a truck, and I had just climbed out of a stasis pod, very similar to the one that I had found Andria in. The place was stacked with several more pods just like it, and nothing else. The ninja immediately walked toward the open end of the cargo unit, to where the double doors had their lock cut open with a blade, most likely the one being carried in the scabbard on the ninja's back. With nothing to hold them shut, the doors swung open freely, an empty highway in the middle of a desert at night stretching beyond it, the road quickly passing by beneath us. He beckoned me to approach, and cautiously I did. The road was now passing a bend on top of a shallow hill. Once I had gotten up to the doors, the ninja suddenly stepped behind me and shoved me out of the vehicle, sending me tumbling down that dusty hill.

I was just picking myself up and dusting myself off when I noticed that the ninja had also leapt out of the vehicle right after I did, and was now holding something in his hand as he ran up to me. It was a gun, a handgun, and he was holding it by the barrel instead of the handle. It was a revolver, a white revolver, my revolver Goldhart. The man used his other hand to remove his ninja mask. It was Ryuji.

"Sorry to keep you waiting so long, Stone-san. Tracking you down was not easy."
I quickly snatched my gun out of Ryuji's hands and spoke slowly, but sternly. "Where the hell am I?"
"You are now in Autumn Falls, the Nevada region of the Sprawl." He looked around to the skyline, then to his comm, pressing a command into it. "Somewhere near Bald Mountain."
"Bald Mountain? Nevada? Autumn Falls? I was in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park last I remember."
"That was two days ago, Stone-san. I was the first to regain consciousness from the lightning man. The fire man was soon after. By the time we had awakened, you and the girl were already gone, and they had come back for us. We managed to escape and hide."
"And how did you find me?"
"We have our ways, Stone-san. The fire man was the first to follow, and was able to give chase. He should be here soon."
"And you...let me guess, your Yakuza...you used them to track me down." MitaTech, and by extension the Yakuza, primarily operated out of Autumn Falls.
"I am not so fortunate as to have so many under my influence as my father, Stone-san, but I intend to change that one day, very soon. I tracked you down on my own, waited on an overpass for the abduction vehicle to pass under."
"What are you talking about, influence? And why the fuck would you want to help me!?" The kind of company I had been attracting lately had been quite worrying, though I suppose I had deserved it, after all the strange jobs I had been agreeing to doing over the years. I wasn't sure if it was any more justified than what I had done for Cerberus, now that I think about it.

"Stone-san..." Ryuji began, putting his hands together. "In the 2020s, The Yakuza and MitaTech were one and the same. My own grandfather was on the board of directors, next to Ken Mitashi himself. Their relationship was like being two parts of a snake. MitaTech was the head, the outward face of the company looking forward to the world. The Hazunomo-Gumi, they were the tail of the snake, hidden the head, where everyone was looking, ready to coil around and choke the life out of all who opposed MitaTech, until Ken Mitashi himself would perform the killing bite publicly, by buying out what was left of our enemy companies. This, Stone-san was how MitaTech conquered Japan, and is now coiling its scales around the rest of the world."
"And let me guess, it's different nowadays? That's why you're telling me this?"
"That is not far from the truth, Stone-san. My father, the current Oyabun, feels like the head and tail of this snake should go their separate ways. The current CEO of MitaTech does not wish for this, as he knows that his company is nothing without the sword of the Yakuza behind it. He has threatened to have his own law enforcement firm, Shogun Security, to arrest the entire Yakuza and make a public display of turning them in. My father, on the other hand, knows where MitaTech's entire board of directors, and everyone loyal to them, live. They could just as easily slaughter them in their sleep. The head and tail of the Great Snake are threatening to devour each other, Stone-San. The opportunity to shift the balance of this conflict is fast approaching."
"So what are you expecting out of me? You want me to help your dad win this civil war?" In all honesty, I would have loved for MitaTech and the Yakuza to destroy each other, ridding the whole world of them, but I haven't been expecting to get everything I wanted for at least four years now.
"No, Stone-san, I want you to help *me* to win this war. As far as I am concerned, there is only one man fit to guide both the Yakuza and Mitashi Technologies. That man is me."
"If you know better than both of them, you must already know how to overthrow them, and know what you're going to do once you're in power."
"Oh, believe me, Stone-san. You are far from the only man seeking vengeance on the corporate bodies that have wronged you in the past, and the ones that are continuing to wrong you in the present. What I am seeking now is to unite the enemies of the corporate giants under a common cause."
"I'm sure the Angel of Retribution would be thrilled to join forces with the likes of you and Yakuza."
"Indeed, the Angel certainly would be. With him on our side, the corporations would not stand a chance. It is true that the corporations own private militaries, but with no wars to fight in two decades, they have gone soft, having only police actions to use them on. The Angel, however, has remained active for twenty years, always in hiding, lying in wait to strike back at the corporations that made him the monster he became during the Cyborg Wars. My own father was involved in the CyberSoldier program that created the likes of him. He would be wise to accept my offer for an opportunity to see justice done to the Oyabun."

While the two of us were talking, I kept checking the open highway that stretched out to the Summer Heights skyline on the horizon. Eventually, a small vehicle could be seen coming up in the distance, drawing closer until, when Ryuji was bringing up the Angel, a motorcycle arrived in front of us, an old song about riding through the desert plains blaring on its sound systems. The biker removed his helmet to reveal a full head of long red hair. It was Aaron.

"Glad to see we didn't completely lose you, Stony Joe! Why, if it weren't for the help of ninja boy over here, we might have lost you inside of New Babylon!" Aaron seemed to be his usual cheerful, passionate self despite all that I had seen happen to him at the Japanese Tea Garden, and he seemed very little if at all worse for wear.
"New Babylon? Is that where they were taking me? Is that where they're taking Andria?"
"Looks to be that way! It's out here somewhere in the Nevada deserts, last I checked! That's a real shame...I was hoping I would get to follow them back to Vegas instead."

The New Babylon arcology, how could I have forgotten. Much like Area 51, it was the subject of a million and one conspiracy theories dreamed up by late night GRIDCast talk show pundits, bloggers, and alternative news sites on the G.R.I.D. in the American West. From Las Vegas, you could usually see New Babylon as a platinum colored pyramid structure out in the distance, stretching at least a thousand feet into the sky. Constructed shortly after the end of the Cyborg Wars, New Babylon was supposed to be a self contained city, sufficient entirely on its own, without any outside influences. The entire world could end tomorrow, and up to one million citizens in the arcology could live the rest of their lives out happily without ever having to leave. At least, that's how the story went. At some point in the 2070s, New Babylon closed itself off from the outside world entirely; no one could get inside, no one was allowed to leave, and communications between the arcology and the rest of the world were completely severed. Not even Vykarius could get into the arcology's own local network; it was an island isolating itself from the rest of the digital ocean. It was a big shame, too. If G.R.I.D. access had at least been allowed to the arcology, whatever activities the isolated citizens might have been getting up to would have made for a great reality program on the entertainment networks. Instead, we have had to settle for watching the most violent criminals within the corporate penal system being forced to fight each other in bloody gladiatorial combat for a chance to win a full pardon. The only winner of those competitions that I knew was my old partner Red, who was instead awarded with a lobotomy and a position on my task force unit at Cerberus Security Systems. None of us ever found out what happened in New Babylon, so the mere sight of an AutoTruck driving towards or away from it was a curious sight indeed.

"Are they somehow able to take people like Andria into the arcology?" I asked. "Aaron, give me your comm, I wanna ask Vyke about all this."
"Your Vykarius told me that the AutoTruck we found you in was headed directly for New Babylon, yes." Ryuji was the one to reply to me.
"Then we should've stowed away on that damn truck to get inside the arcology for ourselves." I replied, frustrated.
Aaron was trying to contain a derisive chuckle. "What, without an escape plan? Going in blind? You'll be completely limited to New Babylon's local G.R.I.D. space, whatever the hell that's like. You will want to at least bring Vykarius with you, right?"
"Vykarius...he doesn't have a body anymore. He was killed four years ago. He's just a G.R.I.D. avatar in the data clouds." I told them, a fact that I had a hard time believing myself at first. "How the hell are we going to transfer some roaming G.R.I.D. data into a private domain like New Babylon's? Even if we could consolidate all of Vykarius into one single digital place..."
"We definitely can do that, Stone-san." Ryuji said to me. "In one of these Nevada mountains, there is a monastery wherein a certain sect of the Singularity Church lives in seclusion. As souls that desire to shed their fleshy shells for digital ones, Vykarius has already accomplished what they have been dedicating their lives to. If there is anything at all that could assist the digitized soul in the corporeal realm with a matter such as this, it would be them."
"Is that so?" I asked, skeptical. "From my experience, this Church liked to blow up airports instead of hang out in monasteries."
"Despite their own name, there are many different, separate sects of the Singularity Church that follow their own doctrines. I know the branches that exist here in the Autumn Falls region, and this one was seeking answers to the Portland airport bombing."
"*Was* seeking?"
"In the time since we had last met, Stone-san, they found their answer, and they would be willing to share their revelation with you, should you meet them in the mountains. The monastery itself may also be...familiar to someone of your background."

Ryuji held up his comm, projecting into my AR vision a map of Nevada zoomed into one particular mountain, accompanied by a photograph of what was now a monastery atop the mountain. A photograph of what used to be an asylum, one that I had been to before, four years ago.

"Aaron, I don't suppose you would be willing to take me on that bike of yours with you, would you? I owe some metallic monks a visit."



## CHAPTER 17

Somewhere on Mount Tobin rested what is now a monastery, but what used to be a sort of institution. When I failed to both carry out and prevent the assassination of Reynold Goodman at the same time, I woke up here, far away from Washington. My entire squad, my career with Cerberus, my right eye, and my right arm were all lost to that fateful day in late 2080. The rest of that year, and most of 2081 was spent trying to get most of those things back.

Before the doctors could lobotomize me or whatever else they had planned to do to get rid of an inconvenience to Icarus Industries, Vykarius contacted me and assisted in my escape. His digital avatar remained active on the G.R.I.D. despite having apparently lost his physical body, having been shot and killed by Cerberus enforcers on that fateful day; how he was still able to operate remained a mystery, but the computer deck he had connected to did interact directly with his own brain through an implanted neural socket. Perhaps when his body died, his consciousness fled through to cyberspace, or a copy of it had been made on the G.R.I.D. Together, we broke into one of the Cerberus evidence vaults that held items from the Goodman incident to find his body, only to conclude that there was no sense in trying to put a living mind back into a dead body. What I ended up finding and taking back instead was Red's mechanical arms, Kia's cybernetic eyes, and Jacob's white revolver, replacing what I had lost with theirs, and replacing Vykarius with his own presence on the G.R.I.D. In the end, Icarus Industries ended up getting the result they wanted from the Goodman incident, but for disobeying orders, they made sure my squad and I paid the price. Since I had survived the bombing, they devised an alternate way to get rid of me, by making me part of some twisted experiment. By escaping from the place that I am now coming back to, I became the one inconvenience that Icarus has not been able to scrub from their record, and by integrating a part from each of my fallen teammates into myself, I became a living reminder of what they had done.

I had to wonder how the Singularity Church had acquired such a facility from Icarus in the first place, and what could have happened within the company to make them have to close down and sell the place to a religious organization on the cheap. They must have raised a lot of money, or were being backed by rich people, as when I was let inside, the building had been renovated and redecorated to the point to where I didn't even recognize the institution anymore. So many walls had been torn down and rebuilt that the building's layout had completely changed. Instead of medical operating equipment, the monastery now contained the most high end computer servers and equipment that were available to the public, and even some things that weren't; probably custom built for them, since their religion literally worshiped technology, and learning how to manipulate it was a holy practice for them.

"Welcome to our humble monastery here atop Mount Tobin. We are but humble monks of the Singularity Church, followers of the machine god seeking digital enlightenment. Do you come here seeking guidance, fellow chromed one?"
I initially felt a bit wary of the first priest that I got to speak to, as he was an entirely chrome cyborg wearing a hooded robe, similar to the ones I had met at the Portland International Airport, but I elected to hear him out.
"I'm seeking some answers and a request for help, yes." I told him. "I suppose the latter is going to depend on the former."
"If this is about what had happened at the Portland International Airport last week, we disavow all knowledge and involvement in the incident. The Singularity Church does not condone violence against humans or transhumans in any way, shape, or form." The robed metallic man was quick to spit this out, as if he had to say this a lot recently.
"It *is* about that incident, actually, but not in the way that you think. I was there, you see. Someone claiming to be being manipulated by someone called Simon gave me a datadrive containing an unidentifiable file that was almost three petabytes in size. What kind of file could be that massive."
"There are many things that could be that large. Massive data libraries could have been compiled and consolidated into a single encrypted file with a custom format."
"Anything that might be useful for someone who could turn themselves into a bomb?"
"Even if I did know the answer to that, why would I divulge such information to another cyborg? I would hope you only have good intentions for the use of this information."
I smiled at his question. "I'm glad you asked. I'm a private investigator, you see. Besides being personally involved in the matter, I have a client that is looking for these answers as well, and I would like for you to meet him. I would like for you to meet Vykarius."

I pulled out my comm from my coat and sent a message to Vykarius with it. A few moments later, his digital avatar appeared before us on our AR overlays. "Vykarius, would you like to tell us your story?" I asked him. His current avatar was a facsimile of himself, when he was alive in the physical realm.
"Yes, I am Vykarius, a digital consciousness that has been successfully uploaded into the G.R.I.D." He began, stretching one arm out and letting it dissolve into a scattered mass of polygons before reforming. "Four years ago, I retrieved a top secret VR rig that was being worked on by all of the Big Three, believe it or not. It was a brain computer interface that could be plugged into a neural jack to interact directly with one's own synaptic networks. MitaTech was needed to create the computer hardware and software, Asclepius Medical had the knowledge of biotechnology needed to understand how the brain operated, so that a computer could be created to interface with it, and Icarus Industries and its patents on cybernetic implants created the neural jack necessary to connect the two together. I was able to use this successfully, the neurons and synapses making up myself being successfully converted into bits and bytes on the G.R.I.D. I would have liked to have seen if this process was reversible, but by stealing this device, I made myself a wanted man by all three corporations. Needless to say, I was executed for this treason, and while I was still using the device, in fact. They took away both the device and my body, but the digital G.R.I.D. entity that I am now still remains."
The cyborg priest looked astonished and incredulous at this claim, especially for someone with such an artificial face. He turned to me for a moment, and I returned him a nod as part of corroborating Vyke's claim before he continued to speak to us.
"It's my understanding that this sort of thing is what cyborgs like you have been striving towards, is it not? I no longer have to sleep, eat, get sick, or any of those pesky human maintenance things that drag you out of the things you wanted to do. I do miss the taste of a good pad si yu dish, but maybe we can implement those human pleasures on the G.R.I.D. someday. All of my brain's functions are still intact; it's just been freaking out over why my body isn't there, and why I'm not getting hungry or tired. It's weird that you can still get phantom limb syndrome while you can still look down and see your arms and legs. So maybe this system wasn't perfect, but it was an early prototype built four years ago. I bet they have a much better model of it around now, with more of the weird kinks smoothed over. If you can do us a favor, we can help you look for this device. I've stolen it once, I can steal it again, if it's still around."

"Fascinating, truly fascinating." The priest was stroking his fingers through his non existent beard on his metallic chin. "If your claims are true, then you have become the first mortal to transcend the material plane and become one with the holy realm that is now known as the G.R.I.D. It certainly does warrant further investigation."
"What we would like for you to do may also be relevant to your interests." I added. "We need to get Vykarius inside the New Babylon arcology, but it's completely separate from the rest of the G.R.I.D. that we know. We need your help consolidating his entire consciousness into one place, so that we may carry him into the arcology on a datadrive or some other method of storage. Any idea how much space it might take to store an entire human mind?"
The cyborg priest put a hand to his chin in a thinking posture, perhaps even using one of his implants to calculate the answer to such a question before he gave me an interestingly precise one. "About three petabytes, at the very most. That would be minimum required storage space, just to be safe."
"Then we're in luck. I've got spare datadrives that can store up to one entire exabyte..." I trailed off as I started to realize something else about this. "Wait a minute, you said three petabytes? Just like the program that the bomber used? You don't think...?"
"There are some organizations that we...choose not to associate with the Singularity Church that may have developed such a process for transferring consciousness between digital formats. They call themselves part of the Singularity too, but their doctrines are far more different and...radical than what we believe. We knew the monks that were at the Portland airport, and they would never do such a thing. In light of your testimony, there arises the possibility that one of them had their consciousness hijacked by the one stored in that particular datadrive."
"Was their consciousness...overwritten?" The priest gave me an affirming nod that made me feel quite uncomfortable. The thought of having another mind invade your own, effectively killing you and taking over your body for you was an unnerving thought indeed. "My God..."
"If the device that Vykarius had described exists, it would be of utmost importance to secure it before a less peaceful organization does. It would certainly be instrumental in your task to transfer him from one digital domain to another."

I gave a nod to the priest's suggestions and turned to the avatar of Vykarius. "Vyke, do you have any idea as to where the BCI machine might be?"
"As a matter of fact, I believe I do!" Vykarius looked quite excited to say this as a series of grainy photographs appeared in front of him on the AR overlay. "In the days since you went missing, Cammy Leon has finally responded to us. She sent us these pictures just yesterday, and then vanished from the G.R.I.D. once again, as quickly as she came back. She seemed as if she was in a hurry to upload them to me."
"She seemed to be in quite the hurry to take these pictures, too." I commented as I went through the photo collection, flicking one hand across the AR display to move the pictures around. "I can barely make out much..." The images all seemed to be taken from inside of some industrial facility, but the environments themselves looked way too clean and sterilized to be military installments. Perhaps they could have been laboratories. "Any idea what these are pictures of, Vyke?"
Vyke's digital avatar walked over next to me, looking back to the photographs from my side. "Cammy's last mission was to investigate the facility under Treasure Island, remember? In fact, she was able to send these pictures to me from that very location. She could very likely still be there now. That's the only reason I can think of why we haven't heard anything else up to this point."
"Indeed." Was all I could say to that. It was possible that her undercover operation encountered some difficulties or was otherwise compromised in some manner, and she only had enough time to upload these files in a hurry. If this was all she could do, these photos had to have been very important.
"Wait...wait a minute...this could be it!" Vyke suddenly pointed me to one photo of what appeared to be a metallic chair with arm, leg, and neck straps. The contraption was connected to a series of wires, and rested below a device hanging just above the headrest. Some other computing machine that I didn't recognize could be faintly seen behind it.
"This is...a brain computer interfacing device, I'm taking it." I inferred from Vyke's reaction.
"It's a distinct possibility!" He exclaimed. "In fact, no, it's way more than just a possibility. I'd stake my digital life on it!"
"Easy for you to say when I'm the one that has to risk my meat body for you." I replied. "How the hell are we even going to get inside? If an espionage expert couldn't sneak her way in, what chance do you think we have? The only other choice we really have is to force our way in, it seems." I flicked through one of the displayed photos, appearing to have captured a unit of heavily armed Asclepius troopers, more heavily armed than the Cerberus enforcers I encountered in Redmond. "Even if we had the entirety of Burning Chrome behind us, and whatever's left of the Redwood Razers, I doubt we could overpower them."

"You may not be able to overpower them..." The robed monk suddenly spoke up from behind us, "But perhaps someone you may have heard of will be able to provide a diversion."
I turned back to face the priest. Vykarius followed in his respective G.R.I.D. space. "And who the hell might that be?"
"This is not a person that we typically associate with our organizations, but the circumstances certainly do appear to be dire. Due to the severity of the consequences for failure, we will allow you to open a channel of contact with this person."
He waved his chrome hand in front of us, and another transmission signal was sent out on the G.R.I.D. Slowly, another digital avatar materialized itself on the AR overlay, next to Vykarius. It was the figure of a young man with a light haired crew cut befitting of the tattered military uniform he was wearing. It looked as if the suit had once been adorned with an array of service medals and ribbons and stars, but they had all since been torn off, and by rough force from the looks of it. The man's sad looking eyes turned to ours and he spoke.

"**WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME? I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE, AND NOTHING LEFT TO GIVE EXCEPT RETRIBUTION TO THOSE WHO HAD TAKEN EVERYTHING FROM ME.**"

Retribution. The voice coming from the new avatar was the chillingly familiar deep, metallic growl of the cyborg that we had come to call the Angel of Retribution.


## CHAPTER 18

Since Aaron owed Cammy a favor, he had agreed to bring me back to San Francisco with the rest of Burning Chrome in their armored tour bus, and do their part in the effort to find Cammy if she was still under Treasure Island. Ryuji insisted on coming along with us as well. Seeing as he brought along some of his own personal Yakuza enforcers that were apparently more loyal to him than the Oyabun, we felt wise not to refuse. We also contacted Molly, Charlie, and the rest of the Redwood Razers over the G.R.I.D., spending the next day getting everyone over from Nevada and southern California over to Frisco, preparing ourselves for an infiltration at Treasure Island. There was no sign of the Angel of Retribution joining us in our effort, despite the Singularity priest talking him into it. Whether he was going to keep his promise was something that had remained to be seen.
All together, there were about a dozen of us that gathered at a cheap coffin motel that day. Myself, the four members of Burning Chrome, Charlie, Molly, Ryuji, three or four Yaks, and a few other Razers that I never bothered to get the names of. So maybe there were a few more than a dozen, especially if the Angel was going to show up at the scene.

We were all able to fit into the armored bus that night, using its electrochromic plating to pass off as a military vehicle, at least from a distance, as drove in formation with a few other Asclepius military trucks that were driving towards the Treasure Island base. Once the front security gate had opened, we cut ahead of the next truck in line, nudging it aside as our driver Lars floored it and sped us into the primary compound courtyard in high gear. This raised the alarm in short order, as well as our opportunities to use everything the bus had been armed with. An AI guided smart turret was mounted on the front, equipped with a gatling gun to hose down the lighter armored land vehicles in front of us. On the top hatch was a rack of self guided anti-air missiles that took out the drones and VTOL copters above us. And behind us, the bus dropped a trail of explosive mines powerful enough to flip over any ground vehicle that dared to give chase. The Razers and Yaks would lean out of the windows to pick off targets with rifles, and occasionally call for a bazooka to be passed down to them, for when a more heavily armored vehicle like a tank stood in our way. Needless to say, everything was getting quite loud.

We seem to have caught the facility's staff off guard, as we were meeting only a token amount of resistance. Or it could have been that, despite the amount of heavy military equipment around, Treasure Island was not as impregnable as it had appeared from the outside. Judging by the stories that I had heard about the place, however, I wasn't going to count on it. We weren't going to press our luck, so we looked around for a way to access the inner facilities. The armored bus swerved and laid out a line of explosive mines. They were highly visible, but they created a barrier between us and the advancing forces forming half a circle, the other half covered by the largest building in the center of the walled compound.

The entrance to the central building was blocked off by a massive door, large enough to drive a moderate sized aircraft through, had it been open. And just like that, our luck was starting to come up a little short as our limited supply of missiles, rockets, and mines had been depleted. Most of us piled out of the bus now, myself included, as we sought to hold our ground and find another entrance into those labs that I had seen from Cammy's pictures.

Armored Asclepius soldiers soon descended upon us, firing at us from afar with high powered rifles, as the minefield prevented them from coming too close. More were piling out of paramilitary trucks; they still had us outnumbered by a large margin. We didn't want to use the bus for cover, as it was our only escape, so most of us took refuge around the smaller structures between the main building and the minefield. Molly, Charlie, and the Razers took to the eastern front, while Rob and Lenny of Burning Chrome followed the Yaks to the west side. Lars remained inside the bus while Aaron, Ryuji and myself stayed closest to the main door, at least until we saw something quickly approaching in the distance, and had to be even quicker to dash out of the way.

It was a salvo of heavy rockets, as if coming from a fighter jet. The first few of them that arrived tore up the ground with the advancing troopers, scattering them and their trucks across the compound in explosive piles of debris. The second salvo slammed directly into the main door in front of us, blasting a hole in it wide enough to drive our bus through. Lars apparently saw just such an opportunity, as immediately when the dust had settled, he powered up the bus and drove it inside the building, having little trouble getting over the scattered rubble.

I thought it was a fighter jet that had done this, too, until the flying object had gotten closer, heading directly towards us. It was none other than the Angel of Retribution in the steel, offering air support with his jet powered metallic wings, mowing down an entire score of advancing Asclepius staff with his gatling gun arm, before eventually landing directly in front of Ryuji, Aaron, and myself.

"**WHAT WE SEEK IS HIDDEN AWAY DIRECTLY BENEATH THIS VERY BUILDING. GO!**" The Angel barked out to us, and immediately took off through the opening that our own bus had driven through. Despite his large size and metallic heft, the Angel could run surprisingly fast. His mechanical legs must have been really something else, to carry so much momentum with it.

Immediately inside of the building was what appeared to be an airplane hangar, but with ground vehicles parked inside of it instead. As I saw that the Burning Chrome tour bus had been parked towards the back of the garage, behind a row of tanks for cover, one of these things gave me an idea, so I ducked behind a truck to open up a conference call with Aaron and Ryuji, inviting Vykarius and the Angel to join us. Vyke was the first of the two to join.
"Vyke, can you give us any more support through the G.R.I.D.? If you can get into Treasure Island's local network, we got a bunch of parked, unmanned trucks and tanks in the central building. See if you can remotely activate and control them. See if you can disrupt the ones that are active and trying to kill us too, would you?"
"Already on it, Joe!" Vykarius came through as the vehicles parked around me suddenly started to whir to life in the next few moments. "Stand back!" One of the AutoTanks suddenly rotated its cannon to fire a round at the hole we came through earlier, making it even bigger, enough for the larger vehicles inside to drive through. One by one, they all began to do just that.
"You're a real savior, Vyke. Aaron, Ryuji, Angel, and I are heading inside to find your old toy, and hopefully Cammy, or whatever's left of her." I began to join the rest of the group after telling him this, but-
"Wait, wait, the Angel actually made it here!? Oh man, have I got a million and one things to ask him! His kill count after the war is quickly catching up to his confirmed kills during it! Probably gonna be exceeding it tonight-"
"Vyke, just keep the rest of the Razers and Burning Chrome safe. If you can give us anything about the lower levels, that'd be great too." I said as I continued to catch up with the rest.

It looked like it was just going to be the four of us in the facility. Having the Angel of Retribution being one of these four, however, somewhat evened the odds in our favor. The first thing Vykarius got to work for us inside was a large elevator platform leading down a funicular shaft. The platform was big enough to hold an AutoTank on it, and even though the funicular descended quite quickly, the steep diagonal shaft seemed to travel downwards for what felt like a mile before eventually letting us off at another boarding station. Hopefully Vyke had worked through the security systems down here while we had been waiting to arrive.

There were no drones waiting for us when we made it into the rooms beyond, the first of which seemed to consist of storage for a large amount of computer servers, each one almost a quarter of the size of the Colossus server we found back in Redmond. There was a team of technicians working on these, all of them human and cyborg; either Asclepius didn't seem to trust robots as much as Icarus did, or Vykarius was able to disable their functions from the G.R.I.D. already. It also seemed that this particular staff didn't expect such heavy resistance to reach this far inside, as the technicians were only lightly armed against us, albeit with energy weapons, to my surprise. The Angel quickly laid most of them to waste with his gatling gun, filling several of the machines full of bullet holes in the process, but the few of them that were able to escape into the rooms beyond were able to get off a few token shots of resistance, sending brightly colored beams of what appeared to be plasma soaring past us. I had heard the rumors  of such weapons showing up on black markets, courtesy of disgruntled Asclepius employees, and further rumors on top of these concerning attempts to reverse engineer the stolen prototypes, but this was the first time I had seen anything that had confirmed the existence of such firearms. I made sure to stop and pocket one of the fallen technicians' plasma pistols under my coat as we cleared out the room and followed the partial map that Vykarius started to provide us towards the research labs.

"You still got a spare data drive, any of you guys? I'm gonna need you to plug it into the unit housing anything we need to extract!" I heard Vykarius call out as we arrived at what appeared to be the first laboratory station. This one was empty, however. The computer stations were abandoned, the testing areas cleaned out, and a row of containment vats in the center of it all were completely empty as well. It seemed as though the scientists had left in a hurry. I went to check out the computer units, but none of them would even switch on. The power to them appeared to be cut off. Perhaps it was being siphoned off for something else further down.

As I stared at one of the empty monitors, I was startled by the sight of a spider skittering across its blank face. Then another, then I felt the sensation of another one crawling across my hand. I looked down to see a half dozen more of them crawling over the desk, and dozens more on the surrounding desks, then hundreds more on the floor, then thousands more all along the walls, turning every surface around me into a black writhing mass of millions of tiny spindly legs as they began to crawl all over my own body next.

Aaron and the Angel seemed to notice this too. Aaron and I were swatting at our arms and legs, trying to brush the spiders off, but nothing seemed to be working for us. The Angel seemed to be twitching and convulsing violently as well, as if in pain. Ryuji, however, discarded the AR goggles he had been wearing up to that point, and looked straight ahead. Through the mass of arachnids crawling across my face and eyes, I followed his gaze to another figure, a bald woman who had been standing there, undisturbed by the swarm. As Ryuji drew his katana, the woman raised one of her hands and the swarm of spiders on the floor in front of her gathered together into the shape of a massive fist larger than herself, which charged directly at Ryuji. He simply kept going, and I witnessed him passing directly through the fist made of spiders and slashing at the woman with his sword. She tried to step out of the way, but came up just a little slow, and the blade found a cut into her right arm. As she recoiled in pain from this strike, the swarm of spiders flooding the lab seemed to flicker before my eyes for a brief moment. "Damn bitch can use technokinesis!" I heard Aaron scream out.

The woman was trying to avoid Ryuji's sword slashes, and at one point made the mistake of attempting to block a downward slash with her arm, something that even I was hesitant to do even with my own mechanical arm, for the sake of preserving the memory of Red. She fell on to her back, and the spider swarms that were appearing to surround us had quickly vanished, flickering out of existence in an instant. Ryuji moved his sword in to make a downward thrust and make a killing blow, but the woman rolled out of the way at the last moment, sending Ryuji to join her on the floor with a leg sweep before picking herself up and running off.

Just as the rest of us were trying to recover from what we had just witnessed, I noticed a red moss growing out of one of the containment vats. It quickly spread itself over the outer surface before it proceeded to line itself over the surrounding surfaces, including the floor and walls. And that's when I realized that this red moss was flesh. Live, pulsating flesh coming in red and pink tones like raw meat. Every surface was getting covered in veiny protrusions and slimy, mucus like substances. The whole lab now looked like we had been standing in the innards of a massive living creature that had swallowed us whole. The scene made me incredibly nauseous and uneasy, the kind of terror a vegan might experience while standing in the middle of a slaughterhouse.

"Aw, fuck! This is some crazy shit! It's like everything is made of meat!" Aaron cried out, looking quite unnerved himself.
"Take off your AR displays." Ryuji calmly replied, pointing to the pair of goggles he had discarded earlier while he was getting up from the floor.
"Ugh, easy for you to say." Aaron groaned out, carefully trying to remove his contact lenses. "Where did she go?" By the time he said this, Ryuji was already gone, having ran off in the same direction that the bald woman fled. "Her technokinesis is fucking up our AR overlays! Making us see nightmares and shit. We can't use augmented reality while the damn bitch is still around!"

I tried manually shutting off my AR overlay in my cybernetic eye, first with a mental command, then with my comm. Neither of these worked anymore. I could still see the interface as well as a laboratory covered with flesh. "I can't...my overlay refuses to shut off, Aaron." I told him.
"Then take out your...um...eye?"
"I'm not plucking my goddamn cybereye out! Are you a certified cybernetic surgeon? Where's an operating table?"
"You only got one cybereye, Joe! Can't you just, I dunno, close your electronic eye or put a patch over it? Look through your regular one?"
"My left eye was surgically altered to accept the AR overlay feed, too. I need to see AR in both eyes to perceive depth."
"Would shutting off your cybereye entirely work?"
"My interfaces aren't responding to my commands at all anymore, not even the power switch on my comm."
"Shit...damn bitch is holding the power on. I knew that technokineticists weren't to be trusted! She can control everything with an electronic circuit!"

Meanwhile, the Angel suddenly let out a primal, metallic scream as he raised one of his cybernetic arms, its hand forming itself into a strange sort of cannon and releasing a discharge of plasma at nothing in particular, the sphere ricocheting across the lab several times before fizzling out. I'll be damned, the Angel Of Retribution had energy weapons onboard too. He seemed to be in a lot of pain right now, or was losing control of his cybernetic hardware. He struggled to take a step forward, his thunderous metallic footsteps becoming painfully slow now. Whatever the power of technokinesis was doing to us, the Angel was the one that was affected the most, being nearly ninety nine percent cyborg. His brain and central nervous system were the only remaining "human" aspects of himself, and even then I think parts of those things could be cyberized as well these days. One had to wonder if he could still be called human at all by this point.

"Vyke..." I called out through the AR conference, hoping that at least that was still working. "Vyke, can you hear me? A psion from Asclep's Psycho Squad is interfering with our AR overlays! Can you do anything about it? I'm not much good in this state, and Angel has been hit with it pretty hard!"
"...can't...tanks...too many...th-" Vyke's signal was incredibly weak and distorted. I don't know if the bald woman or the distance underground was to blame for this. "...burning...raze..." His words were becoming too difficult to make out through the heavy static. It wasn't seeming to be of any use. I had to proceed without the help of the G.R.I.D.

I heard a noise coming from the next room over, and left the Angel to pursue it, Aaron following close by as we hoped it would lead to the psionic woman. We found a large, open room filled with row after row of cryonic storage tanks arranged in a grid pattern, or at least that's what I assumed I was looking at as I continued my search. With the way my AR overlay was interfering with my vision, it looked as if I was staring at several rows of pillars made of writhing viscera.

Then, in the distance of this massive chamber, I could see Ryuji walk past, holding his katana in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. He turned to me and shouted out, "Stone-san! To your left!"

I turned to the left, but no one was there. I did, however, feel a strong kick to my stomach that knocked me on to my back, followed by several more while I was down, from an assailant that I couldn't see. And just when I thought I was going crazy, a volley of bullets flew across the air just above me. The fleshy tissue covering every single surface around me suddenly disappeared, and the psionic woman seemed to spontaneously appear standing over me, now backing away while grasping a bleeding wound from one of her shoulders. I glanced over in the direction that the shots had come from, noticing Aaron with his guitar shaped rifle now at the ready.

As the woman was trying to get away from us, I reached into my coat, pulling out my revolver to line up a shot. She suddenly vanished from my sight again right as I pulled the trigger, blowing a massive hole into one of the glass containment pods instead. My perception of her reappeared a moment later as she was running past the next tank over. As I was getting back to my feet and lining up another shot at her, I felt my mechanical arm abruptly jerk to the side and squeeze off an errant shot that barely missed Aaron.

"Joe! Don't use your metal arm! A technokinetic can move it too!" Aaron shouted as he dodged the round, stepping closer to empty the rest of his rifle's clip at the psionic woman, causing her to flee for cover. I tried to flank her position by approaching the direction she was fleeing, but she wasn't there anymore when I got to it. Were her psionics interfering with my ability to see her too? She kept seeming to flicker in and out of sight like an illusion. Out of paranoia, I held my gun in my left hand, swinging it around as I searched for her, until she eventually found me. I spun around and pointed my revolver squarely at her stitched up forehead.

"No! Stone-san, it is only me!" Ryuji's voice came out of the woman's mouth as she waved a katana around in one hand.
"Shit, is she trying to get you to shoot us instead, Joe?" I heard Aaron's voice coming from my right, but when I turned my head to face him, it was the psionic woman that was standing there instead. She appeared taller than usual, her digital avatar having to stretch out to fit over Aaron's tall body in AR. It was quite unsettling to see her appearing to use Aaron's theatrical body language and mannerisms too. "She's wounded, her arms have been cut, and there's a bullet wound in her shoulder. That doesn't appear on her avatar, does it?" To this credit, I examined the two fake psionic women in front of me and found that they did not.
"It's still a little hard to tell at a glance." I admitted. "I can hardly tell where she's going, either. Did either of you see where she went?"

Before either of them could answer, the projections of the psionic woman over themselves was suddenly lifted. I thought that perhaps, in her wounded state, she couldn't keep up her technokinesis, but then we started to hear those familiar metallic footsteps thundering in the distance. They were getting louder and more rapid with each passing moment.

"Aaron, what happened with the Angel when I left you with him?" I asked, grasping my revolver with both hands now.
"He just sat there! I couldn't get him to move!" Aaron replied.
"Well, it sounds like he's moving an awful lot now."

The three of us fled in separate directions as the Angel came barreling towards us like a linebacker on steroids, his sprint breaking into a low altitude flight as the jet wings on his back extended and propelled his metallic body forward, mechanical feet being lifted an inch off the floor as he charged directly at each of us in turn like a steel bull. Even the cryonic containment pods were not suitable for us as cover, as he smashed through each of them and their frozen organic contents as though they were made of snow.

"Angel! Get a hold of yourself, man!" Aaron yelled out as he dove out of the way of the Angel's rampage.
"**MY ACTIONS...THEY ARE NO LONGER...MY OWN.**" The Angel growled as his jets stopped him in place, extending one of his arms to spray a stream of flame in our direction. "**I AM NOW JUST...A CORPORATE PUPPET. AS I ONCE WAS.**" Join the fucking club, I thought to this.
"Oh, you wanna play with fire, huh?" Aaron put a couple of fingers to his temple and two of the cryonic units right next to the Angel suddenly burst into flame, the blasts strong enough to make the cyborg stagger. Aaron followed this up by waving his hands to launch another burst of flame that swiftly traveled into the Angel's chest. The Angel's metallic alloyed body appeared to be flame retardant, as the blast had dissipated a moment after impact, but the force of the fireball itself was enough to knock him backwards, crashing through yet another cryostasis unit before landing on his back with a loud metallic thud.

"**FIND THE ONE WHO IS OPERATING ME.**" The Angel gave a roaring command as he effortlessly stood back up. "**MY CYBERNETIC SHELL WILL CONTINUE TO PRESENT A THREAT FOR AS LONG AS SHE LIVES. MY SENSORS INDICATE THAT SHE IS STILL CLOSE BY.**" The other three of us hit the deck the moment we heard the Angel's gatling gun arm start to rev up. He sprayed suppressing fire over our heads, seeming to resist the ability to aim any lower while we crawled towards whatever cover was left.

"I knew that the Angel would not be reliable." Over the roar of machinegun fire, I was somehow still close enough to Ryuji to hear him say this. "It is time for his unholy wings to be clipped!" While ducking behind the wreckage of a cryopod for cover, I witnessed him pull out a familiar looking device that glowed with a blue light as he chucked it with all his might in the Angel's direction. It was the rare, forbidden EMP grenade, the kind that the Yakuza would be able to sell on the black market. Its blue light blinked exactly three times as it sailed through the air before landing at the Angel's feet, then erupted in a fantastic electrical storm that caused errors with my already compromised AR overlay just looking at it. By the time the fireworks show of sparks had cleared up, the Angel was lying face down on the floor, now completely immobile.

"Aw damn, was that an EMP!? Do you have any idea what those things do to cyborgs, Ryuji!?" Aaron called out. "He's a Class X. You could have already killed him!" Aaron seemed rather upset about the potential death of someone who was just trying to kill him not a moment earlier.
"His life support systems are running on reserve power now. The rest of him will be back online in a few minutes." Ryuji replied calmly as he got back to his feet. "CyberSoldiers like him had survived far worse during the Cyborg Wars."
"We need to find that woman and put her down before she can get control over the Angel or anything more nasty again." I cut in. "Let's split up, maybe we can corner her that way. She can't have gone far."

In the corridors beyond the cryostorage area, I eventually noticed a faint trail of blood drops along the floor. I tried to signal to the others over my comm about this, but there was no response from any of them. Either my comm was still on the fritz from the psionic woman's interference, or they were all still too busy to respond. I hoped it was nothing bad, and steeled myself as I followed the blood trail in through a large pair of double doors into a very familiar looking room. It was the room with the metallic chair and computing unit that I had seen in the photographs from before. The very reason that I was brought here. And right in front of that chair, the woman I was looking for was standing facing toward it.

She turned to face me as I had walked in. I made no hesitations and immediately drew Goldhart, shooting her in the leg, and nearly blowing it off entirely as she fell back, her head slamming against the side of the chair as she went down. She grasped her leg in pain with one hand as I walked closer to her, and as I rose my gun arm up to her forehead, she reached out with her other arm in protest.

"Wait. It's....it's me." The woman cried out in a weak, yet recognizable voice that almost made me drop my gun.
"Cammy?"
She gave a weak nod in response.

I slowly lowered my gun, and as I did so, I finally received a message on my comm as my AR overlay was slowly starting to regain its functionality. The message was not from Aaron, or from Ryuji, or from the Angel, or even from Vykarius.
It simply read, "SIMON SAYS: Kill her."

I turned away from my comm and back to the woman. "Cammy? Is that really you? I don't even recognize you."
"Well, that was kind of the point." She replied. "I was able to send out a few photographs of this place before they caught me. They did...horrible experiments on me."
"They gave you technokinesis?"
"Yes, well kind of. It wasn't so easy to give psionics to a full grown adult...they...lobotomized parts of my brain..." She was reaching up to grab at her stitched up head as she said this. I couldn't imagine the sort of twisted pain she was in.

She then suddenly tried grabbing for my gun, but her grip was too weak as I pushed back and stepped away from her.
"I'm sorry...They're still trying to control me remotely. I've been trying to figure out how to block their devices with my technokinesis...they gave me that from the brain they salvaged from one of the other test subjects. Shit, he was just a boy...I can still sense something like...memories of his in my head. He was afraid of spiders...and afraid of being eaten alive...why did they have to euthanize him? He was just a boy..."

I got another message on my comm: "SIMON SAYS: Kill her. Now." I tried sending messages out to the others. Still no responses. How was this one getting through?

"In just a few days, they've turned me into quite a force to be reckoned with. Asclepius sure is something else." Cammy continued.  "They're gonna make me kill you once they get control over me again. It may take even more brain surgery. You better get rid of me before they make me get rid of you."

"We can get you out of here, Cammy. There's gotta be a surgeon that can fix you up."
"I can't do that, Mr. Stone. They put a cortex bomb in my skull too. The instant I leave this facility, the countdown timer will be activated."
"Can't you deactivate it with your technokinesis?"
Cammy shook her head. "The cortex bomb is rigged to arm itself the instant it receives any signal sent directly to it at all. Even thinking about disarming it will arm it."
"We can get someone here to extract it for you. We just need to find an operating table around here..."
"Don't bother." Cammy responded. "I've been receiving signals of what the rest of Asclepius is doing at this facility. They've called for heavy reinforcements. If you don't get out of here soon, they'll get you."

A third message showed up on my AR overlay. "SIMON SAYS: Kill her now. She is another failed experiment."

"I think they're going to kill you either way, Cammy."
"Yeah, and I would rather die by my own hand than theirs." As she said this, I suddenly felt my mechanical arm being moved out to point my revolver at her head. I couldn't move it away myself. I tried to pry the gun away with my left hand, but its grip was far stronger. I tried walking away, but a strong electrical discharge suddenly surged through my electronic eye every time I tried to take a step. It send an unbearable pain coursing through my left eye, then to the rest of my body. I couldn't move myself away from her.
"Why, Cammy? Why are you making do this?" I pleaded as the look in her eyes threatened to shock me again. "Don't make me kill you."
"Perhaps I should activate my cortex bomb instead, but where I am now, I wouldn't want to ruin the toy you came here for with an explosion."
"Fine. You wanna go out in a blaze of glory? You do it on your own damn terms. Make some Asclep bastards pay for this by blowing them up, don't make me live with your blood on my hands."

She looked into my eyes for a few moments as I could feel my metallic index finger slowly tighten around Goldhart's trigger, then slowly release it again. I began to feel a sense of control in my mechanical arm once more, and I quickly lowered it away from her head. "Can you stand?" I asked as I grabbed her by the arms to lift her to her feet.
She struggled to stand at first, but soon started to walk, limping slowly away from me and towards the doors. "Maybe you're right. If I'm gonna set off my cortex bomb, I'll do it someplace where it will do more damage.

She left the way we came in, and I was left standing alone in the room with the BCI. I began looking around for a place to slot a data drive to download all the necessary information, wondering if there was a way to haul whatever was necessary out of the facility.

Aaron, Ryuji, and the Angel suddenly burst in through the doors a minute later. "Joe! We've been trying to contact you!" Aaron, as he often was, was the first to speak. "Vykarius just told us that the situation on the surface is all under control now, but reinforcements are coming. We've got to get out of here now!"
"Can we take what we came here for, at least?" I asked, pointing to the computing machines behind me.
"**MY SERVOMOTOR ARMS CAN LIFT ALL THAT IS NECESSARY TO PERFORM A CONSCIOUS TRANSFERAL.**" The Angel said as he picked up one of the fridge sized units, lifting it effortlessly over his head with whirring metallic arms. "**VYKARIUS WILL TELL YOU WHAT SMALLER ITEMS ARE REQUIRED FROM HERE.**"
"Okay, let's be quick about it, then!" Aaron exclaimed as he went to one of the computer terminals. "This is not an encore that I want to be around for! By the way, Joe..."
"Yes, Aaron?"
"You didn't happen to find that psionic woman anywhere, did you?"
I gave him an affirming nod. "I made sure that she will no longer be a problem to us anymore."

My AR interface started loading up with messages from Vykarius coming through, pointing me to the objects in the room that I needed to take with me. Luckily, my mechanical arm could lift up to one thousand pounds without issue, so the four of us seemed good to go, so long as more large computing units were not required. As I begun to pick things up, another message showed up in my feed after everything else that Vykarius had sent.

"SIMON SAYS: This is a mistake. Come to Las Vegas, where we will meet in person. You will not defy Simon if you want Andria to live."


## CHAPTER 19

Somehow, we all made it straight out of Treasure Island alive, piling into the tour bus and flooring it without ever looking back at the carnage we left behind us. The Redwood Razers and the Yakuza thugs that Ryuji brought along with him managed to tough it out on the island's surface alongside the rest of Burning Chrome, leaving a trail of destruction that was second to none. Their combined efforts gave the Angel of Retribution himself a run for his money in terms of damage. I had to wonder if Vykarius could remove enough metadata from this attack to prevent it from being traced back to us in time, or at least make it look like the Angel was solely responsible. He had been doing this sort of thing for two decades already, and seemed to be able to take care of himself quite well in these circumstances. In fact, as soon as we had reached the surface, the Angel used his jet wings to take off into the sky, and went his separate way from the rest of us.

"So, all we need to do is set up this equipment somewhere, and your G.R.I.D. avatar can be consolidated into a single data drive?" I was conferencing with Vykarius during the ride back to Nevada. The inside of the tour bus was a bit more cramped with the extra cargo. The machinery that we couldn't fit inside, we mounted on top of the bus roof and strapped it down. It seemed as if Burning Chrome was used to schlepping their own equipment while on tour.
"If we have everything we need, and by my calculations we should, then yes, we should get back to the monastery on Mount Tobin and start getting to work!"
"I actually have some important business to get to in Vegas, Vyke." I replied. "It's not what you think; it's important to this mission. Maybe you'll be all ready to get into New Babylon by the time I'm done there."
"If you have business in Vegas, I would like to take this opportunity to return the favor you have done for me today." Ryuji cut in. "The streets can be dangerous when walked alone. Especially if you end up on my father's bad side. The least I can do is offer two of my men to protect you. No one will bother you while you are under the care of the Hazunomo-Gumi."
I turned to Ryuji as he was offering this. "Sure, I'll take it. I'm surprised you're not mad about what happened back in Warehouse 893."
"Those guys owed me money. I have no sympathy for a man that dies with debts left unpaid, especially to me."
"Christ...then I'm going to have to make sure I stay alive for quite a while longer."

By the time we had all arrived at Mount Tobin, we all figured out what we wanted to do next. The Redwood Razers and the members of Burning Chrome, save Aaron, elected to help out the Singularity Church monks in setting up the brain computer interface, while the rest of us would ride on down to Vegas. Apparently, Ryuji and Aaron also seemed to have some business down there too. Before I could leave the monastery, Molly mentioned to me that Lucky had since gone to Vegas after having apparently settled his debt with the Marconi family. Now I could only hope that he would remain on good terms with the Yakuza.

It was a long ride through the Nevada deserts, Aaron taking the wheel and blasting classical music (or "heavy metal" as he repeatedly insisted on calling it) on the immersive sound systems built into the bus. I was surprised that he insisted on driving manually; he seemed to derive some kind of joy out of driving a bus across a desert; what a maniac. In the 21st century, a long commute always meant an opportunity for the average Sprawl citizen to catch up on their local G.R.I.D. network feeds. To many, your own cyberspace avatar was as important to maintain as your own physical body. And the more of a narcissist you were, the more time you would spend in AR or VR broadcasting every little thing you did to a potentially G.R.I.D. wide audience, and forming groups around mutual interests for people to share things that they already agreed with in the sort of self-gratifying feedback loop that was perhaps second only to masturbation, and there was an expansive catalog of things on the G.R.I.D. that helped with that sort of thing as well. By the time I turned 20, I got sick of serving myself on the G.R.I.D. and wanted to serve the needs of others in the material realm by going in to law enforcement. By this point, I'm sure you already remember how that turned out.

When we were arriving within the boundaries of the Vegas sector, I finally got another message from the one purporting to be Simon. "SIMON SAYS: Yamateru Building, 13th floor. Come alone, or Andria will die." And Joseph wanted to say that Simon must be a coward for making such demands, but I wasn't the one with the leverage in these negotiations. I planned to change that tonight, however, and let Aaron and Ryuji know where I would be, but that they shouldn't follow me just yet.

Las Vegas at night was lit up by exactly as many neon lights and extravagant setpieces as its reputation was known for over the past century, though in more recent years the neon glow was becoming more and more dominated by the blue hues of the Mitashi Technologies corporate logo. Crime, depending on what you considered to be crime, was perhaps the lowest it had ever been throughout the city's history due to the strong presence of both the Yakuza keeping order from within the shadows, and MitaTech's own Shogun Security forces keeping the peace out in the open, their armored police uniforms made to remind one of the samurai warriors of an era gone by. The samurai were perhaps one of the first private military companies in the history of Japan, MitaTech's country of origin, where they often held all the power and left the Emperor as little more than a political figurehead. We were certainly not the first generation to know what it was like to live in a society where private militias had more political power than governments did, and Shogun Security seemed to want to remind us of this fact with their choice of uniform design.

Even in the age of the G.R.I.D., where communications technologies were blending even the most geographically distant of cultures together, the Japanese never forgot their roots, and were still every bit as patriotic as most Americans, though the two nations' cultures had been blending together enough to the point to where tourists that were native to one country saw the other as a second home of sorts. Almost every product that MitaTech ever sold to the public was represented by a Japanese cartoon mascot, drawn in a popular art style that blended western and eastern animation techniques together to create its own brand of uniqueness. Whenever you activated your home product, this cartoon mascot would always appear on your local G.R.I.D. space  as a sort of interactive manual and remote control board, and they would interact with the other MitaTech brand mascots in the local space in various amusing, sickeningly cute ways. Many people would end up buying electronics and appliances they didn't need just to have more of these characters populating their home's virtual space, further feeding into the capitalist machine that gave rise to every problem we were having today. I had to wonder how many citizens of the Sprawl could be diagnosed with Stockholm Syndrome if the corporations could be considered their captors.

The Yamateru Building turned out to be a high rise office somewhere in the commercial district, my comm having been marked with a map signal to lead me there. It was staffed by MitaTech employees who were more than happy to let me in as soon as they found out who I was, or at least when they were told that my name was Philip Marlowe, even when Ryuji and his Yak thugs weren't with me when I went inside the building itself.

One of the guards politely escorted me through the lobby to what looked like a private elevator, and before I knew it, I was already up on the 13th floor. The elevator doors swung open to reveal a large, dimly lit office. It was quite a walk from the doors to the desk on the other side, and a good chunk of the rest of the space was taken up by a series of pedestals displaying holograms on top of them, their displays frequently switching between various people, places, and objects. I could have sworn I saw the New Babylon arcology at one moment. The large chair at the desk was empty. Behind it, a familiar silhouette was standing by the windows, seeming to stare out at the Las Vegas skyline.

"Mr. Simon, I presume." I announced my presence, and the woman with the horn rimmed glasses turned around to face me, her hair now a fiery red. It was Hera. I just now realized that it was she that I had seen four years ago, who killed my partner Kia, and who had to have been the one leading the attack on the Redmond Razers' hideout.
"Very good, Mr. Stone." Hera clapped her hands together once in mock applause. "Simon Says: take a seat, if you're looking for answers, that is." She calmly walked over to the desk and pressed some button on its interface, causing another chair to slide out from under the floor next to me. At first, I wanted to refuse to sit down in it, but a look in her eye suddenly filled me with a terrifying chill that I hardly felt even when in the middle of a firefight.

"Go on then, Mr. Stone. I insist. If you truly are worried about Andria's safety, you will do as Simon Says." Her tone was calm, yet commanding, the sense of dread suddenly instilled in me compelling me to follow her lead and reluctantly sit down in the provided chair. The moment I did so, metal clasps suddenly opened up from within the chair's own arms and legs, immediately locking themselves down over my own limbs.
I struggled against the clasps holding me to my seat. "You're quite a ways away from Summer Heights, Hera. An Asclepius executive doing business in a MitaTech building, right in the middle of the MitaTech territory of Autumn Falls? You've got some nerve, Hera."
"Oh no, I haven't had any nerves for a long time. I haven't felt anything since I was a little girl." Hera sure smiled a lot for someone who couldn't feel anything. "Not joy, not anger, not sorrow, not fear. Just a boring numbness that I keep trying to fill by acting like I'm feeling something."
"You were working with the Psycho Squad, Hera. You're one of them, aren't you?"
Hera leaned forward for her gaze to meet mine. My feeling of dread subsided, and was replaced by a sense of...happiness, for some reason. "You're feeling happy right now, aren't you?" She said, eventually leaning back. "Ever since they did those experiments on me when I was a little girl, I could never feel any emotions, but I could make other people feel them. It's sad, isn't it? Here, let me make you feel sad." The sense of joy in my mind was quickly swallowed up by a pit of sorrow and despair, like a child whose favorite pet had just been run over.

"You didn't sit in that chair because you were afraid either, Joe." She said, walking around the desk in a circle as she exchanged gazes between me and the skyline. "It was because I *made* you afraid. I've been making people around me feel whatever I wanted them to feel for a long time to get my way. Does that make you angry, Joe? Or do *I* make you angry?" The sorrowfulness I had been feeling in my gut suddenly burned up with rage. I felt myself clenching my hands into fists that shook furiously, my teeth gritting themselves together as I took deep, livid breaths. "Yes, being angry gets you high, doesn't it? Makes you want to channel your indignation to some worthwhile cause. What is it you want? Justice for those who have been wronged? The corporate media platforms love spinning their stories in just a way that gets the general public all riled up over some perceived injustice, so that they may be inspired to take it out on some target that the corporations painted, for their benefit. Of course, they're just doing what tribal leaders, generals, governments and religious institutions have been doing since the beginning of human civilization: controlling the message to get the people to feel the way they want. Me, I hardly even need a message. I can just manipulate people's brain waves to make them feel whatever I want them to. And making people angry has been a very good way to get my enemies to eliminate each other, and my friends to step up for my cause."
"And what the hell kind of cause are you gunning for, Hera?"
"Oh, the same sort of cause that everyone else is after, Mr. Stone: Success. Nothing matters once you're dead, so you gotta exploit life for all it's worth while you're alive. I want material goods, fame, glory, friends and lovers, enemies to crush under my heel. The corporations have all of these things in one place, Joe. They're the winners of this game of life, and I'm going to sit in their thrones someday soon. I'm sure you'd want something similar, don't you, Joe? Perhaps you'd rather see these white collars and their ivory towers burn to the ground for what they've done to the rest of the planet. Perhaps I may make this happen someday, and an empire I can truly call my own will rise up in its place. Won't that be wonderful, Joe?"

Hera was releasing her grip of anger on my mind, but what she was telling me was making me feel genuinely perturbed. "I'm surprised you haven't lost your drive to make such an impact on the world, Hera. Everyone else is or was just as determined as you at some point, until someone else bigger came along, chewed them up, spit them out, made them know their place, determined a pecking order by a show of force and might. You can push down on the world, Hera, but the world is going to push back. Hard."
Hera only gave a laugh at this, and a well rehearsed one, at that. "And that's why you know that you have to have control and supremacy over others if you want to win. I've been given a gift that allows me to exert such a great degree of control, and I intend to use it. If you try to stop me, Joe, I will not hesitate to do everything to eliminate you as a threat. And I do mean everything."