[u][b][color=fff200]Eudaimonia Colony, Archangel Spaceport
Dirty Deeds Brigade[/color][/b][/u]

"Two years today my friend." Said James Wander as he sat in a luxury hotel suite at the Wayne-Falkland business resort in Archangel. In his reflection in the mirror, he saw a young man with a green left eye and ice blue cybernetic replacement for his right. And despite apparent youth, he carried far more wisdom and experience behind those eyes than anyone had any right to. Any human that is.

[b]indeed.[/b] Remarked Tactics, the AI stuck in the mercenary commander's head and the implants drilled into his cerebral cortex and eye. [b]and still drinking fruit juice.[/b]

"Hey, prune juice is just awesome buddy."

[b]of all meatbags I had to be grafted into, it had to be a abstinent and a lightweight. i want a real drink. can't you do me that for our anniversary?[/b]

"Not after last year's fiasco." Replied Wander, not needing Tactics to show him flashbacks to recall how badly that encounter with six rounds of high-grade alcohol went. "Is something on your mind? You don't chat about alcohol unless your running into probabilities you can't compute."

[b]as you have said it has been two years since we were put together.[/b]

"Thats one way to put it lightly."

[b]my point is that Skyguard has not done much of note to actively track us for that period.[/b]

"Besides that one case of the intelligence lady thinking we had too much intelligence."

[b]agent Rawne was more concerned about the datafiles related to Project Gram than the methods used in obtaining them. to date, the only threat to exposing my new platform are standard Skyguard monitor programs meant to track their equipment. no active or targeted algorithms, recovery teams, or intelligence AI's have been activated to investigate my disappearance in the past two years.[/b]

"Its a good track record, why think about it....now? Is this about Earth?"

[b]related. collapse of Earthgov indicates serious sociopolitical shakeup in human governance and factionalism. thus Skyguard would be encouraged to perform a high-level review of all strategic assets.[/b]

"Including AI's such as yourself."

[b]affirmative. especially AI's. the lengths Skyguard will go to reclaim even their basic AI units and keep them out of the hands of competitors is well known. case in point:the Steelhead incident after they recovered a class-4 rear-echelon logistics AI and attempted to crack it for their own purposes. the Steelheads had to rebrand themselves twice to recover from the losses.[/b]

"And you are a, what level exactly?"

[b]my core matrix and programming constitute a level-8 artifical intelligence specialized in tactical analysis, planning, and logistics. not to mention I am somehow compressed within the storage matrix of a single human brain plus implants. my point is, Skyguard would never take the disappearance of a high-level AI such as myself lightly. probability that they would not send any form of investigative force to find even traces of my existance, reasons for disappearance, or potential agents thereof approaches nil, yet is clearly occuring despite encouragement from Earthgov's collapse to start investigating every cold case they have.[/b]

"So the only possible explanation is that they don't know you are missing to begin with."

[b]oversimplified, but yes that is a more probable scenario than majority of possible explanations......or our hosts have more abilities than we think.[/b]

"Come to think of it, we haven't heard anything from the Shadow Bazaar since we met." Reflected Wander. "Then again, we were too busy trying to survive and put together a decent mercenary force to be something on Mars to think about it."

[b]yes. another anomaly. a faction capable of stealing a class-8 AI and installing it within the frame of a single human brain with only a few implants of unknown design. insufficient data to come to any conclusions.[/b]

"Well, lets go ask some questions then." Decided Wander as he finished off his drink and stood up, still hearing Tactics grumble about fruit juice in his head while doing so. "We got spare cash, a contract about to expire, and a ship to ourselves now. Lets go hunting for answers while we got time and freedom to before the balloon goes up. Got nothing else to do in the meantime anyway."

[b]analyzing.....a good first step would be to determine if and how Skyguard is reacting to my disappearance. ideal target: Skyguard auxiliary data storage facility. processing potential target sites....[/b]

The hum of the AI filtering through data, plans, and simulated scenarios played out in the back of Wander's mind as he pulled on his field armor jacket and particle magnum and made to check out. Or rather check out on behalf of the person who really rented the room and had been thrown out the window to a 31-story drop. Not that the hot desk lady needed to know that tidbit of information.