“ Why did you lose?”

“ You got lucky.”

“ Luck is the eternal lie the modern man makes for his failings. I want to know the truth.”

“ My car failed.”

“ Wrong. You failed. That’s why I won. I won because I had the will. I won because I knew that I was meat, not a machine. I won because I realised that the car doesn’t make the racer. It’s merely a tool and the tool is nothing without its master. You are responsible for your legend. Make of that what you will.”

“ Is that supposed to scare or comfort me?”

The Car Czar paused, his back to me, dropping that god awful stinking myco-cig onto the floor and squishing it as if it was a goddamn bug. The fumes trailed out of his mouth as if he was breathing fire. He looked at me with contempt, smoke puffing out of his nostrils.

“ They’re both the same thing, Demon. You just don’t see it yet.”

---

“ Just drive, driver!”

Keah never thought he needed an invitation. He pressed down on the throttle and drove wildly through the dank tunnels of the warehouse. His three tires screeched like a bat out of a hell everytime he oversteered, swerving into right angled turns that left swirling clouds of dust for the Heralds to bite on. The engine roared, the raw power oozing into his gloved hands through the hyperalloy frame. The speed was climbing higher and higher, Keah trying to wrestle every bit that the Jury Rigg could muster.

As much as he tried to deny it, the thrill of the chase - no, race - was getting to Keah. His heart beated to the same rhythm of distant gunfire, his veins popping from the adrenaline, his hands welded to the wheels, foot glued to the pedal, face forward, the dizzying turns -

His ears suddenly caught the hint of a sharp whistle passing by. A flash of bright orange light transforms his entire world into morning for a moment before his car lurches violently from the explosion. They really wanted Petrukov dead, didn’t they? He shifting the car to neutral to prevent his car from tumbling over. The Jury Rigg skates on the concrete, before Keah hit the ignition to flare the wheels up to full rotation again. Keah internally berated himself for becoming lost in the chaos, that inextricable lure of danger that he’d sought to escape long ago.

Focusing on getting Petrukov out of here was the priority.

Thankfully, the entrance of the warehouse was in sight. The decrepit chain linked gate was sent flying as his tires hit the sodden mud. It was lightly drizzling, puddles of stale gray water coalescing around him. He turned the wheel to the left towards I-403, the main highway that linked the South City to the outlying Reclaim Zone. The road was mostly empty, save for the few auto-trucks that trailed by past him at a mammoth’s speed, carrying a mountain of cargo that was in length of hundreds of meters. The odd driver or so gave him passing glances of curiosity but didn’t decide to act further on it. Bullet holes were a common facet of life in the Reclaim Zone and nobody was going to give him second looks for looking as though he’d arrived from a war zone.

It was only after 15 minutes of endless driving that he’d finally relax. The Heralds weren’t following them anymore. Hopefully. Mil-spec vehicles couldn’t hope to reach the speeds of luxury sport vehicles such as the Jury Rigg. Now, he was confronted with a new question. Where to go from here?

His helmet pinged with a new alert. A message.

> Pirate_Party: We need a sitrep now.

“ Deal went south.” He looked up at the rear view mirror to check Petrukov’s shaken face. “ VIP is uninjured. Everyone else is - “ The Bannerlord’s face flashed for a moment. “ - unaccounted for. “

Keah was grateful for the few seconds of peaceful silence he afforded with his reply. He didn’t relish whoever the operator was on the other side of the private com channel. Keeping his eye on the road and on Petrukov’s safety was helping him process the recent betrayal of the heralds. Petrukov’s lieutenants and lackeys, meanwhile, were most likely scrambling like headless chickens. Keah could only imagine the looks of terror on their faces. The future of their movement now was resting on his shoulders, a vagrant haole, and Perukov’s sycophantic bodyguard.

Maybe the Ark would finally accept him……

No, that was just a dream. They were determined to have him stay on his self-imposed path, no matter how many times he tried to convince them.

A new message pinged onto his helmet feed, scrolling upwards across his viewport as he turned onto the right lane onto a bypass that bridged over a river of tar black water, gutters and sewage tunnels pouring out the refuse of the factories and corps that fueled the Reclaim Zone.

> Pirate_Party: Understood. Get the VIP to the party safehouse now. Sending you coordinates.

A series of numbers unfolded onto the screen. The in-built GPS in his iconoclast charted a maze of possible paths to the location marked by the coordinates. 8.5 kilometers away, deep in the Reclaim Zone.

“ All right, change of plans, Petrukov. We’re - “

A dull thump on the Jury’s Rigg roof interrupted him. Keah barely had seconds to react as a mono-blade sprouted down from his headliner. He just barely moves his left arm fast enough for the tip to only graze him painlessly. It’s why every decent law abiding assassin owns them. A second late and it would have separated his forearm from his upper arm. It sunk back up like a shark’s fin. The blade came down again, this time slashing through the side window on his right and spraying glass all over him.

Keah pressed on the brakes, jolting the Jury Rigg to a complete stop, and sending the assailant flying headfirst, rolling onto the syncrete. The mono-blade katana snapped in half as it clattered to the ground. The Herald was clutching his head, leg askew on one side, favoring his left foot. Keah didn’t give him time to recover as a half-ton of industrial-grade steel collided with the Herald’s body. He tumbled over the roof and landed on the ground with a bone snapping crunch, cybernetic hands twitching with nervous feedback.

Sparks then flew off the Jury Rigg as a fusillade of bullets buried themselves in his rear windshield in a diagonal line. Keah’s iconoclast adjusted, connecting with the cams hidden in the Jury Rigg’s rear lights. In the rainy horizon, there were 3 tiny figures zooming towards him at breakneck speeds. He could hear a high pitched electronic whine that made his skin prickle with goosebumps.

Hypercycles.

“ Shit.”



Fucking bozosoku scum. He ducked as one sped by in a blur, his submachine gun spattered a hail of bullets that left a trenched line of impacted glass from left to right. The motion radar in his helmet blinked, signalling a dot coming in fast from the right. With one hand gripping the wheel and his metal one on the gear shift, Keah turned the wheel up, shifting to the right lane in one fluid movement to collide with his pursuer head-on. The motorcycle came apart, wheel dislodged from the frame, whilst the driver tucked their body inwards to cushion themselves as they hit the road hard and rolling.

It went like that for a while. Him trying to sacrifice pieces of his machine to smash their bodies into the roving auto-tracks or turn them into roadkill. It was like trying to swat flies. They veered out at the last moment or simply tailed behind him, outmaneuvering his relatively bulky vehicle. They continued to follow him as he entered a bypass that sailed over a black river, sewage and detritus floating in the froth. Their headlights glimmered in the water, the moon shining over the chrome contours of the Reclaim Zone.

Unfortunately, traffic was heavy. The lanes were filled up to the brim with commuting midnight workers who were traversing back into the Reclaim Zone. The roads were tightening around him whilst it was easy for the Heralds to weave in and out with their miniscule hypercycles. Sweat beaded down his head as he watched the one on his right pull out a long tubular device from his back. A series of prongs snapped out from underneath the tube, connecting with the motorcycle. The Herald continued unfolding it until it looked to Keah what was a reasonable approximation of a gun. That was, if a gun was 99% composed of its barrel and the 1% was devoted to everything else. The moment the Herald pointed it at him, Keah immediately turned left, ducking his car down an underpass into a tunnel.

Keah always hated how eerily silent electromagnetic weapons were. Ballistic weapons were loud and predictable. He remembered footage from the 2035 riots where peacekeepers were given usage of prototype EMs to disperse crowds. Heads disappeared in clouds of blood, crowds were carved into mincemeat and limbs were blown off in perfect condition, all without making as much sound as a pin. Apparently, technology had advanced in the last 30 years as Keah’s ears rang, the very air itself seemed to shriek behind him. In a blink of an eye, a long furrow had been dug into the asphalt, molten red at the edge. Keah could see the exit as he passed under the end of the bypass into an underground tunnel, the size of a manhole.

Unfortunately, that didn’t get rid of his pursuers. In a moment, they were trailing behind him again. The one with the large rifle flipped open the breach, chucking out a large soda can-sized shell that clattered on the road, before shoving inside a new one and clicking it close. Keah hurriedly hit the accelerator and hid behind a nearby auto-truck. There was the same sound of the air being split asunder once more. The auto-truck’s front hood exploded, the chassis nearly split in half, as it careened over and grinded to a near halt, toppling onto its side.

Keah punched the wheel in frustration. He was fish in a barrel and he’d used up all available cover. The tunnel was hugging him from all sides and the Herald was taking his leisurely time reloading his hideous armament. All he could do was keep driving -

Wait.

They were expecting him to keep driving.

Keah drove in visible view in front of the two Heralds. He made sure he was aligned perfectly with them in a straight line. He took a deep breath, steeling himself for what he was about to do.

For the first time in his life, Keah slammed on the brakes in the middle of a race. The Jury Rigg stopped dead in its tracks in the center of the road. The Heralds were understandably confused. Was he trying to ram into them? The hyper cyclists simply swerved to the left and right of Keah’s car, dodging him by mere inches at their top speeds.

Unfortunately, for them, he’d opened the passenger doors at the last second.

The Jury Rigg’s doors were ripped off their hinges like wings on a fly as both Heralds collided into them. They were sent flying off their bikes, bodies smashing onto the road, and then, lying motionless, either knocked out or unconscious. One had smashed face first into the window, his body trapped underneath the door, whilst the helmet of another had come clean off, revealing a head, inlaid with circuitry, sitting on a growing pool.

“ We’re safe. ” He breathed out towards the pair in his back, the pirate queen and her sycophantic bodyguard. The engine vibrated reassuringly in his rigid fingers. “ We’re safe.”

He then pressed on the accelerator and drove away, leaving the two corpses to slowly cool off.

---

The Jury Rigg was coughing and wheezing by the time he made it to the safehouse. He shut off the engine, silent for a moment. He looked at both Johnny and Petrukov, his helmeted face expressionless aside from the long grooved crack that he’d sustained from the chase. He sighed and nodded towards the abandoned building, windows glued up with paper and plank wood whilst a large holo-sign was built in front of the sliding door entrance which read “NO TRESPASSERS. ZONE HAS BEEN CHOSEN FOR INFRASTRUCTURAL REDEVELOPMENT.”

“ They’re in there.” He rasped out. He looked down at both of his hands, his left organic one still whilst his metal one was shaking. He seized control, breathing deeply, before continuing. “ I now need some time alone to perform repairs. Leave me be.”

Gabriel sat in the lawnchair with his ambulance’s back doors open behind him, its sound system blasting an ancient and venerable tune from almost a hundred years ago. The song had stood the test of time due to its simple and joyous message, and it encapsulated Gabriel’s mood better than simple words could. For once, he was relaxed, nursing a tall glass of ice water as the monks around him went about their daily routines. The clinic had opened a few hours ago, but after working fourteen hours the previous day, Gabriel and the monks had agreed without exchanging a single word that Gabriel would be allowed to take the morning off. Or at least, they hadn’t bothered him yet. Granted, it was only eleven o’clock.

Gabe wasn’t used to California weather. Even after decades of climate change had all but eliminated the snows of his youth, Toronto was never this hot. In truth, Gabe had no idea how a city in the middle of a desert could survive, let alone one this large. Desalination or something... he thought to himself, taking another sip of water. That, and stealing water from my city... Gabe allowed his mind to wander as he tried to distract himself from the impending doom he had felt since the invasion of Toronto. Most of the thoughts involved women, as the monks he travelled with were largely unresponsive to his advances. I can’t tell if they’re celibate, or just don’t like me.

One of the managers of the Baolei Clinic approached Gabe’s corner of relaxation with a look of repressed annoyance on his face. Gabe had no desire to engage in their Dharmic teachings, but had accepted long ago that travelling with Dao’s campaign meant being preached to from time to time. The monk spoke: “The Buddha teaches us to refrain from our desires, to remain diligent in our pursuit of enlightenment.”

Gabe turned to the monk, lowering his sunglasses ever so slightly. “I’m meditating.” He paused, picking up his glass of water. “And if I was giving into my desires, this would be booze.” He took a sip.

The monk rolled his eyes. “If you weren’t such a brilliant doctor, the other monks might not appreciate your callousness. But our leader seems to have--”

“I heard ‘brilliant doctor’!” Gabe exclaimed, cutting the monk off, “Thank you so much, Brother Gerard.”

Gerard sighed. “Thank you for fixing that man’s lung yesterday. We all thought he was a goner. We were trying to console him as he stood at death’s doorstep until--”

“Don’t worry about it, my guy,” Gabe responded, placing his drink down and stretching his arms over his head, “Wasn’t that hard, just needed to replace a few parts in his respirator implant, that’s all.” He pointed one finger at the monk: “When he recovers, tell him I’ll break his fucking legs if he starts smoking again.”

Gerard paused, stunned once again by Gabe’s callousness, though not as much as the first time he made such a remark. “There’s going to be a protest tonight near APEX labs, and it could very easily turn violent. Rest for now, and be prepared to take the night shift.”

Gabe nodded. “Let me know if you’re missing replacement parts. I’m sure I can find something in the van.”

Gerard turned to leave, but stopped a few feet into his stride before turning back to Gabriel. “Why do you want to work here, Gabe? Why do you support Chen Dao if you don’t believe what we believe?”

“I believe what you believe,” Gabriel replied, “I mean, the important parts anyways.”

Gerard seemed confused.

“I mean... okay look,” Gabe began, sitting up and draping his legs over the side of his lawn chair, “I wanna help people, I wanna heal them. You’re not out here trying to convert people, you’re giving them medical care. I believe in THAT.”

Gerard nodded. “And yet, you do not see how augmentations can lead to enlightenment.”

Gabe shook his head. “Augs are a type of medicine. That’s all I see them as, that’s all I ever will see them as. And yeah, I know I’m being a bit of a hypocrite, what with my own implants, but still.”

There was a long, awkward pause.

“Look, are we done discussing philosophy?” Gabe asked, “I actually do have stuff I need to do today. Got a little side-project I’ve been working on, and--”

Gerard had already turned to leave.

“Wow, okay, RUDE.” Gabriel finished his drink, then went back inside his ambulance, shutting the door behind him. The Medivan, as Gabe called it, straddled the line between RV and ambulance. Much of the floorspace was taken up by a hospital bed, and the passenger seats had been taken out and replaced with some cabinetry. Currently, the cabinet had a series of vials, beakers and other lab equipment laid out on them, alongside a microscope. On the slide of the microscope was a drug known as Void Dust, which Gabriel was doing his best to synthesize in a lab.

A less scrupulous person might see this as an economic opportunity. Void Dust came from an asteroid-mining rig, and as such, was very difficult to come by on the surface. A steady supply of the rare drug could make you the richest dealer in the Twin Cities, but this was not Gabriel’s goal. Void Dust was highly-addictive, and Gabe was trying to synthesize a compound which addicts could use to wean themselves off of the stronger, rarer drug. He had made significant progress towards replicating the crystalline structure, but had not yet worked up the confidence to move onto human trials. There was a chance that the effects of his synthetic compound could be even stronger, and he didn’t want to take that chance. For now, the synthetic Void Dust would remain hypothetical, possibly useful in miniscule doses as a painkiller, but nothing beyond that.

Although... I guess I could test it myself. Just a small amount, maybe one tenth the dose I’d normally use as a painkiller.

...

...

Four hours later, Gabriel finally awoke at the sound of Gerard knocking on his ambulance. “Gabriel? Your shift starts soon... is everything okay in there?”

Gabriel was still shaky as he got up. Turns out, yes, the synthetic compound is much, MUCH stronger than the original. “Yeah... yeah I’ll be there in a sec. Fuck. Wow. Just... gimme a bit.”

“If you look deep enough into a mechanism, grinding its cogs to sparks, spiralling, shredding any foreign component that interrupts the inner workings of a great machine; it seems so vile, but then you start to understand why it exists. Because the decision is all yours—let the gears click on in lockstep or stick your hand in between their serrated saw blades and feel the metal edges. Feel them twist deeper towards bone. You’ll feel finality in agency.”

ℍ𝕒𝕣𝕥 𝕄𝕖𝕕𝕚𝕒 ℂ>>.,𝕟𝕘𝕝𝕠?<<>..𝕥𝕖
𝕋𝕨??>>.. ℂ𝕚{{>>... > <??𝕝
>>> …
“I called the station. We can’t cut the feed. Both vest cams still recording.”

“Does Valentine know what’s going on?”

“And we gotta find something.”

---

---

ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖, 𝕊𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕙 ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕒𝕨𝕝
𝔸𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕝 𝟚𝕟𝕕, 𝟚𝟘𝟞𝟝 :: 𝕆𝕟𝕖 𝕕𝕒𝕪 𝕓𝕖𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕖 ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖 𝕕𝕖𝕓𝕒𝕥𝕖
[𝕎𝕠𝕣𝕞𝕤] ℝ𝕖𝕤𝕠𝕝𝕧𝕚𝕟𝕘...

“Right,” Salt said. “Outpost Two, I’m coming in hot.” The message reached Glory’s radio only moments before the sound of the grappling hook smashing into the side of the unfinished structure’s concrete walls. Further below, Salt was already in the air, sailing—or rather falling—after the hook on its overextended rope. The grappling rope went slack when he crashed into the side of the building. He wheezed for air over the radio waves.

“Reeling in. I’ll be right there.” Salt triggered the industrial winch in his grappling gun, and sailed skyward, watching the edge of the building for Glory’s outline.

Together, the commander figured, they could at least look like they emerged straight out of some buddy cop movie if they were going to get beatdown in the crowd below. He stuck a hand up blindly as he gasped for breath. Footsteps and shouts from below echoed through the unfinished stairwells below Glory’s recon position, but their voices were distorted. The swell of sound could only mean that a rush of people from the crowd had entered the lower floors.

As Salt reached blindly up towards the edge of the roof he would find it answered with a comfortable and firm grip followed by words of assurance. ”I got you. C’mon.” Hauling Salt up over the edge of the roof, Glory gave him a smile before giving him a reassuring clap on the back and cracking a joke in order to try and diffuse some of the stress of what they were about to have to do. ”Well. At least you got to use it. Fun as you expected?” With her brief joke out of the way, Glory resumed taking the situation seriously. “Got a plan for trying to extract or are we going to just dip into the usual playbook for something?”

Now that Salt was secure, Glory turned her attention to the roof in general. In particular she focused on the door that she’d forced open to get up here. Being the only access point to the roof it made for a double edged sword: It was the only way up, but it was also the only way down. Unless they wanted to try roping down to another floor, that staircase needed to be clear.

Gripping her gun firmly, Glory pulled it free of it’s holster and checked the chamber before nodding to herself and flicking the safety off. If Salt was watching closely he would see Glory’s contacts flash briefly as the smartlink systems switched into their active state and synced with the weapon. It was ready whenever she needed it. Hopefully she didn’t, but being caught unprepared in this kind of a situation was a death sentence.

---

It meant something special to interface in the midst of shockwaves. There will always be those amongst us that just operate, and when cocktails start flying from both sides, it helps to keep one eye on the patrons and the other awaiting some

next formula.
A new idea.
A way to ease and erase
chaos, as easy as they do order.

Perhaps that’s just formulaic hope. Praying for
Some ditch effort conceptualization that sometimes never comes.

Stella’s optics lit up with transparent readouts as a shockwave of displaced air shot past her. The bullet hit the brick six feet and seven inches away from the B - A - R. The measurement overlay melted away. At the origin, remnants of Turkish’s Bomb Squad cleared swathes through the crowd with the vehicle’s mounted turret. Those that remained outside the factory complex with the vehicles were already scrambling for seats, but their barrels remained focused on an enraged mass—like a growth of shadows. Remnant products of forces absent. Grounds run red.

The glow of her optic implants flashed orange on the glass of her respirator. The flickers almost blotted out the scene. Hyperactive motion receptors, flicking towards each disturbance in a radius around the B - A - R. There were a lot of them. Heart rate too high; still climbing. Skin too cold for the surrounding temperature and nearby blazing puddles. These sensations—they weren’t alien. They had their place but not here, in this chaos. Stella lived chaos, was its conduit in Limbo. It played out before her eyes, then replayed and replayed and replayed across the cart’s three monitor screens.

The indicator given to her by the goons came alive in vibrations. Its red indicator light flashed at her. It was a simple piece of tech on the outside at least. That was all the communication that was needed—one signal to take the next step. Another of the B - A - R’s locked compartments unsealed and inside she could see another bottle. Optic readouts identified liquid benzene. Small thermite charges lined the compartment’s interior.



A man stumbled into Stella’s cart on a slow retreat. His trembling palm covered a gouged eye—not well enough. Stella flinched, and groaned as she threw her weight into the B - A - R away from three enshrouded members of the crowd that pulsed out from the central shrinking mass. She backed away until she felt brick against her back. They were coming closer. Another stray shot ricocheted off the derelict factory and left a bottle of gin in a puddle of shards. Stella ducked low behind the cart.

Unsustainable Heart Rate. Clouding Judgement.

Stella gritted her teeth. This Reclaim—the surface—was chaos of a different sort. There were too many factors flashing past. Too many to react. More than any one Mixologist could ever quite micromanage.

“But, Solomon, the Limbo is a closed system; the Mixologist its membrane—not a barrier, but fielding every intricate factor, letting the alien pass within and beyond. So you, membrane, disperse. Become its equilibrium.”

Neon haze and star-filled views from the void erased the danger…

“What do I—” Stella said, but she was alone.

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕃𝕚𝕞𝕓𝕠 ℂ𝕝𝕦𝕓

ℍ𝕚𝕘𝕙 𝕆𝕣𝕓𝕚𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕊𝕥𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝔸𝕝𝕖𝕩𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕣𝕚𝕒
∞∞∞

“I’d say it happens to the best of us, but...”

“But it doesn’t. The young Mixologist, perhaps, becomes enamored, lost in new experience, and wavers in the most important moments. The young Mixologist fears lack of preparation… For the Alexandria’s finest are themselves infohazardous. They change the concept of economy, of life, of freedom. You can’t prepare for that.”

“What? What do we actually do?”
Stella realized she was pressing herself too hard into the metal counter of the Limbo Club’s preparation station.

Just beyond the partition was a party of engineers who walked right past all of the club’s defense systems. The turrets, the lasers sparked and fizzled as they entered. They were an envoy or something—the detail had already vanished in her fog. Her BPM monitor went critical, and glinted against her iris. But it started to slow to the steady rhythm of the club as he spoke to Stella. He had the effect, not just on clients.

“Don’t tell me you’re worried. Is it because of the weapons? Believe me, sweetie, even worse folks have passed beyond our domain without you even recognizing the firepower. And remember… They are the patrons, but it's the Mixologist who’s truly in control.”

“Oswald lets in a lot of—” She was cut off by the gunshot. He held up a pristine steel tray and Stella caught just a glimpse of the reflection. One of her clients was somehow crisp, still burning, but melting into the Limbo’s red carpet. Her throat closed up, but somehow she still choked forward another quip. “Sometimes you can just taste when a drink is tainted...”

He placed another glass on the counter. Its contents shimmered in the low light. He put on a smile, and stepped out onto the floor. “Calm down, Stell… Remember whose domain this really is. And remember that doses flow both ways.”

---

---

𝕍𝔸𝕃𝔼ℕ𝕋𝕀ℕ𝔼…
ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕖𝕚>>.,𝕧𝕚𝕟𝕘?<<>..... {{>>... > <??𝕋𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕞𝕚𝕤𝕤𝕚𝕠𝕟
>>> …

“To what extent is it right to do bad things for good reasons? And how may we identify those who do good things for bad reasons?” A shaky hand held a crystalline martini glass. It wore a silken white glove that ran past a suit sleeve. Despite the tremor, two fingers curled back to smooth his cuff without losing a drop from the drink.

“Advise,” he said, and the dim lights came alive around him. “Construct 3-2.”

“Yes, Valentine?”

“When must you knowingly stop mass harm?.” His gloved hand flicked high and slashed the air. The three drone monitors hovering in front of him revolved, their positions taken by a new set of three with multiple media sources of the crowds outside the APEX foundry. “How many of those who know but don’t act push their deeds into unconsciousness?”

“Should I run this question against a database of recent associates, Valentine?”

His hand strangled the neck of the glass. He feared it would break. “No. 3-2, get me on the bartender’s feed. Two-way. The stage is already set. And open the remote controlled interface.”

“You’re sure you want to risk being seen connected to the Limbo Servant?”

“With haste, 3-2.”

“Yes, Valentine.” The lights around him dimmed until only a stark spotlight remained. He adjusted his lapel. The camera drones in front of him twisted in on themselves and opened up with watching scanners.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter whether they’re conscious or not. It only matters that they exist, but so do I, and perhaps that’s enough this time.”

---

---

ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖, 𝕊𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕙 ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕒𝕨𝕝
𝔸𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕝 𝟚𝕟𝕕, 𝟚𝟘𝟞𝟝 :: 𝕆𝕟𝕖 𝕕𝕒𝕪 𝕓𝕖𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕖 ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖 𝕕𝕖𝕓𝕒𝕥𝕖
[𝕎𝕠𝕣𝕞𝕤] ℝ𝕖𝕤𝕠𝕝𝕧𝕚𝕟𝕘...

Salt staggered when his feet found the coarse sediment of the rooftop. Glory couldn’t see his eyes, but she could tell something was off by the way he swayed. His hand gently pressed the side of his head, where a trail of blood dripped down from the side of his cracked visor. He took in a sharp breath and settled himself facing Glory.

“Thanks. I, uhh— wasn’t expecting my descent to involve so much downward momentum. More testing to be done before field operation next time.” Salt made sure he was far enough from the edge to prevent his subtle swaying from sending him back down towards the crowd. “Let me think,” he said and dropped to one knee. “Extraction… Yeah, we can go down through the stairwells, but we’ll run into the crowd on the way. They’re probably taking refuge from the APEX goons, or each other, or something.”

Salt paused for a long moment, though not just to steady himself this time. He fiddled with the side interface of his visor, fighting its glitched state until his gaze was honed in and following something through the building below. “I got something.”

“Three other Reavers spotted by the reconnaissance teams before they pulled out. It appears like they’re chasing someone. Maybe the killer? If we—” Salt paused, and turned to Glory. “Well, you’re in a better state. I’ll follow your lead. Can guide you to their infrared signatures from the rear, but we gotta move to make it.”

Glory gave a few nods to Salt’s observations before taking a moment to close her eyes and think. Three Reavers that were in pursuit of an unknown party. No information about how they might be armed, and no information on any potential augmentations they had. With the violence and chaos that had taken hold they were likely running entirely on survival instinct, and so anyone who wasn’t one of their own would likely be seen as a threat. Intercepting them and bringing them in would look good, but survival was first and foremost on Glory’s mind at the moment.

Wading into a situation like that wasn’t Glory’s idea of a good time, but if they didn’t get moving they ran a real risk of being abandoned among the storm. Unfortunately, Salt had taken a nasty ding. Glory would have to cover him while they moved. A simple enough task in most cases, but due to the rapid and unpredictable movements of the crowds there were enough unknown factors to make her head spin.

The two paths that Glory could see laying before them were wading into the unknown or sitting around waiting to see if the next person to show up would be help or harm. Neither scenario was optimal, but a choice had to be made. Opening her eyes, Glory placed an assuring hand on Salt’s shoulder before speaking with what little confidence she could put together. ”Alright. We’ve got to move and try to get out of here. Keep your visor working as best as you can. Bounding Overwatch maneuvers. I’ll lead. Ready?”

Regardless of his answer, Glory began to tug Salt towards the stairway down in order to begin making their way out of the building.

---

No stranger to the haze and trance states.
It was like—
a welcome awakening.

Another locked compartment of the B - A - R opened, but Stella hadn’t noticed. A savage Reclaim denizen with a broken arm swung a half-shattered glass bottle for his opponent’s neck. Stella’s Clairvoyance Optics honed in, analyzed trajectories and patterns of blood splatter both from where the man’s hand gripped tight against the glass shards and where they connected against his opponent’s flesh. The uniforms of whatever warring factions may have come to dance had been rendered useless, dull and ashen in the smoke, so she had no idea as to what conflict existed between the two.

Perhaps that was what was missing amongst the terrans. The closed system of Alexandria extended to its nets of information. Everything coming in and out, analyzed and predictable. Earth blurred its factions amongst the meridian lines. They pervaded into one another, spilling and exchanging resources, bacteria, ideas.

“You’re a Mixologist...”

It was hard to focus—dissociating behind the optic feed, letting her vision go blurry—but the voice brought her back. Stella’s eyes locked onto the B - A - R cart’s displays. The feed showed… another television, an old CRT, encased with platinum, embossed with designs. It spoke through the static, faceless.

“Progeny of chemists, biologists, ancient alchemists, bards, bartenders, and charlatans. So follow your path. Seek recombinance, reorganize, reshuffle your factors.”

Stella blinked, and tried to focus her gaze clearly. But something—some shadow—hemorrhaged in her head and all her clarity turned to dust.

“You have everything you need—chance would have it—to avert unfamiliarity, return to Limbo. Or find a path.”

One of the silhouettes from the crowd had reached her—bashed his knee into the cart and tumbled into it. Stella stepped back, her. focus ever-distracted by shimmering analysis of the cart’s velocity across the asphalt and where it would return to stillness. The man clutched at his eye. His palm pressed against the socket couldn’t hide the web of blood across his face. He was hardly aware she was there.



“But by all means, ‘Mary’... Don’t let any one passing goal distract you from your art.”

Stella looked back at the CRT on the feed, and could have sworn it regarded her back. The simplest tilt backwards in recognition of her gaze—it was a cue she recognized in the rhythms of rhetoric in Limbo.



In the new compartment, chilled bottles of thick glass and steel alloy. Her optics bore into the new stimuli for microseconds, then action in the artisan arms.



𝔻𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕖𝕕 ℍ_𝟚𝕆



ℍ𝕪𝕕𝕣𝕠𝕘𝕖𝕟 ℙ𝕖𝕣𝕠𝕩𝕚𝕕𝕖

For rending biotic connection was always the quickest way to purge a vessel of contaminants.

Seared by disinfectant or drowned in antiseptic.

Stella pried open the industrial capsules and jammed each against slots in the bar. Her formulas intermixed, repressurized, and ran through a tap back into the final capsule. Screwed on top was the same sort of spray nozzle she’d handed off to the Man in Rags. This one was heavy duty. She adjusted her respirator, ensured its seal.

---

The Reclaim’s 𝔾𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕖 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖 “ℕ𝟘 𝕄𝔸ℕ'𝕊 𝕃𝔸ℕ𝔻” was bisected at irregular intervals with corridors of perpendicularly intersecting highways where 10 storey skyscrapers once held capsule hotels for the factory workers. The capsule fad never quite took off in South City, so the blocks laid empty. The highways were perfect for the dispersion of an autonomous crowd—paths for conflicts to break and seek equilibrium. Some were quick to use the route as the fires spit more smoke into the street before the APEX complex. Others lingered, still sought conflict. Others made it as far as they could.

The highways led out of the GCZ. Its borders were distinct because the surrounding industrial zone had been excavated at least two or three storeys from the street level of the rest of the Reclaim. Salt grabbed Glory’s shoulder and pulled her to a halt when they neared one of the ramps that led back towards the city.

“Three signatures,” Salt said. “They’re slowing down. On the ramp.” He directed a hand towards three silhouettes, ascending the ramp, but congregated before their quarry. The ghostly figure met a fourth Reaver, shredded his jacket open with the same serrated ripper and tossed the man aside as his pursuers closed in. Watching the ghost’s movements felt like a paradox. So slow and methodical, but executed with razor instinct at the exact, decisive moment to drop the Reaver to his knees.

Salt hesitated, instead letting his visor’s display linger on a small ray heat signature hidden in the smoke rising along the ramp. “And we’re not the only ones watching the show.” Salt flicked his infrared goggles up and zoomed in with telescopic lenses on the small heat signature. The ray emerged just below the brim of a trilby hat. Salt shook his head as his eyes momentarily fogged up. It was vertigo, but with no queue. “Nevermind. Take point. I’ll back you up.”

As Glory moved to intercept, Salt caught his balance and gazed back towards the obscuring smoke.

---

He leveled the black box with his eye in a shaking hand bereft of its own strength and strained to raise his eyes to meet it. “Pretend…” he said to himself between heaved and rasping breaths. “It’s your old standard issue…” He gripped the thing awkwardly, like he was mimicking a revolver grip. With a click, the rectangular box erupted with an infrared beam, siphoning measurements across the ramp to his target—a ghoul and the Reavers that pursued him. As the data reached him, he felt the searing sensation building up again.

The Reavers didn’t wait after their next man fell to the Ghoul. The source of the smog on the ramp rising into the Reclaim became clear when two of the Reavers withdrew clay devices and launched them towards the Ghoul. On impact, boiling tar rode a brief concussive shockwave and released noxious black smoke into the air. The Ghoul’s torso was half-covered, but the ever-present grimace on his face didn’t waver.

---

I pose a question.
What’s more evasive—
A Justice or the origin of Rage once we escape it?

Stella once again found her steady step, rhythmically pressing through the crowd the way a mixologist stabilizes their breath when treading with tray high past the weight of a dozen watching eyes. She held her formula high and sprayed it in a massive cloud as she walked. Those who inhaled the thick mist continued to cough through the smoke, but felt adrenaline fade and fatigue set in. Rage, as though artificially placed, began to evaporate. She caught as many as she could, and those who still sought martyrdom in APEX’s bowels began to break rank. Frenzy gave way to fleeing.

She turned back to capture a last glance of the B - A - R cart. Its surface was a sea of blue flames licking up the last bits of volatile ethanol before it dripped down towards the charges within the open drawers. Then, the inferno became a storm. The B - A - R cart vanished in flares, and the crowd could not remain.

An assault on the senses, acrid fumes of burning petrol seared the eyes and nearly threw Olex’s lungs into upheaval. Billowing black smoke made his eyes sizzle in pain, but even through the watering tears he could observe different bodies of the rapturous crowd all react uniquely to the biting flames that washed over the entire scene. Some began to move in the same manner he did, trying to retreat from the blaze. Others seemed unsurprised, likely those more nefarious actors that had employed firebombs in the first place. Any attempts to quickly remove oneself from the crowd was a fool’s game. In front of Olex lay a sea of bodies all moving in their own directions irrespective of those around them.

The courier paid for a moment of being slack jawed. A spray of blood cut through the air in tandem with the crack of a weapon’s discharge. Olex’s face wrinkled in disgust and frustration, contorting as he fought the urge to gag. The initial shock subsided and instinct took over. It wasn’t his first time. He licked his teeth and spat a few crimson wads on the ground, not particularly trying to avoid the legs of the fleeing protesters. The bloody saliva was quickly washed away by the streaming pool of blood coursing from the dead stranger’s head. Mouth firmly shut and staring at the departed, he wiped the rest of the mess from his face, staining the legs of his pants with his dirty hand. Eye contact with a corpse always precipitated an overwhelming anxiety. At least for Olex’s sake, the only person watching him lick a stranger's blood off his face was dead.





Proctor needn’t struggle his way through the crowd for long before something angelic pierced through the suffocating tungsten and titanium. Sudden divinity clutched him around his wrist, a grip so precise and firm that it would never loosen unless the angel willed it. Mutual eye contact was brief. An exchange of emotions. Distant curiosity from the angel. Bewilderment from the elder cyborg. The looks broke, Proctor being dragged from the spot where he stood.

In spite of the fact that his leg had stiffened straight out and was carving a winding gouge in the dirt and dust in his wake, nothing felt labored about his movement. He wondered if the monk could even tell how much of Proctor’s weight she was pulling for him. She carried more metal than flesh, and a glimpse of titanium plates and bolts creeping up her neck from under her robe implied that even her spine was heavily modified. The monk could probably haul a hundred men twice Proctor’s size without a struggle. Proctor examined her arm for a moment, a piece of cybernetic mastery that was too artfully crafted to have been made on any assembly line on the planet. Most thoughts left his head the moment he entered the monastery proper and suddenly became surrounded with an evenly spaced and incredibly shiny sea of people. People, even if many of them resembled machines more closely. From wall to wall mats were laid evenly across the entirety of the monastery, each being occupied by an assortment of different vessels of flesh and metal commingled. Some vessels still carried souls intact, untouched by the terrible disease that had ravaged its way through many of the machines that sat, awaiting either repair or decommission.

Proctor found his seat on a wave, having little time to speak or ready himself before the monk began to tear the innards from his malfunctioning leg. She spoke. He didn’t listen. Couldn’t listen, rather. Few words pierced the fog as effectively as the pain did, despite his earnest efforts to comprehend some small bit of what she said.

Such a great deal of time had passed since Proctor had engaged in any sort of serious socialization that it felt alien. Most of the relic’s isolation was of his own accord; those who inhabited the Reclaim didn’t exactly go out of their way to chat up limping piles of bumbling and mumbling metal on a regular basis. The monk’s sentences were brief, but the speed with which she spoke still put a bit of spin in Proctor’s head.

“Who are you?”

Proctor was overwhelmed instantly. A question as simple, if perhaps abstract, as that one drew so much from his frail mind that he was at a loss for words. Of a million answers, none seemed particularly satisfying, or interesting. Summing up your own existence in mere words was never easy. Deep down Proctor knew realistically the monk never expected such an answer. But it couldn’t stop him from combing his memories for any single, exemplary moment that could succinctly describe him. Every twist in thought and turn in memory all led to the same brick wall that he attempted to avoid with wild vehemence. Not even Proctor was certain who he was anymore.

Proctor had undoubtedly been a child at one point, but to try and recall anything his formative years was utterly futile. Early adulthood was the same, a depressing inability to fill any holes in his memory. With corporeal limbs and a reflection that still looked back at him in every puddle of dirty water or grime covered window he walked by, it was certain that Proctor was indeed existent. There absolutely had to be some sort of story that spanned the years of life that led to this point. His abundance of scars and discomfort of age all signified that Proctor had indeed lived a long life, one stricken by inescapable violence and conflict. What irked Proctor the most was that despite his forlorn familiarity with the pain he lived with and damage his limbs bore, he was just as inquisitive about them as the monk that had just slid a new piston into a place in his knee.

His cheeks ran cold, conditioned air dancing across the tracks that trickling tears left running down his face.



Chaos of this nature felt familiar, maybe a bit uncomfortably so. Bathing in violent heat and still trying to rid himself of the metallic twang of iron in his mouth, Olex took a deep breath. The very ground he stood on began to give way to his weight. Asphalt deteriorated to sand. Buildings of brick and mortar crumbled into dunes of sand. His familiarity with his surroundings suddenly made more sense. It was The Badlands surrounding him. Parching heat dried his lungs and seared his skin. His hands bore deep crimson stains as if he’d never cleaned them. A dead Tinman lay in front of him, signs of a failed attempt to save his life littered around. As the sand consumed the body, Olex brought his bewildered eyes up to those around him.

A wall of confusion and fear. His chest tightened as he became gripped with a fear, unlike anything that he’d ever felt. A deep, pitch black dread that had crawled it’s way from a deep recess which it had been locked in for quite some time. Dotted amongst the sea of faces draped in terror stood a few stone facades, the few men and women displaying a foul, incongruent comfort with true violence. Yelling and cries of fear and terror mixed, Olex no longer sure which were protesters and which were his brothers in arms. Incomprehensible cacophony blurred and dulled until only his own shallow breathing was audible. He was shaking. Cold, clammy sweat broke out up and down his back. His knees began to buckle.

“Pray that God has mercy for cowardly men!”

A commander’s distant words crept through deafening silence.

“Pray that perhaps you can have a good rest in the afterlife, because a weak-knee’d, quiver-lipped son of a bitch will never have an easy time down here with us. The Path of the Pioneer is always rough, but every Dog has its day!”

Cutting through the impossibly tall dunes of sand was a phantom. A pallid face, eyes sunken and wild looking. Windows into a temple long sacrificed to animalistic instinct. Steadfast in his path through the slowly unraveling crowd, the Ghost had seen Olex first, while he was still caught seemingly in a trance staring off into space. A loutish collision finally cleared the sand dunes from around Olex as his body turned in the direction of the man who hit him. Like ghosts tend to do, the man floated and cut his way through the crowd with little effort, even in spite of the large briefcase he was carrying. Olex spent a few moments trying to figure out what the Ghost had said to him through the intense white noise of the crowd. Within those few moments, the Ghost lunged into someone. His target recoiled violently in pain. His clothing immediately ran deep red as it was carelessly sheared through by the chainblade sinking into his flesh.

The Courier’s cry for help, even had it successfully escaped his throat, wouldn’t have been heard through the surrounding cries of fear and panic as more and more rioters began to notice the man writing on the ground, blood rushing from his back and mouth. The man stared Death in his eyes, his gaze jutting upwards into the sky as the color drained from his face and painted the asphalt. A final, jagged breath inaudibly escaped his mouth.



Perception snapped forward, from deep inside Proctor’s thoughts into his vision and the room around him.

”I don-” Proctor began, before realizing the monk next to him had been called away.

His croaking voice fell silent. A small jolt went through his body as he scrambled his hands to wipe the wetness off his face. He was already an old broken man surrounded by other old broken people. No need to be the crybaby of the bunch.

Proctor slowly made his way back to his feet, extending his arms high above his head. Another futile attempt to replicate that sensation of stretching everything out when you’re tired, which had eluded him since the day he began replacing stretchable muscles with static, hard metal. He relaxed, trying to decide if he wanted to wait inside or outside the clinic for whenever the monks would hopefully start breaking out the drugs. Something stark and bright drew his eyes away from empty space.

He had been scanning the room, curious to see where the monk who had been working on him had been called off to, a face easy to recognize amongst the crowd of cyborgs and half-humans. More recognizable yet was the face beyond her’s, one topped with a short bob of purple gossamer that matched the intensity of the brightest ornamental light in the room.

His limbs froze again, this time not in a fit of pistons or joints painfully seizing stiff, but like a wild animal torn from the darkness. Jaw slack and eyes wide, confusion wrought his mind. That was S’venia. The woman behind the name was still a mystery. Whatever relationship she had with Proctor remained to be seen, if there was any at all.

Perhaps both Proctor and the Monk could glean some more interesting answers about his past were they to ask her. Maybe.



Fear was beginning it’s agonizing creep into all of Olex’s extremities. Fear kept animals sharp, kept them alive. Fear also drove them into the corners of the cage, drove them back until they had no choice but to lash out, uncoordinated and unsure. Fear drove Olex more and more into the fence that held the crowd back from rushing the APEX building. The crowd would surge with movement and Olex, accompanied with a large group of other outliers, would have no choice but to brace against the fence. With every heave, the creaking chain link would groan and lean farther and farther back. The two men guarding the front would tense up, with a set of guns and two pairs of wild eyes jutting out at the wild riot. Olex could move along the fence, one excruciating inch at a time, but his exact destination was still unknown. Just on the other side of the fence lay two men who were dying for an excuse to shoot him, and in the opposite direction lay an immense and mindless drove of rioters and criminals who would hold little more sympathy for him than the guards. Something within that swarm changed. It started on the outside.





Petrol fires still raged around the crowd, driving those with any sort of survival impulse closer inwards towards one another. The slaying the Ghost perpetrated seemed to precipitate a bloody rash of violence throughout the mob. One by one the members of the crowd gave into the same barbaric impulse. The mob thrashed against itself. Metallic limbs and fists became painted in thick scarlet. Protest signs dashed across heads, dusty sidewalks were begrimed with viscera and wide pools of red. Amongst the beasts were the unfortunate victims. They seemed untouched by this violent impulse and were ripped to shreds as a result. Ashes to ashes.

Bumpy chain link dug itself into Olex’s back, rhythmically clicking against his shoulders despite the thick canvas of his jacket. An occasional shove here and there was enough to give Olex room to scoot across the fence inch by agonizing inch. Hands jutted out intermittently, grasping, either for help or with more malicious intent. The reason didn’t matter much. Each attempt was fought off with ease. Fighting kept him from getting dragged into the crowd every time he was grabbed. Another hand, this one not grasping but holding something, jutted forward from the crowd.

A long and bloodied blade glided off the burnished titanium hands of the courier as he caught it. Pressed together by the crashing waves of people against them, Olex faced his would-be killer eye to eye. Face contorted, mouth stretched to bare all of her yellow, rotting teeth. A look in the eyes that could only be the result of an impulse of mindless instinct. Nothing premeditated. Bestial, not vengeful or raging. There was nothing past her eyes. The sadistic void that true evil held in its eyes was something Olex was well acquainted with, but it wasn’t present in her. Just the facade of a cold blooded killer without the malice behind it all. Something was driving her to kill, but she didn’t know what.

The assailant relented on the pressure for a moment, setting her feet for a renewed attempt to drive the knife forward. The brief moment was all Olex needed to react accordingly, taking both of the protester’s hands in one of his own titanium paws. He drove the knife back, driving his fist into the woman’s face with a pop only an APEX Aegis could produce. Sweat was misted through the air as the assailant’s head snapped back with a sickening crack, causing her knees to completely buckle as she was ripped from consciousness. The only thing keeping her from flopping lifelessly onto the ground was Olex crushing her hands in his, which had undoubtedly snapped bones at this point. He tossed the hands, and blade as well, allowing the woman to finally sprawl out and enjoy her sleep.

Like a pinprick to a dragon, the tip of the knife found itself flying into the miniscule inch of open flesh on the back of a gargantuan cyborg. Even amongst the thrashing crowd, Olex crawled to a rigid stop. The titan threw down the man they had been choking to turn his attention to Olex, and carried a look so insidious on their face that even the courier could feel his blood run cold. The titan shot towards Olex at a hideously swift pace that flew in the face of their size. Within only a few moments the Titan’s fist was jutting through the fence where Olex’s head had just been. He countered with his own hook, but the immediate blow to his torso let him know about how little of an effect it actually had.

Doubled over and stumbling backwards, Olex was pitched into the fence. His solar plexus screamed with pain and spasmed. Olex gasped and sputtered for air, sucking in through his gritting teeth. The Titan quickly tried to follow up with a kick to the head. Olex hid his head the best he could under his arms but still felt the strike force his face painfully into the concrete. Coarse bits of sand and what felt like small shards of glass dug into his forehead. He loaded his legs up under himself and shot up to his shaky feet. He started grabbing onto the chainlink to stabilize himself as he fled along the fence. A flurry of punches followed quickly behind him. Metal knuckles found him flush along the jaw and rattled his brain.

Olex landed abruptly on his back. His spasming legs disregarded every attempt he made to stand. Dust collected in small plumes as he frantically kicked away. The Titan scrambled to stomp on Olex’s ankles, setting their feet and losing ground with every failed attempt. Frustrated, they blitzed to catch up to the side of Olex. Steel toe boots filled with titanium feet landed a sickening kick to his ribs which upset the breathing he’d finally gotten under control. Olex writhed in pain as the Titan grabbed fistfulls of his shirt. He was lifted to his feet like a ragdoll and shoved into the fence.

Olex cracked the titan across the face with an elbow. The snap of the blow was audible even over the violent cacophony around them. The Titan’s knees buckled, servos whirring as they struggled to stay standing. The goon lurched forward as Olex tried to follow up. They wrapped their arms around the courier and effortlessly dragged him to the ground. Olex was out of breath and powerless, opting to simply shield himself from the flurry of blows raining down on him. Each blow blurred his vision more as his mouth was bloodied and a cut open above his brow. Olex forced his shaky legs to stand as he lowered his head against the fence. The blows began to come from around his guard. The courier tired of the struggle and could feel his grasp on consciousness slipping. His hand began to creep into his dirtied, bloodied jacket, unlatching the lock on his holster.

His stomach soured. Even with the vicious blows causing a ringing in his ears, the crowd around him fell quiet. Olex’s heartbeat slowed down as a nauseatingly familiar feeling settled into his bones. Olex spun with another elbow, stumbling the Titan momentarily. The stumble was brief. Pure rage kept the Titan on their feet and drove them forward still. The pulse of Olex’s heart grew even more tangible in his face as the Titan wrapped their hands around his throat. OIex’s free hand fought off the grip to no avail. Black tendrils snuck in around the edges of the Courier’s vision. The Titan’s rage distracted them from the pistol barrel creeping up under their chin. Tears began to flow from Olex’s eyes. Pain and regret.

Bits of skull and brain splattered over Olex’s face, blood mixing with sweat and tears as they left ribbons down his cheeks and chin. The titan had crumpled instantly on top of Olex, the latter now pressed uncomfortably against the fence.Olex lay pinned under the lifeless giant, and viscera from it’s gaping skull poured over his face and neck. He struggled in vain to breathe, only to begin gagging and coughing as hemoglobin’s distinct flavor dripped back into his mouth. His lungs screamed. The Titan’s limp body was shoved to the side as Olex rolled onto his hands and knees and continued his gagging and gasping. Shirt and jacket had become stained with blood, but whether it was his or the Titan’s it all tasted horrible. Sand and dust mixed in to make the experience of trying to clear his eyes joyfully fun.

Still on all four, Olex’s head turned wearily over to the nearly headless Titan. Frightening power and speed, the menacing glare and presence, all gone. All that was left was a useless husk of metal and clay. Any trace of reason or emotion had been dashed in one short, easy squeeze.

Shaky inhale, shaky exhale. Olex needed his gun back.

Unexpectedly, it was one of the few things not covered in blood or viscera. Cold to the touch. He tried to pull the slide to begin the process of removing gray matter, but it wouldn’t budge. A quick look over revealed that the safety was still on.



An APEX cleaning crew had introduced more turmoil into an already chaotic scene. Many protesters began to desert their various causes, choosing their life over whatever horror the crowd or mercenaries held for them. Mobs turned into mobile frenzies, overtaking whatever lay in their path and colliding violently with the gun trucks and military grade weaponry that now surrounded the riot.

Two separate crowds went their separate ways as if they were choreographed and meant to do so. A few squads of APEX mercs moved in tight formation into the building through an opening shutter door, while a strangely cohesive group of rioters blew their way into the opposite side.

Various groups of people moved in every direction, with the very center of the Square slowly becoming less densely packed. Stragglers sprinted to and fro, screaming and trying to shield themselves from the violence forming a deadly cross fire. Olex stood amongst it all, unsteady. He ran a hand through his blood-soaked hair, the heat from the surrounding flames slowly drying his coating of crimson into dark bits of scarlet crust.

Ages had passed since he’d had this much strange blood on him. Like putting on an old coat from deep inside the closet that you hadn’t worn in years. He was surprised it fit him so well.

The disgust in his stomach settled for a moment. The mission at hand returned to his mind. There was still a package to be delivered, but every way into the building seemed fraught with risk. One path was filled and guarded by the mercenary crew. This nice group of young men and women would surely listen to reason instead of blowing his brains out the second he got close, right?

Opposite the merc crew was a group of protestors, but more organized than ravenous it seemed. Something felt off about a group of people being led by some green bed sheet in a gas mask. Olex was curious about whatever set of circumstances led to the formation of a strange pseudo-cult which had just blown a massive hole into the side of an APEX building, but solving mysteries was the least of his concerns at the moment.

Olex found himself spilling into the building through the front doors, riding the tidal wave that flushed in the moment flames forced the two guards to relent on their pressure. He thought he could see a set of frightened eyes peering at him from a corner of the building as he entered, but the rush of the crowd pushed him forward too quickly for him to distinguish anything from the grey blur.

As branching hallways and different paths opened up, the crowd thinned out. They scattered into every direction, some simply deciding to destroy everything in sight, others choosing to continue pushing through the halls. Olex slowed down as the shove of the crowd lessened, and began to more carefully make his way through the halls. People who entered the building from every different entrance, all with different objectives, began to mix and collide. Some hallways were death corridors filled with mercs that shot everything in sight. Others held protestors violently beating and stripping mercs of their gear. Olex floated through it all as if he were a ghost, going mostly ignored in the frenzy that had engulfed the building.

One of these groups seemed to be privy to some sort of information that he wasn’t. They moved collectively. Olex floated into their orbit, following them down a set of darker hallways deeper underground. Cries for support and help became audible as the mob Olex was following flowed into the already ensuing havoc of the lower floors. Armed people were rushing in from behind, seemingly to some sort of front lines that had materialized in the chaotic skirmish.Every other room seemed like it had turned into a makeshift triage. There was a group huddled around a rather stoic looking woman. She was pointing at different hallways and rooms on a makeshift blueprint, not really seeming sure of anything that was printed on it.

No one seemed to question anything. The only inquiries Olex could hear were from random passersby asking for ephemeral bits of information. The familiar malaise of battlefield fatigue was beginning to set in, as thoughts of wanting clean clothes or a warm bed wormed their way amongst the panicked musings of a man trying to deliver mail in a warzone.

Metal halls made for ugly acoustics, and explosions ripped their way from hallways all around followed by the screams and cries of maimed men and women. Were they blowing the lower floors up?

Olex had been jogging lightly behind someone, a man carrying a makeshift machine gun with a ratty beret sitting shakily atop his head. A few funny jokes about the hole filled hat began to trickle into Olex’s head before it was suddenly bouncing off the floor. Instinct had brought his arms around his head. He shielded himself from any more potential trauma, grimacing through the ringing in his ears. He could feel the footsteps of people bound past him, and found a few curious gazes momentarily looking back down at him when he opened his eyes. Most of those in the hallways were concerned with the man who had been running in front of him. His legs were completely mangled, blood from hanging exposed blood vessels leaving a trail on the cold metal floor as they drug his lifeless body away.

On the left of the hallway was the only sign of an explosion, with a big smoking hole having been left in the wall and black soot jutting in every direction around it. Opposite the hole, only blood and shrapnel marks were left. The explosion, although sizable and powerful, seemed to only come from one side of the hallway. Olex hadn’t seen any tripwire lasers, nor were there any cameras in this hallway for someone to watch and remotely detonate a bomb. Olex was shakily helped to his feet by a random civilian who scampered off quickly after it was clear he wasn’t maimed or bleeding. Were he to keep his ankles, he’d need to start watching his steps much more closely.

Trailing far behind the front lines, he allowed more and more people to take point ahead of him. One by one they’d fall, losing arms and legs or even lives. Walking by the dead ones continually attributed to a growing malaise. Each step pulled more and more out of him, until every inch forward felt like an inch deeper into his grave. Civilian life had made him soft. Fear of death was something he thought he’d done away with long ago. Now, though, he could feel blood-twinged sweat beading and trailing down his body as he waited for the next explosion to crack and rattle his brain and lungs.

A random soldier ran past, and began signaling for the growing number of surrounding protesters to follow him. Another explosion shook the basement as he rounded a corner, crying out in pain.

”Well, at least he’s not dead. Yet.

Something familiar pushed past him. A man strode past clad in tattered green rags, rasping breaths whirring in and out of a high tech gas mask that clashed with his hobo-chic outfit. Olex slowly followed behind him as he turned the corner. He watched as the man nonchalantly dropped the man a medical stim, gave him a few empty words, and continued on down a separate hallway, maintaining eye contact with something down the hall from the wounded man.

His eyes trailed up, only to see a small group of people down inside a room on the opposite end. These weren’t protesters or rioters, they were too….well-dressed. At least, for a corporate setting. One man stood out more than the others, an older man whose face portrayed none of the fear or trepidation that anyone elses’ did. Something told Olex these were APEX.

His first few steps were short and full of nerves, but with each one he could feel himself building courage. He stepped over the dying man, and held his hands up to show they were clear, besides the small drive in his right. As he separated from the pack, he could feel the eyes of both sides scanning him, followed up by a set of gun barrels pointed at him from the other end.

”Wait!” He waved his hands in front of himself as he shortened his steps. ”I’m Choi’s guy! I’ve got something that belongs to you!”

Identifying himself as someone that was working in APEX’s interests probably wasn’t the best idea when standing so close to a group of people that had been actively working to tear down an entire building belonging to the corporation. The guns pointed at him weren’t lowering, and he could feel more of them being raised behind him. More and more it was beginning to look like he had put himself in the middle of a terrible situation. One that could only really end in him being shot.

Dead eyes stared out vacantly through the small bulletproof window on the security door and did not waver from the mutilated man on the ground. Lott’s chest was locked up and her breathing came in wispy little staccatos. After watching the pawn, with a classic flank opening, move to C4 and being left with little more than just his flank it would be easy to take Lott’s reaction for shock. Yet behind that heavy security door she felt invincible, and the violence didn’t shake her—it excited her. The Man in Rags had robbed her of the opportunity for the ultimate thrill, but it didn’t matter as she cut his act of mercy, assuming leaving someone alive for APEX could be considered a mercy, out of the loop. Every few seconds, her vision was blinded by that violent flash.

Perhaps she was so blind to that cycle of violence that she didn’t register that Turkish was moving to abandon her. He still owed her answers. He still hadn’t asked her out for a drink. She raised a hand to grab arm, and then Flash! He was gone. The pawn crawled, the blood leaving a snail trail behind him, and then Flash! The trail ended as the stim stilled the wound, but the man hadn’t gone far. He lifted his head as if to look back at her. Lott’s heart raced so fast that her watch injected a sedative, mixing with god knows what, dropping a pill on the roulette wheel of health and then kicking the table over as it spun. They were about to lock eyes. She’d remember them forever and then Flash!

Guns with legs and a troubled history with alcohol and kids they never saw paraded past the door and took up a defensive formation and Flash! Another piece in the 𝔾𝕒𝕞𝕖 and lifted his hands to show he was unarmed and Flash! Lott met his eyes and Flash! She was against the wall now, sweating, full-panic, her life going by in a Flash! The door no longer provided security. The excitement turned to shock. Alarms rang. Or had they been ringing? The loop died. No more flashes.

Lott felt a knife in her chest. She gathered what little spine she had left to stand up from the wall she’d fallen against and look out the window again. The knife twisted. There was no need to dig into archival footage. She’d erased it all anyway, not like it would work. No amount of drugs or alcohol or one night stands or soul crushing, mind numbing nine to fives would ever let her forget those eyes, nor would they forgive that last look they’d given her. It was a look she’d grown used to, a look of sad disappointment and harsh realization, a look that said, “I’ve finally figured out what you are, and I fucking hate it.” Son of a bitch, he was supposed to be dead. She’d always regretted not being there to watch it happen.

The sedative hit right, the door opened, and she stepped out into the deadly situation. This was their second chance.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said Lott to the guns—she didn’t care if they belonged to Turkish, Gatch, or APEX. Hell, she’d even take the rioters. She gave Olex a vacant look, pretending like she didn’t recognize him, pretending that could even be possible. Surely he knew better, but it made her feel powerful nevertheless.

“Shoot him.”

Except her execution order died on her tongue, its spirit leaving her mouth as little more than a rattled gasp. The corner of her lip twitched. Her left eye spasmed. She lifted her hand to point at him and bark the order again, but it shook and pulled back to her chest instead as the words turned into air yet again. At least she was able to step in front of their barrels and block their shot. If they weren’t going to shoot him, maybe they would do Lott a favor and shoot her.

The disquieting dread that had come to define Olex’s past week seemed to have made way for something new. A novel feeling trickled into his body, starting from the tickling rush of adrenaline in his stomach, snaking its way through veins in nerves. His knees and elbows fell weak. The air around him felt like it could crush his chest. For all the dark crusted blood that had dried on his face, the skin underneath it had become pale and clammy. The courier stood surrounded by lifeless metal walls with leagues of virtually identical mercenaries, all built to protect the most cretinous of the nihilistic upper crust that the Reclaim could stomach. Even still, in front of him stood something putrid and reprehensible. And it stood between him and the guns pointed at him.

A miserable gray pant suit that sat in a closet with 10 other identical outfits. The clinical bob haircut, maintained to such strict corporate standards that even her hair had learned better than to grow past her chin. Vain, gaudy necklaces and rings that gave her already pale skin a sickly green glow in a dark enough room. Memorable blue eyes that still sent a shock down Olex’s spine all these years later.

They had locked eyes, Olex and the glorified corporate babysitter. After a few stunned moments and wordless gestures, she stepped out in front of the squad of mercenaries who had guns trained on him. Those that could still aim at him directly maintained, but those who were being blocked seemed dumbfounded, and began trying to get past her and re-establish their aim. The self-sacrificial move would’ve almost touched Olex, if he hadn’t sensed how little the pair of them wanted to be alive as soon as their gazes met.

It took a moment for his legs to solidify under him again, but after heaving a huge sigh and swallowing his nausea he shuffled forward. A few less barrels trained directly on him made the advancement a little less perilous, but no less tense.

”See? You don’t need to shoot me!” He motioned towards Lott, trying to play off her passive suicide attempt in his favor. He dangled the drive from its small chain from his finger. He held it out in front of him, trying to make it as visible as possible in the low light of the hallway. He prayed Lott wouldn’t have a change of heart and demand the men shoot him. He honestly didn’t even expect she had the authority to do that.

“How—why—” Praise be to the power of big pharmaceuticals, their little antianxiety injection being the only thing holding Lott together in the shape of some kind of human form. Her tongue felt thick and useless in her dried mouth as it struggled to find the proper start of a question. How are you still alive? Why didn’t you tell me? Would you like to get dinner so I can trap you in a conversation solely constructed to cut you down to tiny, miserable, tinman scraps? All difficult questions to ask with a mob of faceless strangers flanking her to get line of sight on the target.

Why didn’t they just pull the trigger? For the first time in her corporate career, Lott found that once comforting red tape, which simplified life by preventing any kind of personal decision making and transformed people from people to a series of zeroes and ones incapable of steering from their program, wrap itself tightly around her mouth and begin to smother her. As she choked on the regulations, her eyes focused on the drive dangling from the chain, swinging back and forth like the watch of that hypnotherapist who Lott had visited for a few years back in the Vegas Triangle. Their only successful breakthrough had been in unlocking the latch on Lott’s purse. The hypnotherapist had only been a waste of money; Olex had been a waste of her happiest days.

“Are you delivering that?” said Lott, finally finding her voice, her teeth biting through the tape, her eyes glued to the drive. Professionalism kept her from calling for the shot that she’d no authority to make. She was an employee of both Gatch and APEX and it was part of her contract to accept any deliveries on their behalf, even if it came from an absolute waste of a perfect jawline and top-of-the-line company cybernetics. Lott’s eyes moved to meet Olex’s. A twist of a smile splintered the porcelain mask of her face and revealed the low, everburning flames of an old hatred flared up behind her eyes as she gave him a look of recognition. “You’re a delivery boy.”

Her nostrils flared as she huffed out those words, not bothering to hide the cruel satisfaction she felt. It was a strange sensation that crept over her, one she had never felt before. It wrapped itself around her like a warm blanket, settled the acid that had been bubbling in her stomach and straightened out her spine. Was this a feeling of superiority? It was as good as anything she’d ever ingested into her system before; maybe there was a pill that would replicate it. She turned her chin up and narrowed her eyes as she raised her left hand out, palm up, ready to accept the drive.

“Only authorized personnel are allowed beyond this point. You have no authority, so I’ll take it from here.”

The pair had closed the distance between each other, with Lott stepping forward with a brand new confidence, undoubtedly a product of an elevated dosage of some sort. Her words dug at him, in a way he wished they didn’t. It was less what was said, more the worm that said it. His jaw tensed, a million different foul words and insults readying themselves at the tip of his tongue. Unrelenting self-satisfaction and smugness only served to irritate him more. It was a mutual hatred, a reunion a decade in the making which neither of them expected. Olex could see how much his mere survival annoyed Lott, and that satisfied him. Unfortunately, her mere existence irritated him equally as much.

Lots of skeletons had seemed to begin making their way out of Olex’s closet recently. Despite being largely unpleasant and unwelcome, the threats they posed had come to shape the way he thought and acted. Never stay too long in one place, give fake names out to those that don’t already know who you are. Nothing about the reckoning of his past finally coming to fruition offended him. He had made mistakes and had come to terms with the idea of having to pay his debts eventually.

Lott Ramana was not a debt to be settled, nor a mistake to be paid for. She was a snake, someone who Olex watched morph into a cretinous lap dog for those that stood for everything he hated. The idea that they’d both known one another so intimately and she still acted as if she inhabited a realm all her own was offensive to a degree that could incite rage in him. To think he’d spent a not insignificant amount of time with Lott bothered him. She wasn’t a score to be settled, she was a deep and bitter regret.

He held eye contact for a few moments, his mind racing with different insults he could fling at her, the hate in each of their eyes apparent to the both of them. He took a deep breath. Without breaking eye contact he brought his thumb up to his mouth and licked it. He slicked his blood crusted eye brows to the side, crimson flakes falling off to each side of his face as he slid his finger. He brushed those off, as well as cleaning other bits of grime and gore off his face.

”Alright. I’m ready to meet whoever’s actually in charge, then.” His lips could barely curl into a grin. Even with the immense satisfaction he drew from the attempt to goad Lott, the exhaustion and adrenaline dump was beginning to drag him down.

Lott thought it was nice knowing that time didn’t change Olex. He’d always taken every opportunity there was to carve off a bit of her self-worth to beef up his own, questioning her excitement anytime she mentioned being recognized at work or considered for a promotion. It always led to an argument, then making up, and then cycling back to an argument again until they cut out the middlestep and just stuck with the fighting. She never recalled winning a single one, so in a miserable effort to shelter what little droplets of self-esteem she had left Lott would race herself to achieving a blackout by the time Olex would get home. At least then she wouldn’t remember losing.

That luxury couldn’t be replicated here: too many goons were watching, and Turkish had stolen her drink anyway. So instead she just lifted her hand up higher, refusing to back down despite knowing that he’d do the same.

INTERMISSION

Keah found that the body was a more complicated and ill-tempered machine than any piece of cyberware or car. Metal didn’t feel pain. Metal didn’t bleed. Metal didn’t think. Machines had one singular purpose and were laser-focused on achieving that aim in the most efficient way possible.

At least, that was what he tried to tell himself as he stared solemnly at the cracked headlights of the Jury-Rigg, which were blinking spastically in chromatic seizures. He dropped the voltage torch onto the ground and limped away, eventually resting his body against a collapsed filing cabinet. The abandoned building was bare-bones in terms of spaces to park his ride but the Pirates had helpfully provided him with an empty refrigeration unit for him to rest in. The Reclaim Zone, like always, provided its usual din of rain that sloughed through the gutters with its petrichor aroma.

Keah glanced at the wet patch on the left side of his T-Shirt and sighed. No use putting it off now.

Grasping the tweezer in his hand, he lifted the hem of his shirt and stared down at the left side of his stomach where a piece of jagged laminate was stuck in, about the size of a grape. Sucking in a breath, he pinched it with the tongs and began the arduous process of pulling it out. The advantage of using the Octo-Dactyl was that he could shut off the impulses that his brain was screaming towards his hands, to let go, to stop. Bit by bit, he gritted through the agony as his right hand calmly pulled the shrapnel out with a wet squelch. He popped the cap off the toti-thrombin hypo and punctured it into the skin above where the blood oozed out, feeling his flesh boil as the cocktail of stem cells and steroids began to kick his metabolism into overdrive. His Iconoclast, laid on the ground next to the Jury Rigg, began to beep urgently with an alarm just as he slapped a kera-patch on the now sealed wound.

“ Shit, Demon.” A coarse, smoky voice, like burning exhaust, came out from his helmet. “ How’d you get a beaut like this totaled?”

“ Mdakwe.” He crouched next to the helmet, placing the gel cryo-pack on his bruised forehead with a wince. Staying silent, he waited as the South African dove into the Matrix and sifted through what was left of the Jury Rigg’s custom OS to inspect the damage. Every so often, there would be an unintelligible swear in Afrikaans followed by a vaguely patronising sigh and a snort.

“ So, what’s the bill?”

“ Well…..let’s start with what’s not damaged, ja? You’re so goddamn lucky that your drive shaft and engine managed to survive a hail of EP rounds. They’re perfectly intact. Surprising for someone with your reputation.”

Keah ignored the biting sarcasm at the end, inwardly relieved that all the rudiments which made the Jury Rigg run were still okay. He took the cryo-pack off and replied back as he picked up the voltage torch again and strode to the back to inspect more of the damage. The bullet holes made for a nice background against the scratches and nicks that left strips of metal peeling off like pencil shavings. Was it even salvageable at this point?

“ I’m not hearing the downsides yet.”

“ Where to begin? Your fuel-tank ruptured. All but one of your mag-wheels have been completely disconnected from your drive assembly. The smart circuitry inlaid into your sub-systems also melted like ice cream. We’ll disregard most of your cosmetics. Better less said about them.” Mdekwe paused. Keah could make out the sound of her clicking her teeth in disapproval. “ You turboblazers….Always the sentimental type, aren’t you? Are you trying to repair this hunk of junk?”

“ Say, I wanted to.” Keah traced a finger on the windshield and examined where the loose flakes of paint stained his skin. “ How much would it take.”

“You’ll have to stick with the subpar stuff for now. Oly-laminate plating’s rare as a non-myco steak on the black market. My supply of mag wheels went dry as well. I can send you the schematics for how to repair them but you might have to stick with the old frictions for now. Probably.” There was a pause whilst Keah poked around under the Jury Rigg’s belly with a flashlight. “ I hate to tell you this but it’s going to bankrupt you to try and make another one from scratch. Sure, your ride was impressive but this isn’t Detroit. There is no gearhead in a thousand miles of the Reclaim Zone that’d be willing to refurbish your ride.”

“You don’t know that.” Keah replied weakly, wriggling his fingers out from a bullet hole and wiping off the brown coolant that leaked from it like a faucet. Looking at his car this way was like dissecting a dead animal. Any repair he could have done was the equivalent of taxidermy. As hard as it was to accept, the Jury Rigg was gone. Dead.

“ Look. Keah.” Mdeke’s voice took on a gentler tone as she said his real name, like she was tip-toeing over landmines. “I’m willing to loan you a new set of wheels. Me and da boys can come over here later to scrap it after the press conference.”

“ Fine.” Keah grumbled, tossing away the voltage torch in frustration. “ At least tell me it doesn’t have one of those stupid fucking spoilers.”

Mdekwe’s silence was damning.

“ Shit.”

---

“ And that is all?”

“ Yes.”

“ Good. The sooner we help Petrukov with this farce of an election, the sooner we can crack open Amalgmation’s closet of skeletons. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

“ Is that all you called me for?”

“ What? Did you think this would be enough to get back into our good graces, Kaito? I do not care what these *outsiders* call you. We all know your real names. To them, you might be a legend, but to us, you’re just a lost little fool who ran away who was tempted by the ideals of these mainlanders.”

“We have always been lost ever since Hawaii sunk, brother.”

“ Do not ever call me brother. You have your orders. Complete them this time without causing a scene.”

“ You know me. I can’t help but make one.”

Location: 𝔾𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕣 ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕖 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖 “ℕ𝟘 𝕄𝔸ℕ'𝕊 𝕃𝔸ℕ𝔻”

Interacting with: Various @Opposition controlled characters.

---

The extraction had gone about as well as it could’ve. The initial swarm of people had tapered off into distinct pulses. There would be a surge, then people would get caught up with trying to find a new entrance once a fight broke out, creating a lull moment where the building emptied. Then another surge would signal the cycle beginning again. Taking advantage of one of the brief lull periods, Glory and Salt made their way free of the building. With Salt being dazed from his rough zipline ride Glory couldn’t make full use of her athleticism. What made matters worse is that her motorcycle was about a dozen miles away, sitting in the secure parking area of Knight Enterprise. It would’ve made getting away just that much easier, but there was no use crying over milk that got left at home.

Weaving through buildings and alleyways was working out pretty well. At least until Salt grabbed at Glory’s shoulder and told her that three signatures were present on a nearby ramp. In that instance, both of their earpieces buzzed with a new order. As if it had been planned all along.

”New directive for all Knight Enterprise forces: Arrest or incapacitate all aggressor parties. Command out.”

Glory and Salt looked at one another for a few moments before Glory let out a sigh and looked back to the ramp for a few moments before speaking softly. ”Well. Orders are orders. Can’t defy ‘em.” Looking back to Salt. Glory began to rapidly lay out a plan. ”Alright. Since you’re kinda roughed up I want you to camp out nearby. Watch my back and drip feed me what info you can with your visor. Alright? Don’t engage unless you feel up for it. Wouldn’t want you to get overwhelmed.”

Salt could only nod a few times. He wanted to help, but she was right: It’d be too easy for him to get overwhelmed should combat get in his face. Adjusting his visor, Salt began to hunt for somewhere to hide and observe as Glory moved towards the ramp. Checking the chamber of her gun, Glory took a deep breath. Making her way over to one of the side walls of the ramp Glory peeked over and started assessing the situation: Three Reavers and a wall of thick smoke. Not good. They looked slightly roughed up already. Rationalizing that it was probably from the riots, Glory also figured that the thick smoke was their doing. Breathing it would probably be bad.

With little other information to glean and her window of action closing rapidly, Glory figured she might as well get on with it. Showtime. Moving to a low section of the side wall, Glory hoisted herself over with a good jump for momentum. She landed with a solid thud and dropped into a crouch to absorb the impact. As soon as her feet hit the ground on the other side she brought her gun up and shouted an order at the three Reavers. ”Knight Enterprise Police! Get down on your knees and put your hands in the air!”

That sent a shock through their spines. All three of the Reavers suddenly locked onto Glory. There was a little bit of hesitation when they saw that she was pointing a gun in their direction, but that changed when one of them was able to toss another of the clay devices at her. Glory’s vision snapped to it almost immediately, and instinct told her that the odds of shooting it out of the air in time were basically nil at this range. Thus, she did the only other thing she could do: Roll.

Pushing off her left foot Glory dodged to the right and rolled along the hot pavement briefly before bringing herself up into a crouch in one fluid motion. The device that had been thrown at her smacked into the ground right next to where she’d been just a few moments ago and began to fill the air with smoke. Whatever they were, they weren’t good.

Thankfully the Reavers seemed to be out of them, as they had begun to rapidly close the distance between them. One of them pulled a knife, another a pipe. Then the last one seemed to pull out a screwdriver. Glory fixated on that for a split second, reminded of what she had almost done so long ago. But the thud of foot on pavement broke the trance. Bringing her gun up once more, Glory pulled the trigger firmly. Thunder boomed as the .50 Action Express round left the barrel and shredded the leading knee of the knife wielding Reaver. A sickening crunch came as he put weight on it before the full impact of the shot hit him and he collapsed. It wasn’t pretty, but Glory couldn’t hesitate. Glory’s aim shifted to her next target: The Reaver with the screwdriver. Again her gun roared as she took another shot, but this one missed and impacted on the side wall across the street.

Mentally swearing, Glory pushed herself up from her crouching stance before adjusting her aim and taking another shot. This one didn’t miss, and the Reaver’s leading shin bone folded as he screamed before hitting the ground. The third reaver, however, was close enough now that he could swing his pipe and realistically make a threat. He was off by milmeters, but Glory instinctively pulled away from the threaded end of the pipe regardless.

The Reaver didn’t hesitate before swinging again, this time well within range to bring the pipe down right on her head if his swing connected. Thankfully, Glory managed to duck out of the way, and only felt the pipe glance off of her jacket. She didn’t have time to think about the fact that if she’d been a little to the left the pipe would have probably broken her shoulder. Pushing herself forward Glory pushed that shoulder into The Reaver’s chest and staggered him briefly. That brief stagger was then capitalized on as she hooked her foot behind his and pulled it forward, causing him to fall onto his back.

Leveling her gun at his chest, Glory glared down at the now defeated Reaver and issued a firm command. ”Don’t move.” The Reaver, out of viable options, sank into the ground and let the pipe go with a clatter.

Satisfied, Glory holstered her gun and got to work. Grabbing The Reaver’s wrist she pushed him over onto his stomach and began to cuff him. One pair of cuffs down, two more to go. At least until the revving sound of something being started got her attention. Glory’s vision snapped up and she drew her gun again. Instinct told her to reload, but she knew that she still had four shots left. It would probably be enough.

Scanning around the ramp, Glory cursed the smoke that billowed from whatever devices The Reavers had thrown. The groans of pain from the two Reavers that had been shot along with the chaotic sounds still echoing from the crowd dispersing made it even harder to try and find out where the new sound was coming from. Scanning around, Glory took a risk and moved one hand from her gun to her ear. Pressing down on the earpiece she wore, Glory pinged Salt and began to speak ”Salt. This is Glory. I need you to get up here. The smoke is too thick for me to see through and I don’t think that it’s just the three you saw here. Over.”

Once she was done speaking, Glory’s hand snapped back to her gun and she scanned the area again. The revving sound was growing louder, and Glory still couldn’t quite pin down where it was coming from. Until it surged. The next few moments all happened in a blur. First, the Ghoul that had been hiding within the smoke leapt forward, a thick bandanna making the smoke tolerable for so long. Second, he brought down what looked to be a handheld chainsaw onto the joints of Glory’s arms.

Third, Glory shrieked in pain.

And then there was silence. Glory’s brain shut down from the extreme amount of pain that was delivered to it, and she fainted immediately. She didn’t know if Salt arrived, she didn’t know who attacked her. She didn’t know how she would cope with what happened. The next thing Glory knew she was waking up in a recovery bed in a location she’d never seen before.

And her arms were much, much heavier.

Why on Earth am I so nervous?

Theresa straightened out the hem of her midnight-blue SFROTC uniform. She’d gone straight from class to the tech support center when they told her Ms. Ramana’s new phone was ready, and from there, straight here. She hadn’t even gone home to change.

Theresa didn’t exactly have Lott Ramana’s permission to copy her data onto a new device. A uniform, a sense of urgency, an ID card, and a lott of name-dropping had convinced the shop to replace her boss’s precious smartphone, but what if they called Ms. Ramana to confirm who Theresa was? Would she be mad at her for using her name for authority? Perhaps this surprise wasn’t a good idea after all. She should have just told Ms. Ramana what she was doing. And what if Ms. Ramana already got a new phone? Would someone as important as her really not have a backup device…?

Well, too late now.. I guess I should just present her new phone to her and hope I don’t get fired. She clutched the AetherTech Model X AR-assisted smartphone to her chest like it was a precious jewel.

The bright orange light from the setting sun reflected off the glass-and-metal front of the building, and Theresa raised her hand to shade her eyes. Above the glaring glass, neon lights crackled to life with a distinct hum, blazing letters into the dimming sky.



Inside the establishment, Lott was staring at the rows of colorful donuts tucked safely behind a glass counter. When she had arrived the publicist had ordered a vodka tonic and soon found herself as confused as the young man behind the counter in the paper hat when he told her they weren’t a bar. She’d assumed Theresa had invited her out to a cutely named hip college bar full of bright faced young people who had yet to realize that they’d already peaked and not an actual donut shop that was modeled like an old school diner as long as you ignored the automatons running production. Lott was locked in a state of analysis paralysis. The donuts were swirling together like the paint on an artist's palette and becoming a muddied brown, and so that was the one she bought.

Moments later, Lott was sitting in a plastic booth with a styrofoam cup of black coffee and her eyes looking down at a plain, unglazed donut. So many of the other donuts were coated with sprinkles and glazes or filled with jelly and custard, but this one was just fried, somewhat burnt cakebread with an empty hole full of nothing inside of it. Lott had never felt a closer connection to something in her entire life. Other donuts sat on plates across from her for those who had yet to arrive, out of reach like distant strangers. Only the plain donut stayed by her side. She couldn’t eat such a good companion. Although after the day before and the day to come, she couldn’t eat anything anyway.

It was thoughts of Olex, not the debate or the bloodshed, that kept her stomach in a knot. The debate had all but been forgotten, something she was aware existed but unaware of why it mattered to her, like the ozone layer or a grandparent living in a nursing home. The bloodshed should’ve been the highlight of her life, being so close to real danger while never actually being in any danger of her own thanks to the sacrifice of a few brave, forgettable guards and to APEX for having bigger, better guns. All she could see was Olex. Their encounter kept replaying in her head, cutting right at the point where neither one of them would budge, confirming the fear in her mind. If she’d won their pissing contest she wouldn’t have deleted the footage. She was watching it for the millionth time that day, donut held up so it appeared as if Lott was discovering the mysteries of the universe by staring emptily through the hole, when someone approached her booth. There was no acknowledgement as Lott tore the donut in two and dropped one half in her coffee, leaving it to dissolve.

Theresa maintained a respectful distance as she waited for her boss to acknowledge her. The woman was clearly lost in thought, and she knew better than to interrupt.

Perhaps it had been foolish to invite her out for donuts. Surely someone so important had a lot of work to be doing at such a critical time. Right?

She shifted from one foot to the other and back, swaying lightly out of nerves and contenting herself to watch Lott Ramana’s brilliant mind at work, no doubt formulating precise answers to thorny, loaded questions at tonight’s debate. A single word out of place, a single thought in haste or in excess of the facts, could spell disaster for a political campaign. She must be under enormous pressure.

After several quiet minutes, she stepped aside to quietly place an order. She selected a couple specialty donuts for herself - key-lime-coconut and cookies-and-cream. Two donuts was a lot of calories, but, what the hell, she’d had PT all morning. After tapping in her selections her hand stopped over the glowing touchscreen menu. What would Lott like? She should at least order a good one for her boss, too.

Chocolate was a safe choice, right? But then, safe wasn’t terribly sophisticated. Getting two specialty pretzels for herself and then a plain, everyman choice for her boss wasn’t exactly a great look. No, this is a chance to impress her with a great suggestion. Think, cadet!

Before…

Glory flipped a strand of hair out of her face. She wasn’t used to having hair this long. She would’ve liked to just brush it away, but she was advised to avoid placing her hands near her face for at least a week while her body adjusted to the changes. Adjusting her posture a bit, Glory winched slightly as the new augments tugged slightly against the reinforcing braces installed throughout her torso to keep her arms from ripping her body apart. Even with rapid healing tech, things were still a little sore from an operation so invasive.

Fighting the instinct to swing her arms as she walked, Glory blinked a few times as her vision blurred. She almost rubbed her eyes, but then remembered the warning about keeping her hands away from her face and settled with blinking a few more times. She was flanked by people who she didn’t know, but did recognize. Their uniforms were of APEX issue, but why they were escorting her somewhere remained unknown. Out in the parking lot, an armored car was waiting. One of them pulled the door open for her before issuing a stern command to get in.

With no choice but compliance, Glory ducked inside…

Now…

The armored car pulled up outside of a donut shop. If it had been any other occasion she would’ve hopped out immediately, but she was told to sit still for the time being. After a few moments, the door opened again. Did they not trust her to open her own doors? Probably not, once Glory considered the specifications that she’d seen briefly. Shuffling out of the car, Glory was told to follow one of the APEX team members inside for the planned meeting.

Feeling just a little bit of embarrassment and humiliation at the fact that she was going into a meeting wearing only a tube top, combat cargo pants, a tied jacket belt, and some thick combat boots, Glory followed the APEX team member inside. Once there she was pointed towards a booth where someone she thought she’d never see again sat.

Taking a step forward, Glory paused for a moment before looking over her shoulder and speaking. Her voice was a bit hoarse, but she got the message across fairly well. ”While we’re here. I want some donuts. Grab me a variety box, please. I’ll pay later.” With that, she walked over and sat down. Bringing her arms up was slightly mortifying. They didn’t feel like they moved so much as they teleported now. Bringing them to rest gently on her edge of the table, Glory had to adjust them a little once the table started to creak. With that finished, she said a name didn’t expect to say ever again. ”Hello, Lott.”

Lott’s eyes refocused as she stopped reviewing the tapes. Her lips disappeared into her mouth as she stared at the stranger sitting across from her. There was a moment of worry— either Theresa had changed drastically in the past couple of days or Lott needed to ask Dr. Howland to up her medication. A facial scan recognized the woman as hired security from the Swathe Street Incident, but Lott’s face only untensed after the scan picked up Glory’s face again with it attached to a series of emails.

“Welcome, Glory, I’ve been expecting you,” said Lott, lying. “Everyone else, out.”

This had been a planned meeting. A planned, confidential meeting in a public place where she was supposed to grab a snack with her intern. Lott turned and looked over her shoulder at the APEX goons that had infiltrated after the scout. They were crawling around the donut shop, clearing the booths and the bathrooms of any clients or corporate spies. The donutender was roughly grabbed by the shoulder and escorted out the front door, a variety box in his hands. The goons reached to lay hands on a sharp, young intern but were stopped by a sharp whistle from Lott. Surely, if Lott had planned for APEX to release Glory here, she had also planned for Theresa to join her for the meeting. A learning opportunity, right? Theresa was smart enough to come up with a lesson.

“She stays, as do the donuts,” said Lott, summoning her intern and Glory’s donut order over to the table with the snap of her finger. She slid over to allow for Theresa to take the seat next to her and waited for the APEX crew to lockdown the donut shop. She pulled her tablet up close to her chest and began scanning for the appropriate document. It was only when Lott was certain that the three women were left alone that she spoke again, her attention still affixed to the tablet. “So, do either of you know why we’re here?”

Theresa stared for a moment, stunned by the rapid goon-squad takeover of the peaceful donut diner. One minute she was contemplating a bite of tropical paradise, the next she was sitting across from an impressive woman in a tube top, whose massive arms appeared ready to snap the art-deco table like a twig. What on earth had just happened?

”Um,”, she started, tossing the nonsense syllable out like bait in the water. She watched carefully to see if any sharks snapped at it first. ”I just came to- I mean- I-I don’t know about her. Um, you look familiar. Have we met…?”

Things happened too fast for Theresa to follow. Miss Ramana seemed to be in control, or at least, she didn’t seem surprised by this turn of events. Of course, she would make it a working outing, wouldn’t she? But then - why was she asking why we were here…? She knew better than to question her boss on anything in public, so her eyes searched the larger woman’s almost desperately, seeking an answer written somewhere on her impressive facade.

Glory blinked as Theresa essentially materialized next to Lott as the APEX goons locked the building down. She recognized her vaguely from somewhere before. The incident at the Swathe Street Commons. Turning her head briefly to get a better look at her, Glory scowled slightly as a lock of her longer hair fell into her face. Tossing her head a bit to get it out of the way, she blinked again as she admitted that Glory seemed familiar. Still a bit hoarse, Glory spoke up again to clarify. ”Swathe Street Commons. I was on duty. My hair wasn’t this long and my arms weren’t so big.”

With a basic explanation given Glory turned to look at Lott once more. As previously this motion caused a lock of hair to fall into her face, which Glory had to toss out of the way once more. Speaking up again, Glory took a guess at the answer to Lott’s question. ”As for why we are here, I assume that it potentially has something to do with these-” Glory would take a moment to nod downward at her new arms before resuming. ”And the fact that I am still alive. The fact that I was brought to you leads me to guess that you had a hand in it?”

As Glory finished speaking, it became notable that she was opening and closing her right hand gently. To Glory, this simple motion felt weird. Too instant, too smooth. Not even the occasional knuckle crack. Just powerful synthligaments pushing and pulling heavily armored fingers backwards and forwards. It was all she could do to try and practice for the moment while she waited for an answer.

Theresa watched Glory toss her hair aside, distracted by the long, nut-brown locks as they waved past her. “Oh…” was all she got out, before reminding herself not to speak out-of-turn and interrupt her boss.

“Although I am currently a representative of the company, I do not hold the authority to outfit security officers with a prototype series of cybernetics such as the XL-001. You are alive because your company thought you were an asset, and my company thought they were an asset,” said Lott, having taken the time to find the relevant doc for this meeting and skim through the information. She finally looked up from her tablet and turned towards Theresa, “Make note of this situation: Ms. Batalia would not be alive today if she wasn’t such a hard worker.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“You are meeting with me because legally we are required to provide proof that you have consented to the terms and conditions regarding your cybernetics. I, Lott Ramana, hereby to be referred to as Party B, will inform Amelia Batalia, also known by her callsign Glory, hereby referred to as Party A, of what is to be expected of her now that her outfit Knight Enterprise, henceforth to be called Company B, has become a partial subsidiary of APEX Industries, which shall be called Company A. We are witnessed today by my intern, Theresa—Intern A—who will act as an independent company, let’s say Company C, to verify that Party A was informed by Party B about the deal Company B made with Company A on the behalf of Party A, and that none of this was coaxed out under any duress, and that all parties, that being Party A and Company C, are aware that this will be recorded by Party B, who shall turn this recording over to Company A and B to serve as proof of compliance.”

“Are we clear so far?” asked Lott.

Glory’s eyes narrowed slightly at the mention of her actual name. Not a whole lot of people called her that, and those that did were in positions where they usually just called her Glory anyway. To hear it so suddenly was alien and unsettling. However, it did prompt Glory to snap out of her mild haze and focus carefully upon what was being said. As Lott descended seamlessly into full legal speak Glory mentally groaned. Now everything was going to be much more complicated.

Blinking a few times as Lott ran through a string of legal requirements as efficiently as a machine, Glory paused in replying audibly at the question for a few moments in order to give her still-somewhat-on-painkillers brain a few moments to process what all was being said. After a few moments of this pondering Glory posed a question that she deemed important. ”And what, exactly, are the terms and conditions?”

“Due to a transfer in who is now the major shareholder of Company B, Party A shall now exclusively offer her services to Company A. In return, Company A will allow Party A to continue to exercise their user rights of the XL-001 prototype. Failure to uphold her duty to the expectations of Company A, which is vaguely undefined, will be considered a violation of these terms of service and result in the termination of user access to any of their APEX products,” said Lott, staring through Glory as if she was reading a teleprompter behind her.

Lott turned to Theresa. As the girl’s steward, it was her duty to properly make sure that the intern was absorbing the information. People misconstrued stories about corporations and the uneducated working class all the time, often taking what is truly charity and calling it something more sinister like exploitation. Glory wasn’t being taken advantage of but rather being given the chance to take advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime. The choice had already been made for her anyway.

Lott explained, “See, Theresa, Ms. Batalia was fatally injured in the line of duty. For reasons unclear to me, her direct supervisor Mr. Salt thought it would be a better idea to invest in restoring Ms. Batalia to fighting conditions rather than training a new security officer and decided to pay for those new guns.”

For clarification, Lott fired off a finger gun twice at each one of Glory’s new arms. She didn’t want her intern to get confused. She blew away the invisible smoke and holstered the deadly weapon.

“To afford payment, Salt sold a majority share of Knight Enterprise to APEX. Considering the excessive bloat in private security companies over the past few years, it’s actually quite impressive that it could cover the cost of Ms. Batalia’s operation. Although still technically a private security outfit, all contracts will have to be approved by an APEX representative. As well, APEX now reserves the right to pull any Knight, such as they’re going to do with Ms. Batalia, to bolster their own security forces when it is deemed necessary. Really, Ms. Batalia is quite fortunate. Don’t you agree, Theresa?”

Theresa bit back a question, resolving to inquire later when alone with her boss. There was no sense in questioning her boss in public. Instead she turned to the security officer, nodding and giving her a confident smile. “You must be proud to bear such advanced technology, Ms. Batalia, or may I call you Amelia?” She looked up and down one of the technological protrusions. “Um, they look good on you.”

As Lott went on to explain the terms and conditions that she had been bound to, Glory only had one thought come to mind: ”So basically, I’m at APEX’s beck and call or else I have to adapt to life without arms. That’s… Something, alright.” Once Lott turned to her assistant to bounce how grand of an opportunity this was off of them, Glory’s head turned slightly to watch as they nodded along happily with what Lott had gone over thus far. Blinking once more as Theresa asked if she could call her Amelia, Glory gave a blunt answer. ”Eh… Glory will do fine, and… Thanks.”

The complement was somewhat lost on Glory’s addled mind, but she somewhat felt that Theresa was hitting on her? At least that’s how it started to come across. Maybe that would come up later. For now Glory looked back to Lott and cleared her throat a bit before speaking up. It didn’t help with how hoarse her voice was. ”Alright… I can’t let Salt make a sacrifice like that without making it worth it. Where do I sign?”

Lott flipped her tablet around. Glory’s legal name was already typed into the document. All the Knight had to do was check the box that confirmed she was willing to bypass an actual signature in favor of a digital one. Lott believed it was a secure enough method; someone else checking the box would’ve been committing a form of identity theft and could be prosecuted. She set the tablet down on the table and slid it over towards Glory, but Lott didn’t withdraw her hand. The other woman had a history of taking Lott’s personal devices. She’d be a wreck if she lost another.

“Once you have given your consent, Party A’s duty to Company A begins effective immediately,” said Lott. “You as well as other Knights will be expected to bolster the security detail during the debate.”

Looking down at the tablet, Glory took a few moments to breathe and blink at it. At first she tried to read over the document a bit to skim some of the important parts, but even this simple effort was rough on her still foggy mind. Just how strong had the painkillers she’d been given been? Hopefully the fog passed sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, now came time for a bit of a test. Glory began to carefully move her arms, and one could see her face harden in concentration as she struggled with the sensation of her arms seemingly teleporting rather than moving. This was probably not going to go well.

Even what felt like subtle movements still produced significant results. Slowly, Glory managed to bring her finger down on the checkbox. It flicked green, signaling that consent had been given… Then the screen cracked. A web of cracks formed above where Glory had pressed with as little pressure as she could. Immediately, Glroy’s face flushed red with embarrassment. This embarrassment quickly turned into shame and some light self loathing as Glory fully registered what had happened. Growling in frustration slightly, Glory popped off an apology promptly. ”Sorry… Not used to moving these. Every motion feels like my arm teleports rather than moves…”

Lott’s pupils narrowed until they practically disappeared, her irises pale blue screens of death. She did not blink as she stared through Glory. Visions of hand signals, shattered glass, pink mist, and traumatized interns flashed rapidly through her mind like a grotesque flipbook drawn by a desensitized middle schooler in the margins of a classic piece of literature. The band around Lott’s wrist faintly beeped as a mild sedative was injected to lower her rising heart rate. She finally blinked, her vision cleared, and she pulled the tablet back towards her chest, holding it dearly like it were a mortally wounded comrade.

Theresa’s shoulders tensed at the craaaack! of breaking glass, and her heart sank at the sight of a rupture spreading across the screen like a digital spiderweb. They were already down one device…and now this? Well, at least she was already familiar at the mobile-electronics shop… Theresa bit back an interjection, just giving her boss a supportive nod. I should offer something useful here. Think, Theresa!

“It is not a problem, Ms. Batalia. I have an extended warranty,” said Lott, knowing full well the warranty had expired months ago. She sounded out of breath. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the damage done to the screen. No offer for reimbursement? This was the kind of offense that sparked blood feuds that lasted for generations.

“Hardly noticeable,” said Lott with a choke, her words masking the sound of the screen cracking further underneath her tightening grip. Her eyes motioned towards the exit. “You will understand that I mean no offense if I do not end this meeting with a handshake.”

Glory frowned as Lott began to choke up. Blinking a few times in awkward silence as Lott began to grip the tablet firmly. In a moment of clarity she recalled that something had been managed in the time that had passed since something had been taken from Lott. Speaking up, Glory began to explain something. ”Up until now I would’ve considered this classified, but since Knight Enterprise has been acquired, this is technically knowable to the people involved here as far as I’m aware… If you go up to Knight’s HQ, ask about case number 10164. Tell them that Glory sent you, and tell them that you’ve got authorization code 70216 to retrieve object 734. Your phone was repaired, examined, and found to be irrelevant to the case. You can get it back at any time."

Theresa took a moment to appreciate her boss’s poise. The woman was clearly upset. Did her voice crack there at the end? And yet, she remained cool and professional - even cracking a small joke to lighten the tension! She was a true professional. Theresa waited for a lull in the conversation before speaking up. ”Perhaps the implants have nervous-interface settings that can be adjusted?” she said. ”They could be overreacting to your natural impulses and simply need calibration, as it were. After all, they are only prototypes, so I’m sure they are expecting them to need some fine-tuning.”

Did cybernetics actually work that way? It probably didn’t matter. The important thing was to be helpful. How the implants worked was for the engineers to worry about. At least that sounded smart. To Lott she added, ”Glory should probably get some rest if she’s working tonight, but also, she should probably get some practice in if she’s to interface with the public. I’m sure any accidents would reflect poorly on Mayor Gatch? I could probably find some, umm, mannequins or dummies or something.”

At the mention of the cybernetics not being calibrated, Glory shrugged. The motion felt awkward and Glory felt the supports that had been implanted into her shoulders twinge in pain. This was expressed with a slight grimace of pain before Glory spoke again. ”I’d very much appreciate a fat nap right about now. Along with probably another dose of anti-inflams to help with the healing… And then some time to practice with these things so I’m not casually destroying everything I try to touch. In the meantime, I’d like to power down that box of doughnuts as a comfort pick-me-up. Though I’m gonna have to enjoy the fun that is possibly destroying them when I try to pinch them, so…”

Resistant to the idea of shrugging again, Glory opted for a less-painful head-tilt-shrug.

The rest of Glory's reply clicked all at once. The phone! Theresa had assumed the device was hopelessly buried under red tape. Stupid! Of course the personal device of someone so important would be handled with extra urgency!

"M-Miss Ramana has already procured a replacement," she blurted out, thrusting the precious device into view with what she hoped appeared to be a dramatic flourish instead of a panic move.

Lott stared blankly at the smartphone. The news that Lott could receive her old phone had slightly dulled the pain in her heart over the mortal injury dealt to her second favorite device, although Glory referring to her phone as irrelevant was like spit in the eyes. The phone was proof enough that a warning was never the proper course of action for a security officer. Perhaps if Glory had registered that lesson then she wouldn’t be struggling to avoid turning her donut into a pancake now.

All of that was now irrelevant thanks to the device Theresa had flicked out like a switchblade knife. Lott attempted to recall when she had acquired the new phone. Nothing pinged in her search history; had she erased the VOD for the memory file? It seemed uncharacteristic. She would have certainly created a backup just to have a quick reference point to what was and was not covered in the extended warranty. Lott gingerly plucked the phone from Theresa’s hand. It opened to her biometrics. She saw a stack of notifications for missed calls from saved contacts and the default wallpaper of a black background with a gray squiggle. It was her phone all right, but how? Another blackout purchase? Normally those things weren’t so conventional.

She wrinkled her eyebrows and sideyed Theresa. It was a gift? Impossible. Lott looked away. She felt lightheaded. It was a gift. She wouldn’t have splurged on such a new model. She set the shattered tablet down next to her on the bench because she no longer had the strength to hold it. She safely put the phone down in front of her, fearful that touching it again would transform it into a spider because clearly she was dreaming. Her chest tightened. Of course she wasn’t dreaming, her last one was killed years ago.

Theresa had gone out of her way to buy her a phone and set it up with her profile. This intern—her intern! Without a doubt it was the nicest, most considerate thing someone had ever done for Lott in her entire life. It was absolutely exhilarating. She felt the pinprick hit her wrist again as another mild sedative entered her bloodstream. Normally she would have to force a double dosage just to keep herself functioning so coolly. She worked up the courage to grab the phone and slipped it inside of her jacket where it rested right against her heart.

Words lacked the complexity to express the feelings Lott held. They just wouldn’t be enough. She turned towards Theresa, made eye contact, and nodded once in approval. Lott was thankful she was sitting down. Her legs felt like they had been removed for defaulting on a loan. She turned towards Glory, corrected her shaky disposition with a sniff, and said with a nod towards the door, “Then unless there is anything else?”

Glory blinked a few times as Theresa thrust the new phone forward. That certainly made things a little awkward, but there wasn’t much to be done about it. As the question was posed, she paused for a moment before giving a simple reply. ”No. I don’t think so. Which means…”

With a bit of shuffling, Glory stood up. Now that she was free of the table she was able to let her arms rest a bit, and as she gently lowered them to her sides the enhanced length of them became obvious for all to see when Glory would touch her knees without issue. Shuddering slightly as she tried to get used to how moving felt, Glory glanced down at the box of donuts and posed an awkward question. ”Uh… Someone grab that for me, please? I’m kinda… Not confident in my ability to not destroy something like cardboard.”

"Oh!" In a flash, the uniformed intern stood next to the table, box in hand. Multicolored icing glistened under the fluorescent lights as Theresa slid the plastic cover over the box’s immeasurably precious cargo. "Allow me."

Lott muttered something underneath her breath and stared at the empty booth across from her. She buried the feeling of guilt brought on by wanting to have seen the box of donuts crushed like the other day’s rioters, red jelly sticking to superior cybernetics, and swept the crumbs from her own destroyed donut underneath the napkin dispenser. She waited patiently as her intern assisted Glory with the transportation of the treats. It was only when they got to the door that Lott slid down to the end of her booth and poked her head out, her eyes as glazed over as Glory’s donuts.

“One moment, Ms. Batalia,” said Lott. She stood up from the booth with her hands in her pockets and did not approach as she looked past Glory to the APEX goon guarding the door. Lott stepped to the side so that Glory blocked him from her field of view. “Coming from both the data we have collected as well as my own personal eye witness experience regarding your performance in the field I believe it would be irresponsible if I allow you to leave without saying this. Note that this conversation is off the record and any future reference to it will be marked as slander and stain your fresh company record. Still, I believe it is my duty to see that you are properly informed.”

“APEX doesn’t do warnings,” said Lott as she stared unflinchingly at Glory. She pulled a hand from her pocket and beckoned; a moment later the bell chimed as the goon opened the door for Glory. Lott turned back to the booth but then shot Glory a look over her padded suit shoulders, the neon glow of her earrings giving her skin a sickly pallor. “Welcome to the team.”

Glory paused as Lott spoke up again. Listening closely as it was explained that APEX doesn’t do warnings and that this conversation was classified. With a nod, Glory spoke up. ”Understood. And, if I might request… Please, call me Glory. I am far more used to it.”

With that, she turned to leave once more.

"Then we’ll see you in a few hours at the debate…Glory," Theresa said with a smile as she opened the door. The cool evening air rushed through the open doorway, carrying with it the scent of springtime rain and urban smog. "It’s a pity you can’t stick around, though; this donut shop actually has excellent karaoke nights.” She winked.”Sort of a campus secret."

Glory paused again as Theresa lamented that she couldn’t hang out. Glancing back briefly, she offered an understandable excuse. ”Would if I could, but when these meds wear off I’d rather be at home. Maybe some other time.” And with nothing else to say, Glory left for home.

“The Reclaim is dying ground.” The Artist knew. If anyone knew, it was her. She’d seen it before, but hadn’t quite seen the Reclaim’s descent—not the whole of it. Her friend, the former street samurai, had though.

“Why does a human so easily stake claim to it, then? For everything you have—for everything you could have—you’d give up everything for Scorched Earth.”

The Artist took a step closer to the street samurai, and sat next to her on the edge of a high rise. Two blocks away they saw the block of old factories turned to campaign suites and government offices around Central Square. It buzzed with lights and sounds. Every time the samurai let her gaze rest upon it too long, she became disoriented and started to shake, like her whole body was full of haywire cybernetics. It wasn’t. That was just how she was.

“This is your home, isn’t it?”

“Ash and Toxin.”

The Artist crossed her legs as she sat. The fiber of her cloth mask crumpled as she chuckled silently. “But it’s just the concoction your people want. You say you want what they want, right? You say you see its end…

“In cacophonous motion. In its tremors… It rings,” she paused and leaned forward so her torso was mostly over the open air, “like an Anvil against my eyes, my eardrums, my skin, my teeth…”

“Like a—”

“Death knell...”

“But you think it—”

“Entombed. Flesh beneath barbed alloys, steels, syncretes, plastics. The City’s a Golem overtop of it all. Even beyond its end, the Reclaim breathes in its tremor. And I can’t yet be sure if its artifice was the cause of it all.”

The Artist laughed again, lofting her gaze to the dancing sigils and designs that plastered across her AR glasses. The street samurai, so often described as irrevocably detached, played the Artist’s game of metaphors perfectly. “For someone so perceptive, you seem to forget a lot. What’s in front of you, you know… The steel skeleton of the reclaim is covered in a layer of its own biotic concoction. Really, your people are biohazardous… and whatever’s left of the dead, when they reach their end, will saturate your entombed city with the seeds for its new mutant iterations.”

“Sublime… Everything you say.”

The Artist would have said it the same. “But you see it—the city and what’s to come… or something.”

“You see it too, don’t you? Your art, your words… Doomsayers silk, spun from a weaver that sees fate all the same.”

The Artist stood and swiped a hand through the air, accessing an interface unseen. The samurai, she figured, saw it though. She saw—or rather felt—it all. “Maybe I see beyond this little ledge, but nothing quite like you, Cas. I speak the City into existence, mutant iterations of my own malformed imagination, but you hear it in the tremors and speak back. I manipulate with paint and mandibles, but you are just—”

“A watcher.”


“Or so it seems that way...”

The Artist’s eyes traced a street bike as it raced through the Reclaim maze-like streets without a rider. It skidded to a halt 34 storeys beneath the two of them. They shared a final glance, or rather, the Artist looked towards her friend. The samurai’s gaze hardly changed no matter the circumstances. So distant, but omnipresent.

[ℂ𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕝 𝕊𝕢𝕦𝕒𝕣𝕖]

ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖, 𝕊𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕙 ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕒𝕨𝕝
𝔸𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕝 𝟛𝕣𝕕, 𝟚𝟘𝟞𝟝 :: 𝟚𝟘:𝟘𝟘, 𝕥𝕙𝕖 ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖'𝕤 𝔽𝕚𝕟𝕒𝕝 𝔻𝕖𝕓𝕒𝕥𝕖
[𝔻𝔼𝔸𝔻 ℙℍ𝕆𝔼ℕ𝕀ℂ𝕀𝔸]

---

“Sometimes—the shit you say in front of the press makes me wonder why you haven’t blown your little alter ego’s cover by now. But I suppose you got that typical Reclaimer look,” Samsara said to his companion. Delilah couldn’t help but wonder what he meant by that.

But he was right. Sweat beading over heat rash; still shivering despite being wrapped up in his trench jacket. She didn’t say anything.

“It’s fine when you’re going around playing hacker, but this is business. You can’t keep doing it when I’m around—when Amalgamation is watching. And not in public. This campaign isn’t one of your RPGs. Makes me wonder why you still get a check from us while you spit in the face of NTP public relations… And my public relations for that matter. And you tank—” He wanted to say more—wanted to get personal—but at a time like this, he knew better. Samsara gritted his teeth, twisted away from the little quarrel and pushed one of the overweight carts towards the stage. Delilah followed him, but stayed a few paces back. He interfaced with the metal crates on a tablet and they lit up at the edges as the contents booted up. Delilah heard the things inside skitter to life.

“Makes me wonder why you do keep me around. Is it just getting lonely around here? Or are NTP and the Amalga goons stonewalling you? I can’t help but notice we ain’t got no security personnel except for your personal detail from Extropy. Where the hell is Amalgamation? Where the hell are the NTP?" Her questions came one after another, tongue flicking like a snake’s between her teeth, but she could hardly control where she started and stopped. Somehow her mouth felt numb, yet filled with sharp pangs of pain at the same time. “You need me just as much, especially now. Even with all your little droids and your tech company blood diamonds, you’re like a little cybersecurity baby.” She raised her firsts and shook them above her head. “In fact, I’m digitally beating the shit out of you in the Labyrinth right now!”

“What’d you take, Delilah?” Samsara was only half-paying attention. He answered a comms call from one of their security personnel, who was guiding another truckload of goods from Amalgamation into the suite’s derelict bay.

“Not much. Not yet.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re irritable.” Samsara stepped closer, and Delilah realized how tense she was, ever since they arrived at Central Square. She softened her shoulders. “I do need your help, especially now.”

“You didn’t answer me. Where are your corp. shill handlers? They really trust you and your droids to hand them the election with no help? You’ll get dropped as fast as Campbell, and Amalgamation won’t risk it.”

“Maybe you misjudge their reach.” Samsara ran a finger along the metal crates. “And maybe you misjudge what they’re trying to protect… The election. This event. Its outcome. Not me. And for all that, they’ve done their due diligence.”

“I need the position, for my sake, for Extropy Inc., Delilah, and they know that. It’s just orders from here. And you know that.”

The voice of Samsara’s miniscule security detail came over the tablet intercom: “Another two trucks are here. Same cargo. Finished unloading, now we’ll send ‘em back.”

“No,” Samsara cut in. “Leave one truck in the lot. I’ll take care of it.”

“All this shadowy bullshit. What sort of stage exhibition needs four dozen of these things? And where are all the trucks going? Don’t you need to cart them all back afterwards?”

“We will.” He cut her off quick this time, sighed, and repeated his words: “We will… Just get them synced up, and make sure feeds are cut off from Labyrinth countermeasures, until—... If this goes wrong, Delilah, it goes real wrong. I gotta find Gatch before he goes on.” He was already headed backstage. “And if something goes wrong, Delilah—” Samsara took one last look back, a soft gaze upon her erratic eyes before his mirrorshades went opaque. It was time for Business. “Find me. We stick together. For real. I’ll keep you alive in meatspace… So long as you don’t drop yourself first.”

---

𝕊𝕥𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕔. 𝕒𝕟𝕕...



She could feel it. Even now, the autoinjector in her hand vibrated with [𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕟𝕥] [𝕓𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘][𝕓𝕦𝕥 𝕞𝕖𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝] [𝕝𝕚𝕗𝕖]; a mind of its own. Or maybe Delilah was just trembling too much to tell the difference. Most people steered clear unless they needed it. Most netrunners who used it forgot why exactly they ever needed it. Delilah knew she needed it—now more than ever. The thought of [𝔽 ℝ 𝔸 𝔾 𝕄 𝔼 ℕ 𝕋 𝔸 𝕋 𝕀 𝕆 ℕ]—the horror it brought with it—was battled back by a feeling that hadn’t come around in a while.



On Samsara’s security feeds, she watched his detail step away from the last shipment of drones.

No waiting. No games. An ally’s fate—or legacy— could fizzle in absence or stand to remain. Delilah imagined another hacker turning a cheap pistol upon their own face, leaving quiet comms and no trace.



She yanked the cables jacked into her neck taut and stabbed the autoinjector through a spot along the cable patched with electrical tape. It’s payload melted on contact with the wires and followed the electrical current up to where her Electronic-Brain components met flesh. It bound to neuroreceptors and boiled or bubbled like that GREEN brand rock candy that leaves your mouth microbiome feeling like a pit of acid. Or maybe she just imagined it.

She didn’t feel sad, but she felt [BLUE].

Not angry, but the [RED] seeped back in.

Like she was still wearing the glasses, but in a brief and swiftly forgotten fit of convulsions, the glasses had fallen off when the first wave hit.

>>> 𝕃𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘...
>>> 𝕎𝕖𝕝𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖 𝕓𝕒𝕔𝕜 𝔽𝕝𝕦ü̶̡͎̟̬̤͔͕̙̔̆x̶̧͍̹̜̹͍͆͝ͅ ̸̞͇̫̭̝̫͚͑̉̄̾͑̑̿̒̚Ş̷̬̗̲͔̠͕͍̲̉͌̄̂̆̇̉̽̃͜͝\Ⱨ₳…!

>>> 𝕃𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕗𝕒𝕚𝕝𝕖𝕕. ℝ𝕖𝕥𝕣𝕪𝕚𝕟𝕘…

>>> 𝕃𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘...
>>> 𝕎𝕖𝕝𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖 𝕓𝕒𝕔𝕜 [𝕃𝕐𝕀ℕ𝔾 𝔼𝔽𝔽𝕀𝔾𝕐]...

[𝕊𝕃𝕀ℂ𝔼ℝ]

>>> 𝕃𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕗𝕒𝕚𝕝𝕖𝕕. ℝ𝕖𝕥𝕣𝕪𝕚𝕟𝕘…

The AMALGA Rig was whirring and she was in the Labyrinth, but she still saw the crooked table with uneven legs, half-strewn with trash in the derelict suite that Gatch gave to the NTP. Still in multicolor. Pupils still dilated. With heart still racing from all the calories she still burned while just sitting up.

Samsara’s security feed of the trucks in [BLUE]. A trembling hand clawed towards the screen.

The inside of the trucks through the [RED] lens. The autonomous droids were unpacked and waiting, but all their sharp spindly winds collapsed in on their bodies, like they were crushed into coffins too small.

And in Labyrinth, too. There, it seemed like she could see herself, but she wasn’t sure how. There were no cameras in the suites, especially in the derelict ones. No cameras faced the little crooked table, crumbling in real time. Not red or blue but ALL WHITE LIGHT. Like someone was watching her moves in cyberspace— someone there with her. At first, she thought it was the droids or Citizen K. But she was alone.

Then just the same way all her seizures started, there was a CLICK and her neck collapsed back. Dead weight, but the droids felt it too, and to them it was a spark of life.

>>>[𝕄𝕀ℕ𝔻] 𝕊𝕃𝕀ℂ𝔼𝔻 𝕊𝔼𝕍𝔼ℝ𝔼𝔻 ℂ𝕆ℕℕ𝔼ℂ𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ 𝔼𝕋. ℂ𝔼𝕋𝔼ℝ𝔸.



>>>𝔽ℝ𝔸ℂ𝕋𝕌ℝ𝔼𝔻 ℙ𝔼ℝℂ𝔼ℙ𝕋𝕀𝕆ℕ 𝕎𝕀𝕋ℍ 𝔼𝕏𝕋ℝ𝔸 𝔽ℝ𝔸𝕄𝔼𝕊 𝕆𝔽 ℝ𝔼𝔽𝔼ℝ𝔼ℕℂ𝔼

Delilah’s effigy in the white light had long since vanished. But somewhere else, the AMALGA Rig still whirred, and the Prophet Array clicked on its projectors.

>>> 𝕃𝕠𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘...
>>> 𝕎𝕖𝕝𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖 𝕓𝕒𝕔𝕜 ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕫𝕖𝕟 𝕂…

---

---

“I could never parse the monks' motivation. They seemed to mean well for the Reclaim, so I kept my campaign on friendly terms. That's it. Spend too long in that temple, or whatever it might be, and every seems to start feeling like they see something that others don't.”


ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖, 𝕊𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕙 ℂ𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕊𝕡𝕣𝕒𝕨𝕝
𝔸𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕝 𝟚𝕟𝕕, 𝟚𝟘𝟞𝟝 :: 𝕆𝕟𝕖 𝕕𝕒𝕪 𝕓𝕖𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕖 ℝ𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖 𝕕𝕖𝕓𝕒𝕥𝕖
[𝕄𝕒𝕔𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕤 𝕋𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕊𝕡𝕒𝕣𝕜] ℝ𝕖𝕤𝕠𝕝𝕧𝕚𝕟𝕘...

“Wake up ‘Angel’...”

The voice sounded almost malefic... Playful and familiar, but perhaps it was just a distortion—as though spoken through a haze of smoke. The smoke, though, gave way to the dull colors of the Medivan’s sterile walls. Two floating red globes stared back at him, and based on the visual trails still clearing from his eyes Gabe could see the thing had emerged from a little rectangular slot conveniently carved into the ambulance’s wall near the ceiling.

“Gabe.” The drone croaked through a blast of static before that black sliver of its body opened up beneath the rotors and lofted a small screen in front of Gabriel. The sinewy form of a familiar stick-like torso filled up the display. His pale torso was unmarked by metal or medicinal intervention, but his visage was covered by a mask with cylindrical red eyes above a protruding beak. Insect had the mask custom built to mimic some old medical motif, a symbol for doctors of that Insect would tell rich stories about to Gabe during their days together under lab lamplight. Even his drone looked a bit like the mask, with the screen pushed forth from within an avian beak. In the Reclaim, it was ubiquitous as a sign of the ripper doc’s reach, recognized only by those seeking his black clinic.

“Gabe,” he said, then paused for a long moment, staring through the blurry display at his friend. “You should take a day off...”

“I don’t have time, man...” Gabe muttered, barely conscious.

Insect waved a hand through the air to disregard the sentiment. He leaned forward, pressed his elbows hard against a reflective metal table. “Looked into the Dust you sent me. Compared it to some stuff on the street. Got it from a guy. Same sort of shit—told me it came from space or something. Void Dust” He stretched his limbs and contorted his torso like he was wringing a towel. With each offhanded flex, the muscles and tendons looked like steel cords beneath his skin, even despite his stick-like, gaunt build. “Thing is, Gabe,”

“The two samples are completely different. I mean, they’re the same thing at the core, but your plug’s is cut with something.” Another long pause. Insect stared directly into the Medivan, like he was there, just beyond Gabriel’s periphery. Like he could hear the uneven, labored breaths of the dosed doctor. “You alone?” Insect asked, but he already knew. Insect turned to his side, mask lit up by a display out of the drone’s view. Then he started to fade from the feed, and a video came to replace him.

The video showed an amalgamation of cybernetics and gelatinous molds that seemed to mimic flesh, nerves, and tissue around an old E-Brain implant. Gabriel could have sworn he’d caught a glimpse of it moving. Insect injected an IV into the crude simulacrum—Stella’s Dust—then zoomed the lens in on the video, focusing down on a specific cable jacked into the E-Brain that branched out into the mold. The cable shimmered, like rippling water more than metal alloy. The video cut off and Insect’s red eyes reappeared on the feed.

“And maybe it’s not showing up on a microscope slide.” He drummed his hands on the table, clattering a beat to occupy space while he thought, then deviously steepled his hands together. “You still got that blood filter? Can you simulate a circulatory—”

But he cut himself off, shook his head. He righted his crooked, hunched spine and it caused him to smack his head into a swaying lamp. “You know what? Keep cool around your spacemen friends, Gabe. Maybe you want to know what’s going on in their heads, but keep cool.”

Gabriel laid on the floor, wondering if the drone which had appeared before him was merely a hallucination caused by the synthetic drug, or a real corporeal thing. When he finally worked up the presence of mind to respond, he pushed himself up off the ground and said: “... Fuck, okay, so my sample was cut with something else? That explains why I was having a tough time with the formula. But I didn’t get this from a dealer, I got it from an addict looking for an alternative.” Gabriel stood up and began fiddling with the aforementioned blood filtering device. While its purpose was more diagnostic than anything, it could be used to analyze the contents of alien bloodborne substances, including drugs. Gabriel bent down, removed a vial of pre-filtered blood from his miniature fridge, and using his free hand added a very small pinch of the sample that Stella had given him. “Maybe something in the compound I dismissed as an ‘impurity’ is only active while bloodborne. I’ll see if the filter can detect it.” Using the touchscreen on the futuristic device, Gabriel began to isolate the antibodies and chemicals in the plasma, until he had a rough idea of the substances in question.

As soon as Gabriel deposited the dust sample into the vial, his eyes saw a shimmering of their own within the blood. It looked like a web of sparks, but so small; so fragmented, it could hardly be discerned from floaters in the eye of any onlooker. The sample was, at first, about as expected. The machine would return readouts corresponding with Gabriel’s selected blood type, though it detected no foreign substances aside from metal alloys, trace offworld rocks and minerals, and a laundry list of psychoactive compounds—most of which matched Gabriel’s homebrew. Nonetheless, the results were distorted. The expected antibodies were gone one second, replaced with newly synthesized blood proteins, then the sample read clean again. The process repeated, like the machine itself was reading more than one sample from the same vial.

“This shit is almost supernatural,” Gabe mused, “no wonder I can’t replicate it...”

Gabe’s focus on his work was snatched away by a cacophony from the drone’s speakers. It sounded like a vacuum or the drone’s rotors themselves amplified. On screen, Insect pressed a glass flask to the seal of his mask and the flask’s solution started to disappear into the beak. Insect cleared his throat beneath the metal visage. “But Gabriel… You ‘pilgrimaging’ with the monks tomorrow? The debate, or something… Dao definitely appreciates your help, so I figured he might want you around.”

“You know they’re bound to have that guy souped up with new wetware if any of the monks actually care about what he’ll say out there. You should try and get a scan on his augs. We can see what he’s got plugged in. Maybe even tune him up once we see what we’re working with. Of course, that’s up to you, as an official patron of the shrine, or what have you.”

Gabe nodded at this suggestion. “I know what he’s packing already, more-or-less. Some of the stuff in his arms I actually made myself. If he’s gotten more plugins lately, I’m not aware of it.” He paused. “Why do you care what implants the guy has? It doesn’t impact anyone else one way or another.”

“Don’t know why it’s on my mind,” Insect said through a brief, splintering static on the screen. “Dao’s a good guy. Was a good friend for a short stint. Maybe I just figured the dude’s got more impact in the Reclaim than people think. Running Baolei and other clinic operations… With no Black Clinic fees. You think he’s enlightened or there’s something more to it all?”

Gabriel thought amidst the silence. Insect had a point, and Gabriel had heard rumours of his connections to Gaea Naturae. If the mysterious biotech company were distributing anything particularly new and shiny, Dao would be among the first to get it.

Insect paused for too long, and Gabriel’s vision wavered again, like the static from Insect’s drone rippled out into the MediVan. The return of the Ripper Doc’s voice only seemed to amplify the distortion, if only for a moment: “Just might be something worth looking into. If he’s got new ice, maybe you’ll notice. Maybe there’s schematics around the place somewhere. Or maybe you could scan him yourself if you’re clever enough. You think he’d mind?”

“Oh, and I’ll keep in touch about your little addiction project as well. I’m sure I can dig something up, friend.” Insect’s face faded away, and the screen retracted back into the drone which promptly fell to the floor as its rotors followed suit. The thing scuttled like a spider across the van and scaled the wall until it popped back into the slot next to the ceiling. In an instant, it looked like it had vanished altogether, or become part of the van. Gabriel couldn’t quite be so sure. The ripples intensified, then he heard a pounding from the back of the van.

“Fucking hell,” Gabriel muttered. He hated the cryptic manner in which Insect spoke, but odd as he was, he was one of Gabe’s most useful informants. Gabriel would follow through with the scan, but there was no way in hell that he’d divulge the results to Insect without some sort of incentive. As the effects of the drug began to wear off, finally, Gabriel turned around to answer the knocking at the door. “Yeah... yeah I’ll be there in a sec. Fuck. Wow. Just... gimme a bit.”


“Of course. All are welcome to gaze upon the operation, take part in our practice, and lend aid to the destitute of the Reclaim Zone. Allow me to introduce you to someone who may be able to better direct your inquiries, miss…”

"S'venia," she started as she looked over the monk in front of her. Her eyes flashed over the robes, the metallics of his body, and his face. Scanning the machine's intricate nature, S'venia could only describe the monk's look in a singular word; creepy. She found it weird how no matter which monk she encountered, that word was the only one ready on the tip of her tongue. She was sure one of these days she would meet a normal monk like the old told stories. Dressed in black, with a weird white-collar, that liked to preach about a man in the sky. She would not feel safe next to that type of monk either, but at least they were more upfront with their affronts. "S'venia Skor, but you can call me S've-.."

“Welcome to Baolei Clinic, Reclaim outpost of the Mekanedo Monastic Order,” another monk interrupted. This monk looked more threatening than the last. More corporate even. "Oh no," S'venia thought as she looked over the woman as the new monk began to walk back through the doors, "monk human resources."

“You’re welcome to examine our operation yourself, and while the other monks may be busy taking care of those in need, I believe I could answer any questions you might have.” Dharma said.

"Thank you so much," S'venia responded as she flashed her smile. "I hope you don't mind," S'venia spoke as she tapped the control panel, turning her eye red. S'venia then unwrapped her computer and typed a quick command to her camera drone, sending it out to capture videos of those receiving care. She shifted her focus back to the human resource augmented monk and flashed another smile. "My name is S'venia, reporting for the South City Blues. This disaster that has befallen our city is unfortunate, regrettable, and devastating for those genuinely in need. I am not here to figure out what got us to this point," she paused as she flashed her arm across her body in an attempt to draw a line. "But I am here to show the people what good the Mekanedo Monastic Order is doing," S'venia paused as she did a quick spin around as she followed the monk further into the compound. "These people need help, and your order is providing it," S'venia started as she shifted her focus back to the monk. "I hope to help my viewers understand in simple terms what exactly your order does to help ease the pain of our fellow citizens," she paused as she smiled another 'genuine' smile.

Turning the drone's camera towards her face, S'venia paused it’s movement as she focused her attention on a figure in the background. With a twist of her wrist, the camera extended its neck out of its shell and focused. There was an individual here that she knew. How did she know this geriatric looking, clean clothes missing, old looking geezer and how was his face so remembered. And then it hit, it was Methuselah. It was the old man himself, S’vei long forgot his actual name and had since relied on that ‘old’ nickname she had created for her fellow believer in Dex. What was he doing here? She left that question lingering for a second as the drone camera lingered on the aged face before it hit her. He was augmented.

Through the change in his facial expression, she could see that he also saw her, but the look on his face was confusing. It was not the confused look that perplexed her, he was old, and his memory was probably fading. No, this look was much more concerning. It was like he saw a ghost.

“So,” S’venia started as she shifted the drone back towards the corporate monk, “can you tell me how your group has handled the influx of patients in such a short time?”

As the monk started to answer, their head would shift from side to side before turning its attention to one of the many instances of the ‘helping the people mantra’ they recently adopted. S’venia, noticed the lack of awareness, shifted her focus towards the relic and attempted to wave and send one of her trademark smiles. The sight of the monks’ head-turning their attention back around forced her back to her job.

“That seems like a challenge that you were not expecting. Have others offered their support to help?”

“The Mekanedo Monastic Order primarily works alone, but other HyperHuman Monks from around the coast help, as do the people of the Reclaim of course.”

As S’venia finished the statement, she tapped an icon on her screen, and her drone locked its focus on her old “compatriot”. The drone’s lens latched onto the face of the older man. “What has life brought on you,” she thought quietly to herself.

---

Darts missed the board left and right. Everytime Proctor reeled in the line, the hook was empty. His feet were locked in place, his mind being wrought in vain attempts to form some connection or fish some semblance of a memory out of the fog. The feeling of seeing a violet blur rush around the room, accompanied by her orbish camera imp, was so familiar it made him sick to his stomach. Between the two of them sat so many other empty husks of men and monks tending to them that to try and run across the room felt impossible, but the smile and wave told him he had been noticed too.

”So she does remember something.”

Something resembling jubilation fluttered up from his stomach, as if a small lantern had finally been lit within the fog. Before he waved back, she turned back to the tour guide that led her across the room, but he kept his hand up, ready and eager to return the attention as soon as her gaze returned to him.

A deep whirring in his ears told him his heart was beginning to beat with a pace that it hadn’t matched in a long time, and the cyborg would’ve been woozy on his feet had he not learned to master his palpitations long ago. Still though, control had decayed over time, and his heart continued to whir something fierce. His stance widened to maintain balance, thanks to his knee finally listening to what his brain said after the repair. Surely to everyone around him he looked like a mad man, and few monks threw him glances that said as much. He hadn’t noticed, as his sights were still set on the violet blur across the room.

---

“A curious development,” S’venia thought to herself as she focused in on the corporate monk ahead of her. “If you can say, what are some of the biggest challenges that your order has overcome to this point?” S’venia finished and listened to the response. Once again, the monk started off their response and eventually pointed towards an area. Using the timing, S’venia turned her attention and locked her eyes with the older man. She flashed him a big smile and a short wave before she turned her attention back to the monk. “I thank you for answering my questions today,” S’venia started as she tapped a button on her computer, “if you don’t mind, I will take a look at your operations, take some stills and video, and I should be out of your hairs before long.” S’venia smiled and waved and turned her attention back around towards the lost soul.

Dharma’s smile seemed to grow even wider as S’venia’s questions came. She resided exactly where she’d prepared to be. Perhaps that was why Dao was so fond of her running front-end operations like this. She spoke:

“Back when America was a fledgling state, its people turned against one another formally—to fight en masse in order to settle disputes. Before bombs and bots and lasers and smart weapons and psyops, there was a man who volunteered in the field hospitals. Before medical science and biomedical technology were even named—he was The Wound Dresser. He wrote famous poems of what he saw, but dressing wounds was hardly enough. Most of his work, then, became not to dress wounds but to act as a chaplain—administer rites and offer comfort in the last moments to the mutilated, shellshocked, living dead.” Dharma paused and took a silent, breath, but S’venia nonetheless felt a sliver of cold air pass across her skin.

“What will you do when the Reclaim hemorrhages blood and severed limbs, crying for help and ridden with infection? What will we do?” Dharma’s eyes drifted, and dissociated into a distant nothingness.

The repeated acknowledgement drove Proctor forward, the restored mobility of his legs a welcome feeling. He began to weave his way across the room, not trying to draw too much attention as he made a bee line across the room.

“Is he,” S’venia thought to herself as she spotted the old man meandering his way across the room, “I think he is,” S’venia completed the thought. A large smile crossed her face, and she shot the man another wave.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Dharma said, and walked off. Despite the metallic sheen to her legs, she had no footsteps.

A few of the metal husks on mats began to protest as Proctor roughly strode past them, a few unintentional connections between his legs and their backs. Unwanted gazes began to scan the old man as he caused a sort of ruckus in an already chaotic room. He slowed his pace and with a sheepish grin motioned for the S’venia to come to his mat as he slowly retraced his steps back to his resting place. He sat crossing his legs as tightly as possible to leave room on his map for his old friend.



As S’venia squeezed in place to share his mat, Proctor scooted back bit by bit to give her as much room as they could get between the two suffering robots flanking them. He heaved an anxious sigh, and looked deep into S’venia’s eyes.

“Okay, so you’re S’venia. Could you, er, remind me who you are again, please?”

S’venia stared at the older man before her as a breath escaped her lips. He had forgotten who she was. While it was true that the two were never extremely close on the campaign trail, S’venia was still taken aback by how quickly he had forgotten her. For her, it wasn’t all that long ago. She thought of the many interactions they, as a team, had. She remembered back to the many nights they all stayed up trying to plan an election. The many days spent working together. It had not been long for her, but it may as well have been a lifetime for him. Her eyes shifted to the ground as she pondered the request. How can you help someone remember when they are gone? More so, how can you introduce yourself to an old friend when you don’t know who you are? S’venia’s eyes lingered on the mat for a brief moment before they slowly rose back up, locking in place with Proctors, and a small smile spread across her face.

“I am the journalist,” S’venia spoke as she shifted her focus down to her wrapped-up computer. Unfurling it in a quick motion, S’venia waited for it to power on as she kept Proctor in her peripheral vision. “There was a time when we worked together. We tried to elect a good man to be the mayor of this district, Dexter.” S’venia paused as she looked back at her companion. “Do you remember the campaign or Dexter,” she asked as she pressed a few buttons on her computer. Various pictures floated into view on the screen, and she shifted her position so that Proctor could look at it. She flicked through the photos at a pace that was almost impossible to track. Eventually, she pulled her hand off the screen and pointed down towards it.

“There you are,” S’venia smiled as she spoke. “You’re in the background in a lot of these photos,” S’venia continued as she swiped on the screen again. “Here you are with Dex,” S’venia paused as she let the image sit for a moment, “and here we all are in a group photo.” S’venia shifted her focus back to the elder beside her.

“Do you remember any of that?”

Proctor’s own eyes looked back at him from the screen down in S’venia’s lap, his own gaze as strange as the rest of the group. Some faces he recognized, yet couldn’t name or recall the stories of. It was reminiscent of all the times he had looked over embarrassing photos after a night of barcrawling. These memories were missed. He wanted them back like nothing else.

“Dexter Campbell.” His index finger hovered over the visage of the mayoral candidate, smiling amongst the colorful cast of outcasts and rejects that had been running his campaign. “I owe him. Just let me find the bastards that killed him so I can repay them in kind, and maybe then I can finally rest these weary old bones.”

Proctor’s eyes shifted over to the blue eyes to the left, S’venia standing prim and proper with a large, charismatic smile on her face. The version of her that sat in front of him looked hardly different. Perhaps a mite less energetic with slightly darker circles around her eyes. She still exuded a sunniness uncharacteristic to the Reclaim. It stirred something reminiscent of comfort in him, knowing that someone else that had shared the ill-fated campaign as him hadn’t allowed the relentless destruction surrounding them to drag her down to the depths of despair that Proctor had come to know all too well.

“Do you know anything? About what happened to Dexter, I mean.” His perplexed gaze returned to S’venia’s.

“I know more about what I don’t know,” S’venia started as she flicked through a few more photos on her computer. ‘Do I know anything,’ S’venia thought to herself as the smile began to fade. S’venia knew the monster that assaulted the debate was unlike anything else unleashed on the Reclaim. It was fast, adaptable, and it was a ghost. There were never any leads she could find, no sources to track down, and she was no further along locating it today than she was on the day of the attack. What would she do if she was able to find it? Would she confront it in a dark alleyway as it returned home from the bar? Would she send an anonymous tip to the Enforcers? No.

S’venia’s eyes drifted back down to the tablet below. She paused the swiping for a second, her hand hovering just an inch above the screen. S’venia knew if she found the one responsible for the attack on the debate stage, it would not be her actual target. The world saw the beast for what it was, S’venia wanted to find its Frankenstein.

“I tried to track down any information I could, Proc,” S’venia started as her smile returned faintly. “I checked under every nook and cranny, offered up a substantial reward for just the smallest crumb of information.” S’venia paused as she allowed her hand to return to the screen. In an instant a code was typed, prompting a hidden folder to open up. Proctor would see many thumbnails with many interesting names. In a fast tap, S’venia opened the one titled “The Truth About the Dark”, and a slideshow of pictures began to play. The subject would be a familiar, if not terrifying, look at the assassin.

“When the assassin was on the debate stage, I did what I could to stop it from killing anyone else,” she paused as she exhaled sharply, “all I got for it was these photos.” S’venia paused as she allowed her smile to return more to full. She knew she had gotten more than any other reporter there that day. As they all ran for cover, as they all hid from the fight developing around, S’venia managed to do something. She managed to save someone. At least that is what she told herself. Sure, it may have been the corrupt Gatch. Sure, that may have ended up causing more harm to the district than the good that she did.

“I’ll tell you what, if I ever locate whoever was behind that attack we can go after them together.” S’venia nudged the shoulder of Proctor with her own. With a few taps, she closed out of the slideshow and closed the folder it originated from. She swiped for a second, eventually resting on a group photo once again. “Maybe that righteous firefight is what your old bones need, Methuselah.”

Proctor attempted in vain to absorb all the various details of the assassin. The wall of fog in his brain would surely deny him any later recollection, despite his best effort. He finally broke his long glare at the screen to lock eyes with S’venia.

”You help me get ahold of a few doses of Neurosynth, you’ll have your own personal Watson. Without that, I’ll be just as useless in the gunfight as I am now.” His gaze returned to the screen as he continued to talk. “I mean, look at me. The time since the campaign has not been kind to me. Some days I can’t even remember my own name. The only thing I remembered about you was your name! It’s all so….far away from me. Like I have to grasp at straws to remember what city I’m even in. I’m in no shape for a fight” His eyes fell to the exposed piston which had been freshly installed in his leg.

“Say less, Methuselah.”

---

Perhaps it was a trick of his mind; perhaps remnants of a visit to Limbo were reflected in splotches and specks of color crossing Gabriel’s myopic gaze.

“Just bring the aug scanner with you, Angel. Just in case...” Insect’s voice echoed back. Gabriel couldn’t be sure it was in his head—fading away with the last remnants of visual trails as his eyes adjusted to the Reclaim streets—or if that spider-like drone still lurked somewhere nearby.

... but why does he need it? the doctor wondered. He tried to think of the reason for Insect’s insistence.

“Doctor Gabriel,” Dharma called him. She had a habit of doing that despite his rather unofficial post at the clinic. A lot of the monks had similarly obscure backgrounds—some schooling, some certifications, but mostly they knew their way around man and machine from tradework in the clinics. Dharma was like that too, or at least, that’s what most assumed when Gabriel asked around. Dao hired her on, welcomed her into the fold and she quickly integrated, but she had no other references.

She greeted him at the doorway and gestured within. Her movements were like waves. First the flow, then the crash. Graceful, then abrupt. “Lots of new patients—and visitors. Some of your type maybe. Grinders with heavy mods, but not monks; classic Reclaim types; even a reporter today, so maybe keep an eye out. Oh, and some girl off the wire came and crashed her way into the dojo downstairs, I think.” Dharma smiled, but her stonework gaze went past Gabriel. Her optics tremored like they were refocusing or pouring over an over-stimuli unseen outside of her AR.

Gabriel cracked his fingers and glanced around at the cavalcade of patients. “Alright, let’s cut into some people,” he joked, “what types of augs are they packing?” He pulled out his augmentation scanner.

A man stepped through the vagrants outside, scarcely acknowledging them. Combat boots too new for a run-of-the-mill Reclaimer, suspenders and a black polymer jacket to match, but it wasn’t rough-make recycled polymer. It was fresh, albeit scuffed up just enough to conceal a weave beneath. Off-duty kevlar.

“And he’s got a strap,” Dharma said under her breath, more to herself then to Gabriel, but she looked at the doc afterwards. “Anything specific on your agenda today? Just let me know if you need some help or need to find anything. Or you can always play my sidekick for the day.” She smiled at her own banter, perhaps to draw attention away from her continued scans.

“I’m nobody’s sidekick,” Gabriel retorted, a sly smirk spreading across his face, “though if I had to pick someone to play lackey for, it’d definitely be you.” Gabriel adjusted the Red Cross satchel on his hip and nodded. “Just the usual; give me whatever patient is worst-off and I’ll do my best. I’ve got enough spare parts in my van from last month to fix damn near anything.” It is unclear whether he was talking about mechanical or... organic parts.

The newcomer ran a hand along his jacket, to smooth out creases made by the bulk beneath. His eyes flashed past the monks and their charges like they were pipework in the background of the Reclaim streets, but as he passed Howland, almost bumping into the psychiatrist, he smiled and bowed his head. Perhaps it was because he recognized Howland, too, was observing. Howland, too, could see his friends—same style black jackets, freshly scuffed polymer, moving tightly together. A small team of them circled the clinic while another posted themselves near an alley access door.

“Smog’s got the sky darker, even in the evening, doesn’t it seem?” The lone jacket spoke to Howland, as though he thought he’d picked the right time, place, or target for small talk. He gave another friendly smile and started towards the doorway, but looked back. “Got business with the monks or just here for the spectacle?”

”Call it a professional interest,” Howland replied, without looking at the unwanted interrogator. He’d abandoned the electric-green Reclaim-punk disguise and approached the clinic from another angle; having rejected targeting the clinic directly, there was no need to hide any personal presence. Perhaps the monks would be less guarded towards a medical practitioner.

“Is that...?” Gabriel muttered to himself, squinting at a figure across the room, “Howland?” The doctor smiled, waving a hand to beckon the other doctor over. “Howland! What are you doing here?” He seemed genuinely happy to see the man, despite the direness of the circumstances and the mounting injuries which surrounded
them. Gabriel had seen too much blood in his life to be phased by it.

Howland turned at the more recognizable voice, bringing forward a disarming smile. “Gabriel!” The doctor provided a good excuse to put some distance between himself and the black jacket, so Howland walked towards him. ”I came to see if I could help - but with things turning violent, I thought it prudent to avoid getting myself hurt in the process.”

Gabriel nodded. “Not a bad move. I’m glad I picked a less violent lifestyle,” he continued, “Though I still spend a lot of time dealing with blood.”

”Can’t say I don’t miss my office right about now,” Howland said with a wry grin. But his expression didn’t last, and his tone turned serious. ”How can I help?”

Gabriel nodded. “How’re you with surgery? I’m sure lots of folks around here need it.”

Howland shook his head firmly. ”I can render first aid, but I’m not a surgeon. I’ll leave the cutting to you, but I’ll lend my support.”

“There’s always someone looking for your assistance if it’s there. Are you a friend of Gabriel’s?” Dharma said to Howland as she approached the pair and tapped Gabriel on the shoulder. “And in terms of your work, it seems we’ve got a few candidates that need more than your spare parts. This could be a good place to start, your friend can join us.”

“The one with the reporter— She gestured towards Proctor. “Full set of deteriorated limbs. He’s some old merc type. APEX Furytech limbs and plenty of tin on the inside, too. Usually his type gets by, but it seems like Neurosynth deficiency.” Dharma paused and took a few steps towards Proctor and S’venia. She raised one of her prostheses to wave Proctor over. When her arm moved, it was like liquid in the air, then straight back to a solid foundation though still subtly swinging with the resonance of harp string. Proctor saw the flash of her matte-black industrial limbs in his peripheral—a single hypnotic pattern, just distinct enough to be recognized as something other than visual aberration.

“Symptomatic dementia from… deficiency. No Neurosynth.” She hesitated over mentioning the drug at all. “Got SPECS. At least I think so. Probably wouldn’t go so well if we really started opening him up Ship of Theseus style.”

The sound of a small blast came up from the tatami beneath them. Dharma smiled, though hardly acknowledged the sound as she approached Proctor and S’venia. The man in the black jacket had entered the temple once Dharma had left its entryway. He went straight through the crowded room of mats and descended a staircase in the back. A series of soft orange lights flickered around a ring that carried the sequence around the temple’s interior walls. Dharma eyed it as it passed.

“Good to see you’re already back on your feet. Did what I could with your Striders,” she said to Proctor. “How are the rest of your augs? How’s your head?” Dharma, like the rest of the monks, sometimes had the habit of being circuitous in their verbal diagnostics.

“... Good fucking Lord,” Gabriel mused. Both his eyes and his bio scanners told him that this individual’s body was dying already. “Alright, can we get this guy on a bed? I’m gonna need some... everything...” the doctor trailed off, muttering to himself as he began to gather his tools and augment parts from around the clinic. He came back with what looked like a bin of scrap metal, but upon closer examination contained various spare parts that Gabriel had salvaged from augs over the years, most of which had small modifications and modernizations made to them. Anyone wondering what the doctor was working on in his van for so many hours every day now had their answer. “Hey buddy,” Gabe addressed Proctor directly, “how many neural implants do you have?”

“I’ve got alternatives to Neurosynth we can use in an emergency, but all the knockoffs I’ve made are toxic in more than the lowest doses,” Gabriel admitted, “And this guy looks like he’d need a lot.”

A few moments elapsed. Proctor’s jaw sat slightly agape, eyes shifting back and forth from the various silhouettes that had approached him and S’venia and interrupted his visit to the past. Mouth shut and brows raised as he began to consider the litany of questions sent his way. He tried his best to ignore the shadows. Deep, pure black figures that stood amongst the crowd around them. They all stared at Proctor, even in spite of the absence of eyes. They hadn’t been there before. Their odious presence was all Proctor could focus on now. It took a moment, but his wandering gaze returned to Dharma standing in front of him.

”My head?” A chuckle, meek and unsure, escaped his lips. ”Foggy. Like usual. The legs feel much better, thanks for that, but… Not much to speak of when it comes to the head. Everything else feels alright, about as old and creaky as usual”

Another voice cut in after the monk’s but it wasn’t immediately audible. Proctor’s attention had again been pulled away from those who stood in front of him, and towards the others that had shifted forward. Dark shadows had closed ranks around him. Proctor knew there was no way they could be corporeal beings, but that didn’t stop an intense dread from crawling its way up and down his spine.

His eyes shot forward again.

”Neural implants?”His brow furrowed.”I’m… not really sure. I think this is the only one.”

He raised a hand which had begun to subtly shake, he hoped they wouldn’t notice, and tapped the large metal plate that encompassed most of the back and sides of his head.

”Certainly don’t do shit for memory, that’s definite.”

Proctor peered down at the box full of spare parts, raising an eyebrow.

”You a mechanic or something? You don’t exactly look like a monk.” His voice sounded more distrustful than curious.

“Better than a monk,” Gabriel replied cockily, “I’m a doctor. Got a medical license and everything.” The doctor began to dig around in his bin, pulling out what appeared to be a robotic elbow joint. “Alright, so in layperson’s terms, SPECS typically hits in cases where someone’s augments don’t line up with what the brain wants to happen. The brain is highly adaptable, but not so adaptable that it can deal with a bunch of contradictory signals at once.”

Gabriel continues: “Most of your augments, from a purely mechanical and practical perspective, are working just fine--although they could definitely use a tune-up. Much like a computer, an old aug can still perform its basic functions, even though it might slow down a bit with age. The issue is, the brain doesn’t change at the same rate as an old machine.”

“The issue here is that these old augs don’t do a particularly good job accounting for subtle, almost-imperceptible decreases in performance overtime. Both the brain and machines change with age. A car or a computer slowing down a bit is fine, but when working with the human brain, that shit has to be EXACT. When augs started coming out, we didn’t fully understand the effect these had on the brain. Newer augs have some of that buffer built into them, which is why I’m about to replace your shoulders and elbows with something a bit more responsive.”

Proctor’s face curled into something skepticism and confusion.

”Uhm. That sounds nice and all but what about some ‘synth? The hands and feet work fine, it’s just this…” A sharp, frustrated inhale ”...damn fog! One day I can’t remember where I live, others I can’t remember my own fucking name. The street shit only does so much.”

Proctor gestured towards the disembodied elbow.

”Maybe that’ll help the stiffness, but I need something more than just that.”

S’venia backed up slightly as the doctor started his assessment. She kept herself close to be a familiar face to Proctor, at least for the time being. Howland backed up and stood next to her. Visible only to Proctor, just for a moment amidst the incorporeal shades around them, Howland’s clinical, detached look held something else in it. Not quite sympathy. Pity. A moment later, Howland’s face was once more a mask of clinical concern. “This isn’t exactly a sterile operating theater,” he said to S’venia, under his breath.

The doctor frankly looked irritated. “First and foremost, my work isn’t ‘street shit’. I worked with Gaea Naturae on their biomechanical interfaces, and I’ve seen this EXACT problem about a hundred times. Secondly, Synth is a great short-term solution, and can be used to treat SPECS with a proper supply,” Gabriel replied matter-of-factly, “But the more dissonance you have between what your brain says and what your augs say back to them, the worse your SPECS is gonna get.” He sighed, trying his best to explain as best he could to the poor old man. “If we just give you ‘synth and send you on your way, that’ll only slow down the progression of SPECS in the short term. If you let me operate on you, I might be able to slow it down permanently. That shaking in your hands? That’s the sign of a battle going on between the parts of you that are flesh, and the parts that are mechanical. We need to make them get along.”

“I can’t operate without informed consent, though,” Gabriel adds, “And I can do way, way more for you if you let me open your neural implant so I can re-synchronize your augs. What do you say?” Despite his coldness, Gabriel was entirely sincere.

“That voice” S’venia thought as she froze in place. That voice was one she has heard before. It was familiar if a bit unknown. She fell into a memory pit as she thought over who it belonged to. Dashing between thoughts of the explosion at the square, and the moments prior, she came to the realization. ”The enigma, or the curiosity?” She paused the thought as her head slowly shifted to take in the frame of the man beside her. “Ahh,” S’venia whispered under her breath as she shifted her focus back towards Proctor. “Indeed, but given the circumstances I don’t imagine we could find much better for Methuselah right now.” S’venia paused as she unwrapped her computer again.

In a furious motion a command was entered and her drone turned its focus towards the pair. It hovered upwards a small distance before it settled in, and focused its lens on the pair. “I don’t think we have met Dr. Parker Howland.” S’venia slid her glasses over her face as she turned and faced him.

“I’m S’vei, reporting on this ongoing tragedy, pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she finished as she shot out one hand towards the doctor while she pointed with her other at her drone. He was a curiosity, an aberration even, and S’venia’s own curiosity outweighed her fear of discovery. As well, his presence alone would be worth a few thousand interactions alone on a story.

”Parker; it’s a pleasure as well, S’vei,” Howland replied. A smile flashed across his face just long enough to be polite before dropping; the circumstances hardly warranted an expression of happiness otherwise. ”Although the circumstances could be better. I came here to help, but emergency neurosurgery is a bit beyond my skillset I’m afraid.”

“I understand that,” S’venia paused. “I came here to show the good work that the clinic performs as the Reclaim sinks under her own weight, but all it takes is one look beyond the gates here to see that there isn’t enough room on this lifeboat to save all who drown.” S’venia typed a command to her drone, causing it to pan across the crowd. As it did, she spotted a fresh deviant in the form of a black jacket. Interesting. What would bring an undercover to these parts?

“I will do what I can,” S’venia continued as she turned towards Proctor. “While emergency neurosurgery is out of reach for the both of us, I am sure we both have skills that can help. Mine is to remind the people that there is still enough hope to cling onto to stay afloat for now,” she paused as she shifted her focus down towards Proctor, “or to help remind one person who they are.” As she finished speaking she watched the undercover man cross the clinic with a curious intent.

“You’re in good hands,” Dharma said to Proctor as her eyes followed the man in the black jacket disappear from view. Once he’d descended the stairwell, four others with unmarked gear entered the clinic and headed after him. Dharma started moving after them, hardly turning from the group of patrons as she did, though her eyes were tracer-like, honed on her mark. There were glowing crescents like waning moons, and the shapes rotated in her amber irises as she briefly locked eyes with S’venia, reacting to a stimulus or perhaps PROCing a scan based on some internal parameters. She disappeared down the stairwell.

An array of voices, whispers. Some real, some imagined. Proctor’s confusion was mounting. Between the barely audible murmurs between his old friend and a strange face that barely stood out from the shadows, or the jargon being flung his way by the doctor he was clearly annoying, his head was beginning to pound. The metallic angel spoke up, parting the avalanche for a moment.

Her reassurement settled him a bit, but the doctor’s words drew his attention back down to his hands, which continued with a slight tremor.

When did this shit start?

When his eyes met Gabriel’s again, there was little in the way of confidence to be seen. It was obvious he was frustrated and scared, almost in the same way a child in a strange place. What was there to be frightened of?

A strange place? Strange people?

There was no such thing as familiarity for Proctor anymore.

”Fine. Let’s do this ‘operation’ then. What have I got to lose?”

S’venia’s concentration on the undercover enforcer, and the others that followed, was soon broken by the stunning stare of Dharma. S’venia immediately shifted the focus of her drone on a random patient at the clinic. Was there more behind those curious crescents than what met her eyes? Or would this be just another example of how wondrous some augmentations were? S’venia pondered the thought until the Dharma was well down the stairs.

“Curious development. Enforcers at the clinic,” she spoke softly but audibly. “I wonder why they masked their presence from the crowds outside.” A curious development that churned the waters. The enforcers never appeared somewhere without cause, S’venia knew this all too well. Whether this cause was just or not was made more clear by their apparent desire to blend in. They had something to hide. And when enforcers had something to hide, they had a story to tell. And S’venia knew she wanted to be the one who spoke their Truth to the world.

With a quick wave, S’venia turned around and started to look for a way down that would not draw attention to herself.

---

𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕨𝕙𝕠 𝕔𝕒𝕞𝕖 𝕓𝕖𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕖, she imagined.
𝕞𝕦𝕤𝕥 𝕙𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕝𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕕 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕤.
𝔻𝕚𝕤𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕟𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕖𝕕.





The reason’s faded, but she knows it will ℙℍ𝔸𝕊𝔼 back in. Everything does. Pushing through the cloaked baldies and their homies was experienced more in still frames patched together with searing glares from bright lights blurring her sight.

The next she remembered, the studio was 𝔸𝕃𝕃 𝔼𝕐𝔼𝕊, all around her. Delilah stood center stage and the human-machine ophanim half-surrounded ehr. In front of her was Shade. Through all the haze and hot, piping proselytism, she’d found him. Somehow. Like always. Because she was a fucking operator. Unconcerned. Unhinged. Periodically punctuating declarations with punches. Heart palpitations made her jump and jet torrents of flames and leaking coolant, spitting sparks from loose wires in the web of her AMALGA Deck and breathing in the fumes from its hot connection ports half-jammed with cement dust and particulate rubble.



The shaman, for a second, was forced to tear its gaze away from the Shade and, for a moment, remembered a connection to someone named Delilah. When she looked back, she saw Dao. His name conjured faith from a memory of fragmentation at Central Square. He spoke:

“Where does your anger come from?”

He—Delilah thought, she was too dazed to speak—was haloed by white light trailing off in Mandelbrot tendrils, like the ghosts of firing neurons branching past his skull. Or was it just another malfunction, twisting the Prophet Array. She tried to think of Shade and recall what happened. What had he taken? Money or information? Shade stepped into the center of the mat. She was moving before she realized, breaking from Dao’s gentle caress, taking hasty, heavy steps until she met him at the center and pumped back her arm; threw it forward like the machine it was. Her fist met Shade’s face and blasted a cone of sparks like tracers in a shotgun thick enough that she feared it would ignite the tatami beneath them. The watching wall of spectators’ eyes lurched back and that pleased the Shaman.

“Delilah, wait—”

She heard Shade’s words after the act, like her senses had lagged several seconds. His voice reverberated and the lights seemed to shift with it. More radiant flashbangs, triggering slowly in time dilation. She heard the overclocked fans of the AMALGA Deck struggling to keep up and spewing hot air against her skin. Then, Dao again:

“Your whole setup’s shredded, Delilah.”
“Your whole setup’s shredded, Delilah.”

“From mistreatment. From mismatched, incompatible cybernetics strung together. A cloud with no centrality.”

She tried to ignore him and stepped to Shade again. He flinched back, still crumpled down to two-thirds his height on a leg prosthesis with broken servos. She remembered.



She couldn’t tell if she or Shade had lunged first this time, but he caught her hand in his grip and bent it at the wrist. For the first time in years, the joint felt filled to the brim with frayed nerve endings and atrophying muscle that convulsed in his wristlock. Delilah fell to a knee and almost threw up. More sparks sprayed from her hand; tendrils of smoke almost imperceptibly slipped from the ports of her AMALGA Deck.

“You know I’m a data archivist. I got that shit locked away, and it stays there.” Delilah lurched and her wrist twisted in Shade’s grip—like muscle and clogged arteries morphed their way back into the chromium limb. “I had to go dark too.” He glanced at Dao, with each word bubbling in his throat like he was choking on them. “You knew. Security,” Shade said, “over paranoia,” as though it were a rehearsed mantra.

Delilah tried to parse his words, figuring there might be some sort of epiphany within them. There usually was, she thought, if you dug deep enough at any mundanity or absurdity. Then Shade had a baseball bat—she wasn’t sure where it came from—and he cracked through her jaw before she could wrench her hand free. She collapsed.

“What happens to people like you, try to play pawn of chaos?”
“What happens to people like you, try to play pawn of chaos?”

The Shaman growled something feral as a beast but unfeeling as a machine. She moved harmoniously, despite her wristed still pinned against her chest, sweeping Shade’s legs and pouncing on top of him. She hoisted the bulk of the AMALGA Deck constricting her with its cords and slammed its pointed corner towards Shade’s eye socket until the light in his optic went dark.

“They become Lernaen.”
“They become Lernaen.”

“We were partners,” Shade said, “We—”

“𝕣𝕒𝕟 𝕥𝕠𝕘𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣…” Blood dripped from her chin onto the mats. Delilah only heard the sputtering fans—the Deck’s omnipresent thrum of internal mechanical energy. It strained—the way it did when she ran the Prophet Array projectors too long,

>>>𝔸ℕ𝔻 ℙ𝕆𝕎𝔼ℝ𝔼𝔻 𝔻𝕆𝕎ℕ…

The blood evaporated. Delilah was still kneeling, but the muscular agony was gone. Her wrist was ensnared in the cords of her deck. Shade was kneeling too, ten meters across the room. She looked back at Dao, who stood just beyond her.

But Dao had already turned away, leaving the murmuring monks to melt from their tight circle and talk in loose groups. Some of them conversed with Shade while others seemed keen on enlightening Delilah or discussing what had happened. Perhaps she should have stopped and took stock, to understand, but it didn’t quite cross the surface of her mind; whenever it did, she pushed it aside.

Dendrites of disconnected white wires still stood, though ethereal like floaters in her eyes. They receded, following Dao’s crown as he rounded a corner. She followed too, though tired, still carrying enough strength—or at least enough deadbeat determination—to bruise through any monks and denizens accosting her with curiosity like some treasured or pathetic oddity.

ℕ𝕠𝕥 𝕢𝕦𝕚𝕥𝕖. ℕ𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘. 𝕊𝕙𝕒𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕚𝕔 𝔻𝕖𝕒𝕕 𝔼𝕟𝕖𝕣𝕘𝕪.
𝔾𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕥 𝕗𝕝𝕠𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘.

Dharma nearly ran into Delilah as she stumbled through the halls, almost automatically calling out a warning—You’re not supposed to be down—but she stopped herself, and recentered, looking for Dao. Delilah could have sworn she’d seen those crescent eyes before—the way they glinted and spun in reaction to any new visage.

The basement walls—though looking like they were made of layered paper backlit by orange light—seemed to absorb sound. At times, Delilah followed only the remnants of the dendrites firing.

A dead end, and within, a storeroom.

Shelves of steel decorated with leftover medicine, old machine parts, and general maintenance supplies lined the walls. It was all sparse, the last bottles and buckets of the Reclaim, save for the black steel payload in the cleared away center of the room. It was like a trapezoidal prism, and nondistinct with its side clean of any labels. Whatever it was, the crate must have held a majority of the supplies, lest the monks were far deeper entrenched in the poverty of the Reclaim then they let on.

Delilah—and so Dharma stopped in the corridor just outside the storeroom to listen in, but caught only the tail end of some negotiation and subsequent orders issued. There was no door, so they saw clearly within. Other corridors split off throughout the Temple Underground, and one even led up a ramp towards a steel cellar door to the alleyway.

The man in the black jacket—who Delilah, for some reason, recognized only by the name ‘Tim Smith’—had met up with his four identically-strapped companions. The goons raised the payload up with a lifting frame.

Dharma was a ghost—no footsteps, dancing the distance between her and Tim Smith and seizing his shoulder before he knew she was coming. She pinned his elbow to his ribs and cranked his hand at the wrist. Delilah felt ghost ligaments of her own snapping like rubber bands stretched too thin as she stood stuck, struck by spectacle and lost in paracosm. Smith drew on Dharma as he dropped to his knees, but Dharma’s cyber arms struck like pit vipers even outside of her peripheral vision. She elbowed the pistol into the floor and Smith’s first round went into the tatami.

“Wait,” Tim Smith choked out before another of the monk’s strikes connected. He dropped his gun, and gestured back towards the payload. Two of the Enforcers had drawn sidearms as well, still struggling to hold two of the corners of the payload.

“You’ll destroy it,” Dharma said. Her breath and her pulse sat at an unwavering baseline. Somewhere in her head, the altercation had never happened, or it wasn’t her skirmishing and she was still back topside tending wounds. “—if you drop it.”

Despite her words, the Enforcers held steady their aim, though they exchanged concerned gazes with Tim Smith. If she engaged them, they’d have to set it down first, or risk leaving the clinic empty-handed.

“Whatever you think you can do with that,” Dharma started, “Know from whose hands you pry it.” She gestured towards the ceiling, concealing her own concerned scan for Dao. “And what resistance you might meet.”

“If they knew what you had—what you withhold—maybe you’d be surprised by how quickly your allies become your opposition when you fail to deliver.” Tim Smith had retrieved his weapon and leveled it on Dharma. “And maybe your master—and your mojo—aren’t all that you thought they were…”

“Should you try to leave with our supply— Dharma took a deep breath. “You can keep ignoring our patrons, and trust in my deliverance.”

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“Wait, Dharma; please…”

“Trust my words.”