There's nothing calm about walking up paralyzed. The heavy, cotton blanket trapped him like a pair of leather straps tying him to a gurney. Rational, non-sleep addled thought would have parsed this situation to simply be sleep paralysis. Abraham experienced the sensation once every few months, often accompanied by huge bouts of stress. Yet, much like a dream, the logic centers of his own mind couldn't process everything as it should.
Everything felt numb. A roar screamed in his ears, both the sound of his blood rushing in and a screaming rapids shaking through him. The instant adrenaline of fear gripped him, unable to flail his arms or unlock his legs. In pitch black darkness, Abraham truly vulnerable, unable to discern shapes in the milky shadows of his room. The terror intensified at the sudden rush of air next to him, his eyes unable to truly catch the shadowed silhouette that sliced through the darkness. It climbed above him, taking to his headboard like a demon perched above his quarry. The last thing he felt was the sudden exhalation, a gust of hot air that burned his face and sent a shock down his spine.
"Oh." he woke hours later, head pounding and eyes crusted. "Fuck," Abraham breathed, running a hand through his matted hair. For a moment, he sat at the edge of his bed with a pert frown tugging his lips. Everything felt off from before or maybe the week long headache shifted his perception too far over. He mumbled a few things, stopping his alarm before it went off, turning on the lights, turning on the shower, and ordering breakfast. Just a few words, simple and mechanical and very much his routine.
Routine blurred the day away until Abraham warped back to consciousness, his hands hovering over the data files in front of him.
"... Ahab."
"Huh?" he turned, blinking. His hand swiped away the files, letting them fall back into the console that promptly shut down. "Yeah, sorry. Been in my head all day." Abraham sighed, let his friend guide him to the break room to sit him down. The purpose in the other man's eyes, he hadn't caught that. It furrowed his brow as he slid into an empty chair.
Silence hung over the two, settled between the raucous noise of the bull pin and the hushed conversations around them. "You ready for this?" he said, catching Abraham's gaze, "There's still time to pull out; you're fresh as hell, ain't nobody gonna mock you for it."
A lot of things could be said, things he's thought to say for a long time now. Rookie detectives don't get much say in what they do, not around here, at least. Abraham's been lucky to stumble on cases with more depth than the precinct first caught. While he was still far off from any superior's eyes, Abraham's last few solved cases put him on someone's radar, enough to shove him head first into this. Ryan, his elder in every way, told him prior to the VI program how off it all felt and here, again, he'd say the same thing. Suspicious or not, he had no basis and with no actual evidence to provide Abraham with the skepticism Ryan tried to cultivate, he just couldn't say no to potentially skyrocketing his career.
Abraham slammed his hand on the table, pushing himself up. "I have to get ready," he said, deliberately looking through the break room's gaping doorway, "I'll send word through if I can do so safely. No doubt you'll be keeping an eye on my case, regardless." Abraham flashed him a smile, tamping down on the twist in his stomach at Ryan's blank expression. He didn't have time to worry about a friend; too many other things addled his mind.
Undercover debriefing usually happened in as private an area as possible. With how technology worked these days, every government agency had to take thousands more precautions just to tamp down on small leaks. For this, he'd be given everything by paper, told everything in a secured room, and given whatever he needed to pass as a petty crim by hand. The process made Abraham less nervous. Having solid material to hold onto gave him an anchor for his worry. Something to channel his anxiety into, as well as the dull pain still throbbing the back of his skull.
"And you're all set, Detective Ahearne," the woman debriefing him smiled, fake and riddled with her own nerves. Abraham returned it, feeling no faith in her words. She tacked on an empty good luck as he left for the car lot. Along with sets of clothes to fit his persona as an up and coming hacker (and the equipment to boot), they fashioned him with a beat down hover-vehicle, something completely opposite to his usually pristine car.
He cringed at the rust coated, cramped, and 'quaint' car. Normally it'd be a bad idea to just roll something like this out of the precinct, but his destination took him to a run down apartment complex in another district of the city. It was a run down section that lacked much in the way of law enforcement. It's where many of the petty thieves, scammers, and small time hackers took residence. Somewhere where he could make connections, build his persona from the ground up. With the help of his VI, it would take what would normally be years working his way through the city's underground and slice it right in half.
It was just a matter of getting the program to finally work. A week with the transplant and still nothing. What little faith Abraham had was waning quicker by the second.
