It was raining. Of course it fucking was. All it ever did was fucking rain. Cayne had only stepped off the train three seconds ago, yet the murky clouds of toxic smog had already opened up. He rolled his eyes in annoyance, reaching a hand up to the top of his head to pull his hood down further over his face. The one downside to having hypersensitivity implants installed that he had found so far was the rain. To most, the dull acid drops slid right off their skin, but for Cayne, every drop left a small burning sensation that was far from painful, but certainly irritating. Sure, he could hear things he would never have been able to before, and his vison was like watching an extremely high definition display forever. But god, it made the rain annoying. One robotic, boot-clad foot set down in front of the other, and he was off, striding over the cracked concrete of the platform towards the terminal. He was glad to be off the crowded transport, even if it did mean walking the neon-bathed streets of Arcadia, with the rain pouring down and the foul air, a rotten mixture of chemical pollutants and cigarette smoke, assaulting his nose.
The walk along the unsheltered platform was longer than Cayne cared for. Soon he was back under cover, the automatic terminal doors making way for him with a reluctant hiss. It was cold inside, and it stank of piss, Trace and god only knows what else. A small crowd had formed around the security gates, a less than orderly queue trying to squeeze through as fast as they could. Not that there was anything to see. The only thing on the other side of those gates were the shit-stained, gang infested streets of the Delcos District. Cayne waited patiently, trying his best to ignore the fact that almost everyone around him was completely clean of augmentations. He counted to ten in his head, trying to suppress his natural urge to cleanse them all of their sins. They were ignorant; they knew not that they did wrong, but that did not make them innocent. Everyone in the densely packed terminal crowd barged each other, but no one dared lay a finger on Cayne. It only took one glance at the gargantuan mountain of metal and meat for most people to decide it was probably wiser to just move out of the way.
After little more than a minute of waiting, Cayne stepped up and presented his ID. He nodded to the guard; a friendly looking, middle-aged man with dark skin and a scruffy black beard. The man was heavily augmented, sporting a fashionable robotic eye with a warm blue glow that Cayne knew was filing the faces of every person here. But not Cayne. He was on Cayne's payroll. They had danced this dance a number of times beyond counting. In a matter of seconds Cayne was through, registered under a random name every time. Technically, Damiran Cayne had never entered the Delcos district, the stronghold of the Awakened crime syndicate. But, Scott Rogan, Ben Baxter, and hundreds of other faceless Arcadian nobodies had passed through this gate in recent months in his place. No one could pin Cayne here no matter how hard they tried. The light above the gate flashed green, briefly highlighting the narrow smirk on Cayne's shadowed face, and the glass panels parted to let him pass. Cayne had learned that in a world like this, where a different gang owned every pavement slab and leaning on the wrong wall could get you shot, it was important to enjoy the little things. Sliding through checks like this was just one of the thousands of little things that Cayne had come to love about being the boss.
The streets of the Delcos District had become almost comfortingly familiar to Cayne. His personal dwelling was elsewhere but Delcos felt like home. Towering buildings flanked the closest thing Delcos had to a high street, and a plethora of neon signs flooded the battered pavement with an eerie multi-coloured hue. Over a mile of shops to either side of the terminal were the first thing most people saw of the place. All manner of small-time businesses made their home here, from small clinics and clothes shops to cafes and bars. None of them would ever reach the heights of the Mega-Corps, but they did enough to keep themselves afloat for the time being. Easier said than done, given the way things were these days. On the surface, Cayne's gang presided over a relatively peaceful district. There was very little gang conflict since the Awakened had driven most of them out. Violence was rarer here on the streets than other parts of the city and the crime rate was relatively low. It was when you dug deeper below the façade of relative safety that the roots of Cayne's gang became more and more evident. The night time disappearances had raised a few eyebrows but with so little evidence to go on there was nothing the Peacekeepers could do. Roughly one in every three of the boys in blue that walked these streets had been paid off by the Awakened to look the other way, and given their poor pay and poorer life expectancies they were often more than happy to take the bribe. Those that weren't often disappeared themselves. In truth Cayne's gang owned much of the territory here by law, having invested heavily in a number of the local businesses, swooping in at times of hardship to lift them out of trouble in exchange for impossible, bottomless debt that they could never shake free. That way the Awakened were able to financially sustain themselves, and got the double bonus of being able to use the stores as fronts for their often less than legitimate dealings.
It was a sweet deal to be sure, and one greatly pleasing to a man like Cayne who placed emphasis on efficiency and power above all else. The Awakened didn't need anyone to thrive, and Cayne liked it that way. Anyone who wasn't with them was against them and needed to be cleansed. They were certainly a few enemies at the moment. The Black Brethren, more specifically, Aurora Baines, had managed to find the Golden Disk. The Awakened had been waiting and preparing, rather than searching, and now that the Disk had finally been unearthed, it would only be a matter of time until the Shepherd set his disciples loose on Arcadia. With the Disk in their hands the Shepherd could usher in a new age of prosperity and fast-track humanity's evolution, extinguishing the souls of the unworthy and ascending those who deserved it. It would be glorious. The other, a girl. That was all Cayne knew. She had delivered a suspicious package to a Skin shop frequented by several of Cayne's men a few weeks back. It had turned out to be a bomb. She almost certainly was working for someone; there was no way she would have known unless someone else had directed her there. The only way to be sure would be to find her, and have someone peel her pathetic flesh from her bones until the little mouse squeaked. Cayne had his men all over Arcadia listening in for news on both the girl and the Disk, but so far, no leads.
Cayne kept his head down as he walked, turning a left out of the terminal doors and mixing into the crowds along the pavement. It was late evening, and the sky above Arcadia probably would have been a brilliant golden lightshow were it not for the choking grey clouds and the shadows cast by the reaching peaks of Arcadia's skyline. The street was alive with people of all sorts flooding in and out of various establishments to listen to music far too loudly and get way too drunk and high. Cayne pitied them; life without a purpose was not worth living, and for your sole purpose to be to get blackout drunk and off your face on Trace? It didn't bear thinking about. It took about fifteen minutes of trudging in the rain, moving people out of his way with his shoulders and ignoring the insults of drunken fools for Cayne to reach his destination. A few turns, and then eventually left down an alleyway, past a sleeping homeless man slumped against the wall. It was narrow, with only a few inches of space on either side of Cayne's broad shoulders, and easily missed by most.
Eventually the alleyway opened up onto a much quieter street. The buzz of the bars and the blaring music was little more than a dull murmur in the background from her. This part of town was a run-down and long-abandoned industrial complex. The factories and warehouses here had belonged to various corporations over the past decades but their current state of disrepair and awkward location in regards to transporting manufactured goods meant that when they had gone on the market, no one had taken up the offer. Cayne's gang had made extensive use of the opportunity this had given them. None of the buildings looked particularly suspicious from the outside, but after Cayne had passed through the gate in the chain-link fence and in through a locked side door, he was back in his hive of criminal comrades.
This factory was in a better state than most. It was high-roofed, reaching as tall as three stories with a basement below. The main floor was a basic construction line that Cayne had long ago tasked his men with repairing with so far little success. Since then it had been utilized as a common space, adorned with battered old sofas, pool tables and TVs. The walls were solid grey concrete, illuminated by rows of white strip lights hanging from the ceiling. The second and third levels were accessible as steel walkways, giving a view over the entire floor and leading to what used to be a staff room and several offices. The air was thick with smoke and heavy rock music boomed out from a cleverly arranged speaker system, echoing off the walls of the cavernous construct. No one even looked up as Cayne entered. He headed straight for the stairs, his every step causing a great metallic thud that was drowned out by the raucous chatter of the thirty or so heavily augmented men and women in the factory and the loud music.
On the third tier Cayne entered his office, and sat down. It was by far the nicest room in the factory. Dark, blood red carpet met the dark walls and warm yellow lights lit the room from each corner. A small wooden dark was in the far corner, partnered with a comfy black leather office chair. Cayne took of his jacket, throwing it over the back of the chair, and then his hoodie, letting it drop to the floor by his side. In just a tight t-shirt, the full extent of Cayne's modifications was visible. Thankfully, the air here was cleaner and the music drowned out. He reached down the where the PC sat under the desk and grabbed the jack, plugging it into the neural port at the bottom his skull. His ghostly white eyes turned red, and his mind was synchronized to the system. Cayne clicked the monitor on his desk on, prompting the black and red display to fire into life. There were several emails and messages, as expected; various reports on successful dealings and a number of meaningless memos that Cayne had seen a thousand times. Cayne scrolled from the bottom up, nonchalantly, uninterested, until at the top he saw an email titled URGENT! Cayne opened it by instinct. In his mind, the words were directly in front of his eyes; the monitor was largely redundant thanks to Cayne's link. He scanned it once, then twice to make sure what he had read was correct. If he still had his eyes, they would have widened. Quietly, he muttered, "Well. No shit."
The walk along the unsheltered platform was longer than Cayne cared for. Soon he was back under cover, the automatic terminal doors making way for him with a reluctant hiss. It was cold inside, and it stank of piss, Trace and god only knows what else. A small crowd had formed around the security gates, a less than orderly queue trying to squeeze through as fast as they could. Not that there was anything to see. The only thing on the other side of those gates were the shit-stained, gang infested streets of the Delcos District. Cayne waited patiently, trying his best to ignore the fact that almost everyone around him was completely clean of augmentations. He counted to ten in his head, trying to suppress his natural urge to cleanse them all of their sins. They were ignorant; they knew not that they did wrong, but that did not make them innocent. Everyone in the densely packed terminal crowd barged each other, but no one dared lay a finger on Cayne. It only took one glance at the gargantuan mountain of metal and meat for most people to decide it was probably wiser to just move out of the way.
After little more than a minute of waiting, Cayne stepped up and presented his ID. He nodded to the guard; a friendly looking, middle-aged man with dark skin and a scruffy black beard. The man was heavily augmented, sporting a fashionable robotic eye with a warm blue glow that Cayne knew was filing the faces of every person here. But not Cayne. He was on Cayne's payroll. They had danced this dance a number of times beyond counting. In a matter of seconds Cayne was through, registered under a random name every time. Technically, Damiran Cayne had never entered the Delcos district, the stronghold of the Awakened crime syndicate. But, Scott Rogan, Ben Baxter, and hundreds of other faceless Arcadian nobodies had passed through this gate in recent months in his place. No one could pin Cayne here no matter how hard they tried. The light above the gate flashed green, briefly highlighting the narrow smirk on Cayne's shadowed face, and the glass panels parted to let him pass. Cayne had learned that in a world like this, where a different gang owned every pavement slab and leaning on the wrong wall could get you shot, it was important to enjoy the little things. Sliding through checks like this was just one of the thousands of little things that Cayne had come to love about being the boss.
The streets of the Delcos District had become almost comfortingly familiar to Cayne. His personal dwelling was elsewhere but Delcos felt like home. Towering buildings flanked the closest thing Delcos had to a high street, and a plethora of neon signs flooded the battered pavement with an eerie multi-coloured hue. Over a mile of shops to either side of the terminal were the first thing most people saw of the place. All manner of small-time businesses made their home here, from small clinics and clothes shops to cafes and bars. None of them would ever reach the heights of the Mega-Corps, but they did enough to keep themselves afloat for the time being. Easier said than done, given the way things were these days. On the surface, Cayne's gang presided over a relatively peaceful district. There was very little gang conflict since the Awakened had driven most of them out. Violence was rarer here on the streets than other parts of the city and the crime rate was relatively low. It was when you dug deeper below the façade of relative safety that the roots of Cayne's gang became more and more evident. The night time disappearances had raised a few eyebrows but with so little evidence to go on there was nothing the Peacekeepers could do. Roughly one in every three of the boys in blue that walked these streets had been paid off by the Awakened to look the other way, and given their poor pay and poorer life expectancies they were often more than happy to take the bribe. Those that weren't often disappeared themselves. In truth Cayne's gang owned much of the territory here by law, having invested heavily in a number of the local businesses, swooping in at times of hardship to lift them out of trouble in exchange for impossible, bottomless debt that they could never shake free. That way the Awakened were able to financially sustain themselves, and got the double bonus of being able to use the stores as fronts for their often less than legitimate dealings.
It was a sweet deal to be sure, and one greatly pleasing to a man like Cayne who placed emphasis on efficiency and power above all else. The Awakened didn't need anyone to thrive, and Cayne liked it that way. Anyone who wasn't with them was against them and needed to be cleansed. They were certainly a few enemies at the moment. The Black Brethren, more specifically, Aurora Baines, had managed to find the Golden Disk. The Awakened had been waiting and preparing, rather than searching, and now that the Disk had finally been unearthed, it would only be a matter of time until the Shepherd set his disciples loose on Arcadia. With the Disk in their hands the Shepherd could usher in a new age of prosperity and fast-track humanity's evolution, extinguishing the souls of the unworthy and ascending those who deserved it. It would be glorious. The other, a girl. That was all Cayne knew. She had delivered a suspicious package to a Skin shop frequented by several of Cayne's men a few weeks back. It had turned out to be a bomb. She almost certainly was working for someone; there was no way she would have known unless someone else had directed her there. The only way to be sure would be to find her, and have someone peel her pathetic flesh from her bones until the little mouse squeaked. Cayne had his men all over Arcadia listening in for news on both the girl and the Disk, but so far, no leads.
Cayne kept his head down as he walked, turning a left out of the terminal doors and mixing into the crowds along the pavement. It was late evening, and the sky above Arcadia probably would have been a brilliant golden lightshow were it not for the choking grey clouds and the shadows cast by the reaching peaks of Arcadia's skyline. The street was alive with people of all sorts flooding in and out of various establishments to listen to music far too loudly and get way too drunk and high. Cayne pitied them; life without a purpose was not worth living, and for your sole purpose to be to get blackout drunk and off your face on Trace? It didn't bear thinking about. It took about fifteen minutes of trudging in the rain, moving people out of his way with his shoulders and ignoring the insults of drunken fools for Cayne to reach his destination. A few turns, and then eventually left down an alleyway, past a sleeping homeless man slumped against the wall. It was narrow, with only a few inches of space on either side of Cayne's broad shoulders, and easily missed by most.
Eventually the alleyway opened up onto a much quieter street. The buzz of the bars and the blaring music was little more than a dull murmur in the background from her. This part of town was a run-down and long-abandoned industrial complex. The factories and warehouses here had belonged to various corporations over the past decades but their current state of disrepair and awkward location in regards to transporting manufactured goods meant that when they had gone on the market, no one had taken up the offer. Cayne's gang had made extensive use of the opportunity this had given them. None of the buildings looked particularly suspicious from the outside, but after Cayne had passed through the gate in the chain-link fence and in through a locked side door, he was back in his hive of criminal comrades.
This factory was in a better state than most. It was high-roofed, reaching as tall as three stories with a basement below. The main floor was a basic construction line that Cayne had long ago tasked his men with repairing with so far little success. Since then it had been utilized as a common space, adorned with battered old sofas, pool tables and TVs. The walls were solid grey concrete, illuminated by rows of white strip lights hanging from the ceiling. The second and third levels were accessible as steel walkways, giving a view over the entire floor and leading to what used to be a staff room and several offices. The air was thick with smoke and heavy rock music boomed out from a cleverly arranged speaker system, echoing off the walls of the cavernous construct. No one even looked up as Cayne entered. He headed straight for the stairs, his every step causing a great metallic thud that was drowned out by the raucous chatter of the thirty or so heavily augmented men and women in the factory and the loud music.
On the third tier Cayne entered his office, and sat down. It was by far the nicest room in the factory. Dark, blood red carpet met the dark walls and warm yellow lights lit the room from each corner. A small wooden dark was in the far corner, partnered with a comfy black leather office chair. Cayne took of his jacket, throwing it over the back of the chair, and then his hoodie, letting it drop to the floor by his side. In just a tight t-shirt, the full extent of Cayne's modifications was visible. Thankfully, the air here was cleaner and the music drowned out. He reached down the where the PC sat under the desk and grabbed the jack, plugging it into the neural port at the bottom his skull. His ghostly white eyes turned red, and his mind was synchronized to the system. Cayne clicked the monitor on his desk on, prompting the black and red display to fire into life. There were several emails and messages, as expected; various reports on successful dealings and a number of meaningless memos that Cayne had seen a thousand times. Cayne scrolled from the bottom up, nonchalantly, uninterested, until at the top he saw an email titled URGENT! Cayne opened it by instinct. In his mind, the words were directly in front of his eyes; the monitor was largely redundant thanks to Cayne's link. He scanned it once, then twice to make sure what he had read was correct. If he still had his eyes, they would have widened. Quietly, he muttered, "Well. No shit."
