SARIF INDUSTRIES – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The sound that came out of the other man’s mouth was something tortured and animalistic, a raw cry of pain that cut right through Jensen’s skull

The sound that came out of the other man’s mouth was something tortured and animalistic, a raw cry of pain that cut right through Jensen’s skull. Stacks staggered out across the corridor, shaking his head violently and clawing at the air. His heavy cybernetic arms crashed through racks of discarded equipment, smashing them to the ground. The man cast around, swinging back and forth, as if he had been thrown into a pit of horrors that only he could see.

“No, no, no,” he cried, tears running down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t do it, oh no, no, please, no…” For a brief moment his wild gaze crossed Jensen’s and he saw the panic in Stacks’s eyes, the blank lack of recognition, the all-consuming shock and horror. “The blood, all the blood, make it stop, please!”

At Jensen’s side, Pritchard was fumbling for a weapon, a Buzzkill stun gun unfolding as he dragged it from a pocket in his hoodie. “Wait!” Jensen pushed him away before the hacker could draw a bead. “Don’t shoot!”

“He’s lost his mind!” Pritchard shouted back.

“Just back off, damn it!” Jensen gave him another hard shove and deliberately put himself in the line of fire. He advanced on Stacks, hands raised and his eye shields retracted.

“All this blood, the blood,” Stacks repeated, muttering the words over and over. “How? How did it happen…?”

For a moment, Jensen wasn’t sure what he meant, but then he looked down at the floor and the implication of the other man’s words clicked. The muddy orange light from Pritchard’s little light-drone spilled over the floor of the corridor, where the contents of storage boxes had been upended and scattered. All around there were piles of augmentation components, bits of circuitry and mechanical limbs in a chaotic mess. The light from the drone gave everything a blood-red cast and Jensen felt sickened as his mind suddenly reframed what he was seeing as a vision from some hellish abattoir.

And that was how Stacks was seeing it. He’d stepped from the elevator and straight into a nightmare. Jensen reached up, as gently as he could, and grasped the man’s mechanoid forearm, trying to steady him.

It was difficult. Stacks had heavy-gauge augs designed for hauling him up the side of derricks and lifting girders, and if he turned on Jensen, he could rip the other man’s cyberarms from their sockets.

“Harrison,” he said firmly, deliberately using Stacks’s first name to hook his attention. “Listen to me. It’s Adam. I want you to come back.” He worked to keep his voice moderated, just like he had been taught during his police training. “Where you are right now, that’s not here. It’s not happening, man. Come back. Talk to me.” Jensen didn’t dare to employ his CASIE implant – the same ‘social engineering’ device Agent Thorne had tried to use on him back in Alaska was good for reading and influencing the moods of others during direct conversation, but Jensen had no idea how it would react to someone in so extreme a situation. Gotta do this the old-fashioned way, he told himself

He held out his other hand. “You’re not there,” Jensen insisted. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

“I… I…” Stacks was breathing in short, panting bursts – but slowly that normalized and the hollow distance in his gaze faded away.

Jensen threw a hard glance over his shoulder at Pritchard, who scowled and reluctantly put away his stun gun.

“What the hell was that…?” Stacks slumped against a wall, all the frantic energy suddenly drained from him. “I don’t know…”

“I knew it had been a while since your last neuropozyne dose,” said Jensen. “But this?”

“I just saw all that and I… I freaked out…” He shuddered. “Lost control.”

“Can you keep it together?” said Jensen. “Don’t lie to me this time.”

Stacks gave a wooden nod. “I’m okay.” He very carefully made sure that he wasn’t looking down at the severed mechanical limbs. “Thanks…”

Pritchard gave a grunt of disapproval and crossed to a door on the far side of the corridor. “The quicker we do this, the better. I don’t want any more surprises.”

Jensen surveyed the door. It was a thick barrier of armored glass, secured in place with a magnetic lock, and there were signs around the mechanism of failed attempts to force it open. Beyond it was a small laboratory set up with the kind of gear he recognized from LIMB clinics for maintaining augmentation systems. “Can you get us in there?” he asked the hacker.

“Oh, please,” said Pritchard, with a scornful glance. He made a sweeping motion with his hand to indicate the locked door and a dozen others along the length of the corridor. “Tai Yong Medical may have stripped Sarif Industries for all its assets but I was under no obligation to make it easy to get to them.” Pritchard leaned into a control panel by the door and spoke a string of numbers. A light on the lock switched from dull red to bright green and the door dutifully retracted open.

Stacks was still shaky on his feet, so Jensen helped him inside, guiding him to one of a pair of maintenance cradles in the center of the room. Like old-style dentist’s chairs, they reclined back so that automated scanner heads and spider-like service arms could come in and work any fixes – short of invasive surgery – on an augmented person with damaged or malfunctioning tech.

“Take a load off,” Jensen told him. “We’ll get you fixed up, trust me.”

“Yeah…” Stacks nodded wearily. His panicked episode had left him disoriented and weak.

Pritchard pulled Jensen away and spoke to him in low tones. “He needs neuropozyne, that’s not in doubt… but what just happened out there? That wasn’t withdrawal shock! Your friend there just had a psychotic episode!”

“Thought you said you didn’t know anything about cybertech?”

“I know what I saw!” he hissed. “Whatever’s wrong with him, the withdrawal is making it worse!”

“So help him,” Jensen demanded.

Pritchard scowled. “Check in there.” The hacker pointed at a sealed compartment on one of the lab’s walls.

Another magno-lock held the temperature-controlled cabinet shut, but Jensen didn’t wait for Pritchard to open it for him. Extending half the length of the nanoblade in his left forearm, Jensen used the blunt tip of the fractal-edged weapon to cut through the lock and pawed through the contents inside. There were dozens of ampoules of the vital anti-rejection drug in there, but he frowned as he looked over use-by dates on the packets. “These meds are expired…”

“It’s all there is,” Pritchard insisted. “That or nothing. Unless you want your pal here to get worse?” The hacker had started up the scanner unit, letting it move back and forth over Stacks, but Jensen didn’t miss that Pritchard was keeping one hand on the grip of his stun gun in case the man had a sudden relapse.

“Fine.” These doses were in liquid form, in disposable injectors, and he popped one out of a bubble pack and pressed it to the carotid artery in Stacks’s neck. The other man let out a low gasp as the drug filtered into his system. “That should help… for a while, at least.”

Stacks looked up at him. “Thanks, brother. What about you, you need a hit too, right?”

Jensen shook his head. He wasn’t about to try and explain how his uncommon genetics made neuropozyne redundant for him. “I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”

Pritchard peered at the monitor. “The scanner says there’s structural fatigue in some of his joints. Fluid lubricant reservoirs are almost empty. Should be able to fix that…”

Jensen gave a nod, and moved to the second maintenance cradle. On an impulse, he climbed into it and pulled the unit’s control screen around so he could operate it. “Might as well check myself while I’m here,” he said.

“There’s something wrong with you too?” Pritchard sniffed.

“I was out of it for months,” Jensen shot back, dismissing the comment. “Just being thorough.” He activated the scan program and sat back; but Pritchard’s words cut closer to the truth than he wanted to admit.

It was hard for Jensen to frame the strange disquiet that had been with him ever since he awoke in the clinic. If he had been forced to sum it up in a single word, it would have been disconnected. He felt out of synch with the world, and there was a quiet, corrosive fear in the back of his thoughts that something had happened to him during his lost time, something he couldn’t grasp.

The scanner did its work, moving over his limbs, projecting a sensor image on the display screen. Jensen’s augmentations were all in working order, showing the same outer wear and tear they’d had before he embarked on his mission to the Arctic but no more than that. Strangely, he found himself almost willing the scanner to find something amiss, almost as if that would confirm his unrest.

He got his wish. The sensor head stopped suddenly and a text box lined in crimson appeared on the display. Anomaly Detected, read the warning.

Jensen shot a look at Pritchard. The hacker had his full attention still on Stacks, wary for any possible burst of fresh violence.

There was something wrong with Jensen’s right cyberarm. He lay it across his lap and triggered the nerve-pulse sequence that opened up the scuffed polycarbonate sheath. Revealed below were alloy bones of spun metals made in zero-gravity factories, surrounded by bunches of coated myomer muscles and hair-thin digital nerve pathways.

And there, where it should not have been, was a foreign object.

Before either of the others could see him do it, Jensen delicately plucked at a thin wafer of plastic lodged in a myomer cluster, pulling it out between thumb and forefinger. It was no larger than a microcircuit, but the shape and design of it told Jensen that it very clearly did not belong. It wasn’t recognizable as any kind of Sarif-made tech.

He turned it over in his palm and without warning the circuit gave off a weak double pulse of light, like a heartbeat.

A tracker? Without thinking, Jensen’s hand closed into a fist and crushed the tiny device into powder, his thoughts racing as the question of who had put it there pushed at him.

“Something the matter?” said Pritchard, seeing the shift in his expression.

“Nothing.” The lie was automatic, and he wasn’t sure why. Jensen switched off the scanner and stood up. Suddenly, all he wanted was to be away from here, away from all the memories that the building stirred up for him. “We should get moving. Don’t want to outstay our welcome.”

“Finally, an intelligent suggestion,” Pritchard agreed.

But Stacks had his attention elsewhere. “I don’t reckon they’re gonna let us walk out of here easy…” He nodded in the direction of the open doorway. Jensen turned to see a half-dozen figures crowding out in the corridor, and the concealed chip he had found was suddenly the least of his concerns.

* * *

In the spill of white light from the lab, Jensen saw nothing but angry and desperate faces, all of them sunken and hollow with malnourishment and withdrawal. They were street scavengers, the lost and homeless reduced to existing on the ragged fringes of society, just like the girl they had encountered back at the mech-ghetto camp.

Pritchard pulled his stun gun and retreated back. “Jensen!” he hissed. “I told you this was a bad idea.”

Two of the scavengers had firearms – a stocky, scarred man and a jittery, thin woman both carrying Widowmaker shotguns that had to have been looted from the Detroit police. The others had an assortment of makeshift clubs or blades.

The first through the door was another woman, whose left arm was a broken mess of damaged aug parts. She brandished a huge combat knife like a short sword in her other hand. “You try anything, you’ll regret it,” she hissed, but the warning was more desperate than it was threatening.

Her companions with the guns followed her in, while the others loitered cautiously outside. “How’d you get it open?” demanded the scarred man. “You Tarvos? Tai Yong?”

Before anyone could answer, the thin woman licked her lips and drew a bead on Jensen’s head. “Let’s just smoke these creeps and take the salvage. This ain’t gonna be like last time at the Junction, getting cut to pieces by their goddamn army!”

The Junction? The name raised a red flag in Jensen’s thoughts, but he didn’t have time to consider what it meant. “We don’t want any trouble,” he said, raising his hands.

“They’re here f-for the nu-poz,” said Stacks, wavering on the verge of standing up but unwilling to risk the wrath of the scavengers. “Ain’t that so?”

“You’re gonna give us all you got,” said the woman with the ruined arm. It was a bald statement. She put no anger there, only weariness and resignation. “Or you’re gonna die for it. Your call.”

“We got needy people,” said the man with the scars. “Kids, some of ’em. So we ain’t got no choice.” He raised his shotgun and pointed it toward Pritchard.

Jensen let the moment hang, and then finally he lowered his hands. “No,” he said firmly.

“No?” echoed the thin woman, her voice rising. “Who the hell do you think you are saying no to us? I had—”

He silenced her with a look. “No-one is getting hurt today. No guns or knives.” Jensen gestured at Pritchard. “Put the stunner down. We’re not fighting our way out of this.”

“You’re a second away from being dead, friend,” said the other woman. Closer now, and Jensen could see she had twinned cat’s-eye cyberoptics. “And everyone here is about as desperate as they come. So you give it up or pay the price.”

He studied them. “We’re not animals,” he said, his voice carrying out to the others in the corridor. “I know it can seem like that now, after what happened to us. Because of how we have to live. But all that came from outside, not from us. We don’t have to be the monsters everyone else thinks we are. We don’t have to turn on each other just for one last dose of nu-poz.” Jensen found the pack of drug ampoules from the cabinet. “Here, take this. It’s yours.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, and then with a sudden rush of motion, she stabbed her knife into a nearby tabletop and snatched the packet from his outstretched hand. “There’s a lot here…” she muttered.

Jensen turned to Pritchard. “The other labs on this floor… are there more neuropozyne stocks in them as well?”

“It’s possible,” said the hacker.

“Open them up. All of them,” Jensen insisted. He looked at the two scavengers with the shotguns. “You hear me? Take as much as you can carry. Meds, repair packs, praxis kits… You say you have people who need aid, so give it to them.”

Pritchard frowned, then brought up his wrist-keyboard, working through a series of remote commands. After a moment, Jensen heard the thuds of other magnetic bolts opening in sequence further down the corridor. “Done,” said the hacker.

“Just like that?” said the thin woman, distrust heavy in her voice. “You’re giving us a goddamn scav jackpot?”

“Yeah,” Jensen told her. “Because you need it. Because you’re not thugs and murderers.”

“Just desperate,” said the other woman, shakily taking a shot from one of the syrettes. The tremors that had been running up and down her damaged arm eased away to nothing.

The scarred man let his weapon drop. “Thanks,” he began. “I hate this stinkin’ place. We scoured it for every damn piece of salvage we could find, then those Tarvos assholes set the robots shooting everyone who came near…” He called out to the other scavengers, directing them to gather up the vital medicines.

The thin woman finally relented and let her shotgun drop to dangle at her side on a single-point harness. “Goddamn Samaritan, huh?” She helped herself to a handful of syrettes from the pack, eyeing them to make sure it was the real thing and not some sort of trick. After a moment, she took a dose and let out a low moan of relief. “Don’t expect nothing else,” she snapped at Jensen. “You get to walk outta here, so go.”

“One thing before that,” he said, halting in front of her. “You said something about the Junction. You mean Milwaukee Junction?”

“Yeah,” she said, with a shrug. “The Sarif factory on the edge of the city. We got a whole bunch of us together, went out there. Figured there would be stocks, maybe, or salvage…”

“We needed the pozy bad enough to risk it,” said the scarred man. “But they killed a lot of us.”

“Who did?” Jensen pressed.

“An army of the sons-of-bitches!” snarled the thin woman. “No-one stuck around to ask them their names, yeah?” She pushed past him and stalked away.

LOCATION UNKNOWN

Lines of light ranged across a fathomless, unending digital void. The endless gulf resembled a virtual of deep space or the immeasurable depths of an abyssal ocean.

This anti-place existed far below the strata of the global data network. High above it, billions of people cross-communicated via a myriad of social media portals, while mega-corporations traded valuable non-linear currencies and untold other waves of information washed back and forth. But here, living in the unseen spaces of forgotten server farms and the ghostly margins of the virtual world, there was still activity. Like the blind chemovores that swarmed around volcanic black smokers at the bottom of polluted seas, a tenacious kind of digital life also clung to existence in data-arid wastelands of the deep web.

Above, a web of faint neon-bright lights pulsed with rays of shimmering code that surged between its threads like electrical pulses bouncing from neuron to neuron in a brain – but down in the dark net there were only the occasional blurred constellations of information, nested geometric constructs of lonely data shrouded by complex security programs that glittered in the utter blackness. Snatches of garbled, lost binary data flashed by, fragments of speech or music too fast to register.

Adrift here was a glassy raft built from lines of redundant, meaningless code, a brief but fragile safe haven for the gathering of a fugitive few. Aboard it, a group of abstract digital avatars faced one another, their identities and voices heavily masked.

A pixilated human form addressed the others. It was a phantom bled of all uniqueness such as gender, race or vocal tonality – but still there was an urgency behind the words it spoke. “Thank you all for coming. I appreciate the risks you are taking by linking to this nexus, but I believe what I have to say will make it worthwhile.” No-one replied; it was unprecedented to gather so many of the Collective in one place, even if that wasn’t a physical locus. Face-to-face communication was almost unheard of in their world of digital dead-drops and multiple blinds. “I have confirmation,” continued the human avatar. “I’ve traced and double-checked the location. He’s resurfaced, after all this time.”

Nearby, another of the virtual selves – this one a winged skull that drifted about in quick, darting motions – fixed the human shape with its empty eye sockets. “That’s why we’re here? I’ve never been convinced by the great stock you put in this man’s ability to get things done. Do I need to remind everyone of what happened at Panchaea? How can we know what effect that had on him?”

There were three more avatars waiting motionless on the raft, but none of them volunteered a reply to the skull’s brusque question.

“A fair point,” allowed the human. “Our predictive model does draw from old data, that’s true. But I believe that he’s ready to deploy. We’ll make certain of it, of course. But it would be foolish of us not to use this opportunity. We’ve waited a long time for these conditions to come into synchrony. I admit, I thought our window had closed. I’m pleased that is not so.”

“And if you’re wrong?” demanded the skull. “How can we be sure about him?”

At length, another of the avatars spoke. This one was a glowing light, made to resemble a distant star as viewed through a telescope, and it pulsed with a woman’s voice. “Like Janus says, we’ll keep a close watch. If it comes to it, I can make sure he stays on the sweet path.”

There was a wry sniff from the avatar closest to the human shape, a silvery letter from the Cyrillic alphabet that morphed randomly from one character to another. “Are you sure you can handle him, little sister?”

The voice behind the star ignored the comment. “You’ve all seen the intercepts. We need someone who can be proactive, someone outside the group. Our boy’s the best choice.”

“We are committed,” agreed the human shape. “I’ll set things in motion.”

The last avatar – a featureless cube made of blue crystal – finally spoke. “If he becomes aware he is being manipulated—”

“This isn’t manipulation,” interrupted the phantom. “We are just showing him the way.”

The Cyrillic symbol glittered and shifted shapes. “I doubt he’ll see it like that. Not the forgiving type, you know?”

The human avatar paused, glancing up toward the distant glow of the global network. “We’ve been here too long, our encryption is decaying. They’ve set seekers after this node.”

The cube spun on its axis. “Time to go, then. We all know our assignments. Make contact again through the usual channels.” The avatar lost definition and faded away, the word DISCONNECTED flashing briefly across the space where it had stood.

“Roger that,” said the star, and followed suit. A moment later, the silver letter winked out, leaving only the human and the winged skull to stare blankly at one another.

“Fifteen seconds to intercept,” said the ghostly avatar. “Seekers incoming.” Above them, distinctive streaks of color were now visible, dropping toward the glassy platform on spiraling paths. The objects resembled comets, but moved like sharks.

The skull did not seem to notice. “We can’t afford to let the Illuminati have another victory, Janus.”

“To them, every outcome is a degree of victory. That is why they think they will win.” The human shape looked away. “We’ll prove them wrong.”

The last two virtuals severed their connections and the raft where they had stood broke apart like sand, dissipating back into the endless digital noise of the networks, as if the clandestine meeting had never taken place.

The hunter-killer programs swept in, their dog-smart synthetic intelligence anticipating targets to pursue and subdue. An analogue of disappointment washed over them at finding nothing, and they looped listlessly away.

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