Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  The Art of Deus Ex Universe

  by Paul Davies, Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, and Martin Dubeau

  Deus Ex Universe: Children’s Crusade

  graphic novel by Alex Irvine and John Aggs

  Deus Ex: Black Light

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785651205

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785651212

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: August 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © 2016 by Square Enix Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

  Deus Ex: Mankind Divided © 2016 Square Enix Ltd. All rights reserved. Developed by Eidos-Montréal. Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Deus Ex Universe, the Deus Ex Universe logo, Eidos-Montréal and the Eidos-Montréal logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Square Enix Ltd. SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ONE

  FACILITY 451 – ALASKA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  “How much do you remember?”

  It was a woman’s voice, careful and steady, metered with just the right balance of maternal concern and authoritative firmness.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a dry, papery rasp. It was difficult, as if the act of using his voice had become foreign to him. He gave up on the attempt and tried something else. He tried to focus on the woman’s words, to find her in the room.

  “Take your time,” she told him – then an order, to someone else. “Give him some water.”

  An infinite white space surrounded everything, blurred bright but without dazzling his eyes, and if not for the warmth and the stillness of the air he could have believed he was on some expanse of frozen tundra, stretching away to an unseen horizon. At the edges of his vision, trains of golden icons trickled down, vanishing one after another. He half-raised his hand to wipe them away, as if they were raindrops caught on his eyelashes, before remembering that they were being projected directly into his synthetic retinas.

  The hand and the arm it belonged to ghosted up before him. Black as a shadow, the fingers moving, twitching. It fell away again, and he understood that he was lying in a bed, the pull of gravity holding him down. The tundra was a ceiling high above, out of reach, and by degrees he felt himself shifting upwards as a mechanism behind the mattress raised his torso to a shallow incline.

  Other ghosts came into sight. The sketches of human figures.

  He flinched at the sight of strangers, the echo of a fight-or-flight reaction triggered by something he didn’t immediately recollect. It was the dying ember of another memory, gone before he could grasp it. It left him unsettled and wary.

  A robotic manipulator drifted closer, proffering a squeeze bottle of clear liquid, and he leaned forward to meet it, letting a nozzle hook his lip. Cool, fresh water whispered into his arid mouth, a faint medicinal taste washing over his tongue. It was like he hadn’t taken a drink in centuries, and for a long moment he just let himself enjoy the simple pleasure of it.

  But then the flow of the fluid touched a different fragment of recall. Suddenly he was drowning in icy salt water, the cold filling his throat and his lungs, the impossible force crushing him like the fingers of a giant hand. He choked and spat out the liquid, gasping and retching, shock throwing him forward. Wires hanging from sensor disks on his throat and his chest pulled taut, others tearing away, sending contradictory signals to the monitoring devices crowded at the head of the bed.

  A tidal wave of absolute panic crashed over him, the brutal and unstoppable force ripping away all his defenses, crushing his will in an instant. He knew that this was death pressing in on him, knew it without question because he had been through it before, more than once.

  The first time, it had been a cauldron of razors and fire, ripping pieces of him away within and without, changing once and for all what he would be. He had survived that. Barely.

  The second time, it was cold and pressure threatening to crush him into oblivion and leave nothing behind.

  He remembered some of it now. Not a distinct chronology of events, not second by second, but flashes of action disconnected from one another. A random pattern of blinding, painful moments held together like pearls on a string.

  The shrieking of tortured metal under the impact of a colossal volume of polar ocean. The wild screams of the mad and the dying. The thunder of his fading heartbeat. Lances of light through glassy, shifting waters. And a terrible knowing, a certainty that he would die out there and nothing would stop that from happening.

  I should be dead. The thought grew, sharp and diamond-hard.

  His artificial eyes adjusted steadily, the color tone of the room shifting as it gained greater definition. Digging deep, he reached past the fear and found the steel that had never left him. Took it, held on to it.

  The next breath was rough, but it was controlled. By force of will, he moderated his ragged breathing and concentrated on calming his racing pulse. In the corner of his vision, a softly blinking warning icon faded to nothing as the hammering of his heart subsided. Sweat beaded on his flesh, and he swallowed hard.

  “I remember the sea.” They were the first words he had spoken in months. “The cold.”

  “You’re very lucky to be alive,” said another voice. A man, this one, the accent behind it a firm northwestern burr while the woman had sounded more like a southerner. Those facts emerged in his thoughts automatically, some ingrained means in his mind immediately sifting their words for data, for clues.

  He blinked again and now he could see them better. The woman, of average height with a dark face framed by a white headscarf; the man pale and fatigued. Both of them wore doctor’s coats and cradled digital pads in their hands. At their shoulders, a small monitor drone the size of a softball floated on a cluster of whispering impellers, patiently framing everything in the room with a blue-tinted lens.

  The woman tried on a practiced smile. “You were clinically deceased when they plucked you out of the ocean. But a combination of the chill and the actions of your Sentinel implant kept you from going beyond our reach. They were able to pull you back.”

  “A lot of other people weren’t so fortunate,” said the male doctor, and there was an edge of reproach to the words.

  He settled back against the mattress, pushing the squeeze bottle away,
uncertain how to respond. His thoughts were still churning and disordered, and when he closed his eyes all he saw was a torrent of jumbled recollections that had no sense of order or narrative. He looked down again at his hands, his arms. Both of them were identical, carbon-black synthetic constructs that terminated at his shoulder joints. Once they had been smooth and polished, but now they were scarred and pitted with surface damage. He tried to remember the time before he’d had them, but for now there was a blank space where any memory of meat and bone might have once existed.

  Touching his bare chest, he found healed scars but again, nothing to connect them to. The part of him that was flesh felt almost as artificial as the metal and plastic.

  “Is there anything else?” said the woman. “Anything more you remember?”

  “Darrow.” Unbidden, the name floated up to the surface of his consciousness and drifted there.

  The two doctors exchanged a look, a silent communication passing between them. “Do you know who that is?” she asked.

  “He died up there.” Past the pair of them, the wall came into sharper focus and it was suddenly clear that he was looking out of a window on to a snow-covered landscape. The near-absence of color in the surroundings, the room, the people before him, it knocked loose another shard of recall and he remembered being in a different white room. Someone there had been important to him. The memory brought with it a bitter sting of emotions that he could not parse. He shook his head, forcing the moment away.

  “Can you tell us?”

  “My name is Adam Jensen,” he said, cutting down the question as his impatience flared. “I remember who I am. But not where the hell this is.”

  * * *

  Within a day, the two doctors – the woman was named Rafiq and the man McFadden – decided he was lucid enough to leave the recovery room and move to the facility proper. They described it as a place to heal, but it wasn’t like any hospital Jensen had ever spent time in.

  Rafiq told Jensen he had been a police officer once, and he recalled pieces of that life, more and more of it as the days passed by.

  This place reminded him of the secure wards where, as a cop, he had sent psychologically unstable criminals – not quite a prison, more like an asylum. What that said about how he was seen by his doctors made him uncomfortable.

  When Jensen asked them if there was a next-of-kin he could talk to, they told him they had no records of anyone – but he was free to place a vu-phone call to anywhere he wanted. An instinctive reaction that came out of nowhere made him lie; Jensen told them he didn’t recall any contacts, but that wasn’t true. He just didn’t want them listening in on any communications he made. As for his infolink implant, that stayed resolutely offline, doubtless disabled along with anything else that might have made him troublesome.

  Facility 451 was a collection of prefabricated modules that had been assembled into an unlovely pile of blocky shapes, and parked out in the sparse landscape of the Kenai Peninsula. Two decades of unrestricted corporate exploitation and rampant pollution had turned this part of Alaska from carpet of forest into a bleak shadow of its former self, a naked space of half-dead scrubland coated with gray, polluted snow. Remote and thinly populated, the World Health Organization had chosen it as one of a dozen sites for places like 451. They called them ‘processing clinics’, but as Jensen walked the limits of its corridors and high fences, he found himself thinking of other, less palatable ways to describe it.

  There were people here from all ethnicities, all walks of life, and a broad spectrum of ages and backgrounds. There was only one common denominator: everybody had an augmentation of some kind, from replacement limbs to cyberoptics or neural implants.

  The character of the clinic’s residents was the kind of forced-together, beaten-down community he had seen in skid row districts and shantytowns, or the envirorefugee camps in the Kansas dustbowl and the flood zones down in Florida. At first, the other ‘processees’ – no-one ever called them patients or inmates – kept their distance from him, leaving Jensen to eat alone in the cavernous cafeteria or walk in silence around the yard during the hours of weak daylight.

  And that was okay. He needed the space and the time to get his head straight. To put everything that he could remember into some semblance of order. It came slowly for the most part, now and then in jagged fits and starts. Reminiscence was strange that way. Fragment by fragment, Jensen reassembled himself. McFadden told him blankly that he had been in a comatose state for months, and he personally had never expected Jensen to recover. A man doesn’t cheat death twice, said the doctor.

  “Beg to differ,” Jensen said aloud, answering the memory. His breath made a puff of white vapor that escaped into the air.

  “What’s that?”

  He turned as someone came walking his way, deck shoes that were way too light for this chill climate crunching on frost-covered asphalt. Jensen saw a stout man with a round face and the kind of deep, leathery tan you only get from a lifetime of working outside. He had the fuzz of an ill-kept beard and a bald, slightly uneven head. Jensen stood taller than the new arrival, and as he met his gaze, he saw the man had natural eyes. Curiosity was clear there, but caution too.

  “Nothing important,” Jensen told him. “Just thinking out loud.”

  “Right on.” The man wandered to the fence line and placed both his hands on it. Like Jensen, his body was mechanical from shoulders to fingertips. But where Jensen’s cybernetic arms were athletic and sleek in design, this guy’s augmentations were heavy sleeves of battered metal that resembled parts of a construction vehicle scaled down to human size. Thick hands with an additional thumb each side made claws and held on to the chain links of the fence. The metal barrier creaked audibly under his grip. “Some view,” he added.

  “Better without the fence,” Jensen replied.

  “I heard that,” the man replied with feeling, then turned and offered him a handshake, as if his reply had been the right answer to some unspoken question. “Folks call me Stacks. You’re Jensen, right?”

  He accepted the gesture. “You know me?”

  Stacks nodded toward the clinic, where two orderlies in heavy parkas had gathered to watch the pair of them, another monitor drone circling lazily over their heads. “Heard them say your name.”

  Jensen studied the orderlies. He’d seen the stunner truncheons they carried and the Buzzkill tasers in their quick-draw holsters. Why the WHO needed armed guards in a place for healing people was a question that nobody had a good answer for. But then again, none of the orderlies had visible enhancements of any kind. Being around so many augmented people had to make them nervous. He looked away. “West Coast, right? Where you’re from?”

  The other man broke into a brief grin. “You got it. Tell that from how I talk?” He didn’t wait for Jensen to reply. “Yeah, from Seattle. Lived there my whole life, until…” A shadow passed over his face. “Well, y’know. I was a steeplejack. Building towers and alla that. What about you?”

  “I used to be a cop.”

  Stacks nodded again. “I figured. You got the look.” He paused, clearly framing his next words. “People are wonderin’. They ain’t seen you before, then here you are. Questions getting asked.”

  “Let me guess, you drew the short straw. Go talk to the new guy.”

  He chuckled. “Something like that.” He went on: “Most of us have been here a while. Tends to be that folks get rotated out, if they’re lucky… But not a lot of fresh faces come in, know what I mean?”

  “I really don’t,” Jensen said, watching him carefully. “New here, like I said.”

  Stacks eyed him. “Well, not exactly. I mean, you been here a while too, but on ice, yeah? There’s a bunch of folks like that, in the coma ward. Never woke up. Not like you. Sleeping beauties, we call ’em.”

  “McFadden told me I was lucky.” A gust of cold wind whipped around Jensen’s shoulders. The clinic had provided a thin, military-surplus jacket, and he pulled it close. “I’m not really fe
eling it.”

  When Stacks spoke again, his tone shifted. “There’s talk about you and the other sleepers. Say you were out there, in the middle of it all when it happened. Right at the heart of the action, up in the Arctic. That so?”

  Icy salt water and crushing pressure. He tensed at the memory. “Panchaea.” Jensen said the name without thinking. It was as if uttering it opened another floodgate in his memory. He was assailed by a rush of confused images, all of them dominated by a vision of a hole in the ocean, an endless black well into nothingness. He shook off the moment. “Yeah. I was there.”

  Stacks’s face hardened. “Were you part of it?”

  “No.” The answer was as much a lie as it was the truth. Jensen held up his machine hand. “We were all part of it, right?”

  “Yeah. True enough.” The grim cast in the other man’s eyes faded. “I… I lost my wife and my daughter that day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Stacks gave a hollow sigh that seemed to come from miles distant. “So am I.”

  Jensen changed tack. “How long have you been here?”

  “Since it happened.” Stacks let go of the fence and stepped away. Jensen saw the orderlies visibly relax. “I lost a lot. Up here.” He tapped his temple with a thick metal finger. “Gettin’ right takes time, I know that. But I thought I’d be done by now.” He shot a look at the two guards and gave them a humorless smile. “They’re scared I’m gonna do somethin’ crazy. Rip a hole in this here fence and make a run for it.”

  “Are they right?” Jensen glanced up as the first drops of a dirty rain began to fall.

  When Stacks replied, it sounded like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Might just be, one of these days.” He started walking. “C’mon. Too damn cold out here, man.”

  But as Jensen turned to follow him inside, he saw that a third guard had joined the other two. A severe-looking man wearing a data monocle, he scanned the yard and found Jensen. “You,” he called out, his voice carrying. “Got a visitor.”

  Jensen’s jaw stiffened. Who knows I’m here?