Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  “That junk’ll poison you,” he told the other man. “It’s gotta be old enough to have kids.”

  Stacks offered him a stale Proenergy bar. “Don’t get to be picky. So. What about your guy?”

  Jensen reluctantly took the packet. “Any second now…”

  “Let me know how it goes.” Opening a salvaged pack of caffeine sticks, Stacks lit one with a shaky hand and wandered outside.

  Within a day of being there, Jensen had realized that Facility 451 was surrounded by a masking field that smothered any kind of long-range cellular signals. While he was inside, his implanted infolink was dead metal, unable to transmit or receive, blocked from even the most basic tracking signal. But now he was a few miles clear of 451, and with nothing to interrupt the feed, the infolink was rebooting itself. The start sequence concluded, and for anyone who knew the implant’s covert contact protocols, Adam Jensen was effectively back on the grid.

  Two minutes later, a familiar voice echoed through the transceiver implant in Jensen’s mastoid bone. “Who is this?” The demand was brusque and distrustful.

  “Hello, Francis.”

  On the other end of the line, Jensen heard a sharp intake of breath. “Identify yourself. Or I cut this transmission right now and scrub the contact.”

  “I don’t have time for games, Pritchard. It’s me. I figured you’d still be monitoring this comm-code.”

  “After a year of silence?” Frank Pritchard’s tone rose, becoming terse and sneering. “Maybe I should—” He stopped, catching himself, and his manner changed. “Adam Jensen was listed as missing presumed dead after the destruction of the Panchaea complex. I have no reason to believe that fact isn’t true. If you’re Jensen, prove it.”

  “Your middle name is Wendell. Your hacker handle is Nuclearsnake. With a number 3. Good enough?”

  “Any competent investigator could dig up that data.”

  “You’re also a prick.”

  There was a long pause. “Well,” said Pritchard at length. “If you’re not Jensen, you’re a very convincing emulation of him.” He paused again. “Locator ping is showing you in… Alaska? Perhaps you could provide some kind of explanation as to why—”

  “No time,” Jensen cut him off. “If you got the location, you know exactly where I am. I need a ride, Pritchard, and I need it now.”

  “Is that all? You contact me out of the blue because you need a favor?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. Can you do it?”

  “Of course I can do it,” the hacker snorted. “Where do you need to go?”

  The door banged open and Stacks rushed in. “Jensen! I seen a chopper, off out to the west, lights scanning the road. Coming this way.” He shook his head. “We got about five minutes before they’re here, no more.”

  He nodded to the other man and looked away. “Detroit,” he told Pritchard. “It’s time I came home.”

  THREE

  DETROIT – MICHIGAN – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  It was cramped and uncomfortable in the automated truck’s maintenance compartment, barely big enough for the two men to share it without stepping on top of one another. But somehow they managed the journey in companionable silence for the most part, Stacks gently snoring his way through it and Jensen hovering on the edge of the same, but never quite allowing himself to slip fully away into sleep.

  With nothing but a small glass porthole in the hatchway, there was no view to speak of, and so Jensen gave up on marking the passage of time as the vehicle headed eastward through the day and into the night. It was early evening when he felt the truck start to slow down from the constant pace it had kept up since Alaska, and he nudged Stacks with his boot.

  “I’m awake,” grumbled the other man. “We there yet?”

  “Looks like.” The truck rocked and he felt it shifting lanes, until finally it came to a halt. The hatch hissed open on hydraulics and a gust of cold, damp air blew in. Jensen climbed out, grimacing at the aches in his back as his boots hit the road.

  Stacks was a step behind him, taking a deep, grateful breath. “Man, that whole rig stinks of oil. I almost forgot what fresh air tastes like.” He coughed and spat. “Well, not that this air is so fresh, neither…”

  They were barely out of the compartment before the hatch hissed shut and the truck rumbled away, leaving them behind on the shoulder of the freeway. Jensen glanced around, finding a road sign telling him they were on an elevated section of I-94 – the Detroit Industrial Expressway, just past Dearborn. As he got his bearings, he turned around and found the dark band of the river to the east, beyond the ill-lit streets of Mexicantown. And further to the north, the city of Detroit itself, a cluster of skyscrapers that glowed faintly through the low cloud. A fire was burning steadily out there, and the flames reflected off the bottom of the cloudbank, giving it a sullen glow. Jensen picked out the Renaissance Center toward the riverfront and used that as a reference mark to search for the twin pillars of the Sarif Industries building.

  For a jarring moment, it seemed as if the towers had been erased from the skyline. He was used to seeing the glass and steel spars lit from within by soft golden light for miles around. His optics adjusted for the distance, and he realized what was wrong.

  The Sarif towers were still there, but they were pitch dark against the night sky, no illumination visible in them except for the pinpricks of crimson aircraft warning lights at the very highest levels.

  Stacks made a show of looking around. “Nice place here. Now I’m wishing I’d got your buddy Pritchard to detour us to Seattle instead.”

  “He’ll get you there, if that’s what you want.”

  “Maybe…” Stacks winced and shifted his arm stiffly. “Don’t know if I’m ready to go back,” he went on, almost to himself.

  Jensen crossed to the guard rail, casting a wary look over his shoulder at the traffic streaming past behind him on the freeway. He pressed a fingertip to his mastoid bone, bringing his infolink out of sleep mode. “Pritchard. You there?”

  The response took a moment. “Welcome home, Jensen. A pity it’s not under better circumstances.” Was that sarcasm, or a note of real regret in the other man’s voice? It was hard to tell with someone like Frank Pritchard. “There’s a metro station to your northeast. Get there, head into the ticket hall.”

  “Copy,” he nodded, beckoning Stacks to follow him.

  “Watch your step,” Pritchard added, “and try not to draw any attention. This city’s not how it was when you were last here.”

  The two of them slipped over the rail and made their way down a steep embankment, emerging in what used to be the grounds of a public park. Once there had been a line of trees to screen off the area from the noise of the freeway, but all of them had been cut down for firewood, with lines of ragged stumps protruding from the yellowing, piebald grass.

  The park was choked with people, hundreds of the homeless packed into a makeshift campground built out of discarded packing materials, the shells of stripped vehicles and ragged sails of plastic sheeting. Groups of them clustered around oil drum fires, while others stayed concealed in the deep shadows that fell in the gloom. There were no working streetlights, many of them cut down like the trees and others torn open at the root so power-snatchers could tap into the city’s electrical grid.

  Wary faces caught sight of Jensen and Stacks, some seeing strangers and electing to turn away, others measuring them with rapacious, threatening gazes.

  “Didn’t we just leave this party?” muttered Stacks.

  “No guards here, though,” Jensen said quietly.

  “Wanna bet?” The other man nodded toward the gates of the park, where a police cruiser slowly rode past, a cop in the passenger seat using a handheld spotlight to cast a beam over the faces of the dispossessed and desperate.

  “Hey,” said a voice, and Jensen felt a tug on the hem of his jacket. He looked down and saw an emaciated young woman with an athlete’s recurved cyberlegs splayed out beside her. The legs were Kusanagi mode
ls, he noted – a high-grade brand, not that it seemed to matter here. The woman held up a crumpled disposable cup, gesturing with a stub where her other arm should have been. It ended at the elbow joint in a cluster of bare metal connectors and trailing wires. “You help a sister out? Spare some change or a little nu-poz, yeah?”

  Jensen’s lips thinned. “I can’t do anything for you.”

  The woman turned her attention on Stacks. “How about it?”

  Stacks hesitated, his expression tightening. “I… I don’t have any pozy on me, girl. I’m real sorry about that.”

  “Then fuck off,” she snapped, her expression turning spiteful.

  “Look, I—” Stacks started to say something else, but Jensen pulled him away.

  “You heard the lady. Come on. Keep walking.”

  “Yeah, you better!” shouted the woman, rising unsteadily to her feet. “Don’t come down here and pretend you’re better than us! Goddamn wrench!” She hissed, flinching in pain with each step she took after them, finally tottering to a halt.

  Jensen had seen the effects of neuropozyne withdrawal before, and it was always an ugly, sorrowful sight. Part of the forced bargain anyone with human augmentations had to make, synthetic anti-rejection drugs like neuropozyne were a necessary evil. Anyone who had an implant or a cybernetic limb was subject to a condition known as DDS – Darrow Deficiency Syndrome – where glial tissue would slowly build up around the interface between the augmentation’s electrode pick-ups and the implantee’s nerves. Neuropozyne kept those connections working, but without regular doses, augmentations would start to misfire and cause severe pain, seizures, and in the worst cases, systemic nerve damage. The drug’s availability had always been controlled, and it had always been costly, but in the wake of the incident Jensen had to wonder how much harder it had become to get hold of it. There were few alternatives, with poisonous ‘street’ versions cooked up by criminal gangs and hazardous untested variants like riezene taking more lives than they saved.

  Stacks was asking himself the same questions. “Everyone here,” he began quietly, “Jensen, they’re all augs like us. A damn mech ghetto, is what it is. All these poor bastards, every one of them has to be hurtin’…”

  “We need to keep moving,” Jensen insisted, pushing Stacks in the direction of the park gates. Across the street was the metro station Pritchard had mentioned, above it the curves of two monorail lines threading in and out of the building. Less than thirty seconds away.

  But the woman was on the move again, coming after them once more. “You seen enough, huh?” she shrieked. “You boys go back downtown to your natch master and be good little wrenches, get your nu-poz while the rest of us choke!”

  Some of the other augs were taking notice, and Jensen felt the tension in the air building an edge.

  “You gotta have something!” cried the woman, her anger finally crumbling into a desperate sob.

  But Jensen hadn’t lied before. He’d never needed neuropozyne to keep his augmentations operable; he didn’t understand all the medical jargon behind it, but there was something different about his genetic structure. His ex-lover Megan Reed had once told him he was a ‘super-compatible’, a rare human anomaly who could accept augs without the yoke of the anti-rejection drug to keep him whole. Jensen was still undecided if that was a gift or a curse, and he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if this unique quality was some loose thread left behind by other unanswered questions from his past. Questions that for now, he had to push away, along with other troubling memories that Megan’s name brought up.

  He had more immediate problems. The woman’s tirade attracted the interest of other augs, none of whom seemed to consider Jensen and Stacks as anything other than unwanted intruders. He looked around and saw the police cruiser swinging back around. The situation was slipping toward an explosion of violence with each second that passed.

  But then Stacks was holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Look, just stop! You’re right, I’m sorry!” He dug in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a plastic packet containing a single drug capsule. “Here. This is all I’ve got.” Stacks handed it to the woman. His voice caught as he spoke again, “You just… you take it. Reckon you need it way more than I do. Okay?”

  “Thank you…” The woman reached into the pack with trembling fingers and dry-swallowed the neuropozyne. The moment of tension eased, but didn’t fade entirely. They were still unwelcome here.

  “Stacks, come on!” Jensen didn’t wait around to see if the other dispossessed augs would change their minds about them, and he hustled the other man to the gates and across the street. The light from the police car swept over them and kept on going.

  * * *

  “That girl, she…” Stacks swallowed hard. “Kinda reminded me of my daughter, you know?”

  Jensen nodded. “I get it. But you gotta focus. We’re fugitives. We have to stay anonymous.”

  “You probably reckon Ol’ Stacks, he’s a soft touch, yeah?” Stacks gave a rueful chuckle as they entered the ticket hall. The place was dimly lit and covered with graffiti and gang tags, and in one corner a line of automated vendor screens glowed with dull yellow light.

  “I’ve got no quarrel with someone putting more good into the world,” Jensen told him. “But just be careful, okay?” He took a breath and activated the infolink again. “Pritchard, we’re here.”

  “I know.”

  The voice came, not from his implanted cellular comm, but from the gloom beside the metal staircase leading to the platforms. A thin figure in a dark brown jacket over a shapeless hoodie emerged from behind the cover of an illuminated map display. Hands reached up to roll back the hood and Jensen saw Pritchard’s face there. The hacker looked drawn and weary, his tapered features appearing gaunt and hollow in the waxy half-light. He cocked his head, studying Jensen carefully, one hand firmly held inside a jacket pocket.

  Jensen eyed the bulge in his coat. “You gonna shoot me, Pritchard? I know we’ve never exactly been best buds, but I thought we’d parted on better terms than that.”

  The hacker’s manner eased a little, and he looked around, peering into the corners of the hall. “Can’t be too careful.” He leaned closer – and then suddenly Pritchard reached out and snatched a trailing hair from Jensen’s head. He backed away, producing a small handheld device, and stuffed the hair into a sample tray.

  “A DNA check?” Jensen’s eyes narrowed. “You still think I’m not who I say I am?”

  Pritchard didn’t answer, eyes flicking back and forth between Jensen and the device’s readout. After a moment, it gave a low chime, and the hacker relaxed slightly. “You could have been a surgically altered double, for all I know… Gene scan matches the samples from the company files, so now I believe you.” He looked Jensen over. “You seem well for a dead man.”

  “Thank Sarif for that. Sentinel implants kept me alive in the water.”

  “Yes, of course.” Pritchard nodded. His tone was mordant. “You’ve made survival against the odds your raison d’être. I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock to me. I might have known you’d shake off drowning just like everything else.”

  Stacks nudged Jensen in the ribs. “Man don’t seem happy to see you,” he said guardedly.

  “Pritchard’s never happy,” Jensen noted.

  “What did you expect?” snapped the hacker. “A hug? Wherever you go, trouble follows!”

  “What’s he mean?” said Stacks.

  Jensen raised a hand. “Not the time, Francis.” He put acid emphasis on the other man’s name. “Do you have what I asked you for?”

  An older man in a heavy coat walked into the ticket hall and faltered on the steps, seeing the three of them and immediately suspecting something illegal going on – which in fact, was true. Irritably, Pritchard beckoned Stacks and Jensen over to a shadowed corner and the passer-by did his best to pretend he’d seen nothing, almost at a run as he went up the steps.

  Pritchard produced two pocket
secretaries and handed them to Jensen. “Snap covers,” he explained. “Identity passes encoded on there, nothing special, plus a faked credit account with Bank of Detroit. It won’t last long, though. There’s enough for a couple of meals and a bus ticket.”

  “I don’t plan on leaving here any time soon,” Jensen shot back. “I came back to Detroit for a reason.”

  Pritchard scowled at him. “I knew talking to you was a mistake. I should have scrubbed that infolink code after they said you were dead.” He shook his head. “Jensen, things are different now. If you thought it was bad before the incident, you have no idea. This city is the last place you should be. Your face is known here. And I’m risking my own safety just being in the same place as you.”

  “Yeah.” Jensen nodded. “Gotta admit, seeing you out in the field is a new wrinkle. Since when did you get out from behind your desk?”

  “I don’t even have a desk anymore!” he said hotly. Then his tone shifted, becoming sullen. “Let’s just say, I don’t have the reach that I once did.”

  From above them, there was a low, throaty rumble as a ‘people mover’ train approached the platform, and Jensen heard an automated announcer calling off destinations. “I need to take a look,” he told Pritchard, unsure of where the impulse had really come from. “I have to see the city with my own eyes.”

  “You’ll regret it,” Pritchard relented, and he turned toward the stairs. “I already do.”

  “So we going with?” asked Stacks, with a shrug.

  “We’re going,” Jensen told him, and followed the hacker up.

  * * *

  There were only a few travelers waiting for the train, and when they spotted Jensen and Stacks emerging on to the platform, they immediately put distance between them.