Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

“What are you doing?” Jensen demanded.

  The hacker sighed. “TYM’s acquisition team take what they want and abandon-in-place everything else. And they typically don’t bother to deep-sweep the main grid for backdoor passwords embedded by, oh, let’s say, the company’s former head of digital security.” Pritchard’s wrist-keyboard gave an answering beep and he showed a sly grin. “Done. Now those bots will register us as friendlies.” He got up and walked out of cover. “You were actually right for once, Jensen. This was easier than I thought it would be.”

  “Easy for you,” Jensen muttered.

  Pritchard ignored him and approached one of the pods. It momentarily tracked him with a red thread of laser light; then the beam snapped to green and moved on as if he wasn’t there.

  “Whoa,” said Stacks. “Your… buddy, uh, he’s real impressed with himself, yeah?”

  Jensen nodded. “And then some.” He paused, eyeing the other man as he walked awkwardly after the hacker, clearly in pain. “Can you handle this?”

  “I… got it.” Irritably, Stacks waved him away. He was sweating and his breathing was shallow. “This place, brother, it gives me the damned creeps.”

  “I hear you,” Jensen told him, the honesty of his own response giving him a moment’s pause. He offered his hand to Stacks, but the other man refused with a scowl and moved off without him, trying not to draw attention to the tremors going through the fingers at the end of his hulking arms.

  Jensen followed, but his own thoughts kept straying as a steady stream of old memories washed over him. He’d come here partly hoping to reconnect with his past, but it wasn’t working the way he wanted it to.

  Being inside the Sarif building seemed somehow unreal to him, the knowledge of the place where he had worked filtered through a lens of uncertainty. He knew the layout of the office complex intimately, but part of him felt as if he had never set foot in there before, as if it were all some kind of abstract illusion.

  Jamais vu, he remembered. That was the term for it, the polar opposite of déjà vu, the eerie sense of when something intimately familiar felt totally new. His eyes narrowed and he shook off the feeling with a physical shrug. As he did so, he caught sight of a dim corner of the atrium where the remembrance monument had been situated.

  Back in 2027, a group of mercenaries known as the Tyrants had struck the company and many lives had been lost. Jensen’s was almost counted among them. What at first had seemed like a covert attack by one of Sarif Industries’ corporate rivals was revealed as the cover for the multiple kidnappings of several of SI’s top scientists. It was only Jensen’s dogged investigation of the assault that allowed him to track down the missing in the custody of Hugh Darrow, who had secretly abducted the group to work on his biochip control scheme at the Illuminati’s behest. Everyone else had thought they were dead, many laying the blame for that at Jensen’s feet – he had been in charge of security that day – and for a long time, a monument had stood to honor their loss… and his failure. But he had always known they were alive.

  I always knew she was still alive, thought Jensen.

  “Why don’t you just get it over with and ask the question?” He turned to find Pritchard close by, watching him intently. The other man nodded toward the smoke-blackened monument.

  “What happened to… the others?” He frowned, angry at himself for being unable to draw up the words he really wanted to utter. “You said David Sarif went off the grid, but what about the rest?”

  “For the most part, the people who worked here were either caught up in the incident or else they scattered to the four winds soon after.” Pritchard folded his arms. “I know that Sarif’s assistant, Athene… she quit after what happened. Couldn’t live with herself being part of the company after all the chaos. She was the first to go. Your security teams were kicked out when Tai Yong bought up the company assets.” He paused, thinking. “Malik, the pilot… Last time I saw her she was with you, heading off to Hengsha, so you would know better than me.” Pritchard shook his head. “But we both know who you’re really interested in.”

  Jensen bit out the name. “Megan Reed.”

  The hacker gave a nod. “I’ll never understand that woman’s attachment to you, Jensen. You were never good for her.”

  There were a hundred different retorts that pushed at Jensen for release, and for a brief moment he hated Pritchard for making him face that cold truth head-on. He must have seen that flash of pure fury in Jensen’s eyes, because Pritchard’s superior expression slipped for a moment.

  “I went halfway around the world for her,” Jensen said, at length. “I found out the truth.”

  And that truth was complex and troubling. Before coming to work at Sarif, they had been lovers, even spoke of settling down together, and although it hadn’t worked out, Jensen could not deny that he had still carried some affection for her. Maybe that had been what fueled his search after the Tyrants attacked, at least at first. But in the end, he had discovered that Megan Reed’s priorities were very different from his own.

  She’d kept secrets from him, sampling his DNA in hopes of isolating his unique super-compatibility, even ensuring he would be offered a job at Sarif Industries to keep him close. And when at last he had confronted her with that, her reaction wasn’t what he’d expected. Megan believed she was working in the name of a greater good, and Jensen still wasn’t sure if she was right or wrong.

  Pritchard’s tone shifted. “All I know is that Megan came back to Detroit after Panchaea, and then she vanished. But there have been rumors that she’s working for Versalife, maybe in their Hong Kong or San Francisco labs.”

  “And Versalife is an Illuminati front.” Jensen let that sink in. “I don’t know what to make of that.”

  “For what it’s worth… I’m sorry,” said the hacker.

  Jensen took whatever emotional reaction was forming and crushed it before it could coalesce. “It’s over and done,” he said firmly. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  * * *

  Stacks was waiting for them by the elevator bank, and Pritchard ran another bypass subroutine to call a lift car down from the upper floors. Jensen drew his gun and reloaded it as they began their ascent to the laboratory levels, while Stacks kept to the corner of the elevator, panting hard.

  Pritchard eyed the other man and shot Jensen a questioning look, but he said nothing.

  “What are the odds this place will have what we need?” Jensen watched the floor number display count up and up. “Didn’t you say Tai Yong stripped most of it?”

  “Only what was portable, and what their goons could actually get into.” Pritchard gave a brief, smug smile. “Someone might have tampered with the key codes on his way out the door…”

  “Can… we get out soon?” Stacks breathed. “Too close in here.”

  There was a hollow ping and the elevator halted, the doors parting to reveal darkness beyond them. “We’re here,” said Jensen.

  “Testing and quality control,” Pritchard told them. “Main power is off on this floor, but I should be able to get the emergency batteries up and running.” He reached into the daypack on his back, retrieving a spherical drone. The hacker gave it a twist and tossed it into the air, where it floated away on micro-rotors. The unit immediately cast out a weak orange glow that spilled over desks, chairs and other equipment, casting strange, jumping shadows.

  Jensen stepped out, his pistol raised, with Pritchard right behind him.

  Stacks came last, but he made it only a few steps before his trembling iron hands came up to his face and he started screaming.

  FIVE

  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. 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 g
round. 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.

&
nbsp; 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.”