Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  “Don’t get your hopes up.” He found Stacks looking at him glumly. “Trust me, ain’t what you want it to be,” he said, reading the question in his gaze. “Not by a long shot.”

  * * *

  They took Jensen to a part of the clinic that he had never seen before, a lower level where daylight didn’t reach and the sickly glow of florescent lamps made everything look like it was coated in a layer of grimy transparent plastic.

  The guard opened a door and Jensen entered a chamber that could only be described as an interrogation room. A cluster of monitoring devices looked down from behind an armored glass bowl set in the middle of ceiling, above a metal table bolted to the tiled floor. On his side of the table, a metal chair. On the other, the same but occupied by a rail-thin woman of average height in a characterless black jacket and trousers. She didn’t look up as he walked in, engrossed in the glowing display of a digital pad. The cold color of the screen reflected off a milk-pale face, framed by short, shock-red hair. He spotted the telltale dermal markers of neural implants, and saw that her right hand – delicate and long-fingered like its organic twin – was made of brushed steel. Her manner and her outfit screamed government agent to Jensen’s ingrained cop instincts.

  He dropped into the empty chair without waiting to be asked and rubbed the unkempt stubble on his chin. The woman’s gaze flicked up to study him, then back to the digital pad. The quiet between them stretched, and Jensen’s lip curled. The silent treatment was one of the first questioning techniques they taught police officers in the academy, that the mere act of saying nothing would sometimes compel a suspect to fill the void with words and maybe incriminate themselves along the way.

  But this was amateur hour, and he wasn’t in the mood for it. Jensen leaned forward across the table and fixed the woman with a hard eye. “If you’re gonna make me wait,” he began, “I could use a cup of coffee.”

  Was that the ghost of a smirk on her face? It was gone before he could be sure, and she flicked one of those long fingers over the surface of the pad. Jensen caught the sound of a high-pitched buzz from beneath the surface of the table, and without warning his right arm slammed down and locked firmly against it, pinned there as if it had been pressed into place by an invisible hand.

  There was a thick steel bracelet around his arm; it had been there when he woke up in the recovery room, and Dr. Rafiq had promised him that it was just a medical monitoring unit to keep tabs on his wellbeing. Jensen hadn’t bought that for a second, not after he’d seen the same thing on Stacks and all the other residents of 451, but he hadn’t figured it would work like an actual restraint. Buried in the table, there had to be an electromagnetic generator that was keeping his arm in place. The woman, he noticed, was sitting exactly far enough away to be out of reach of his one free hand.

  “All your offensive aug systems were inhibited after your initial recovery,” she said, confirming his earlier suspicions. Her accent was mid-American but deliberately colorless. She put the digital pad on the table and produced a wallet from her pocket, unfolding it to present him with a badge and identity card. In the process, Jensen caught a glimpse of the butt of a matte black pistol protruding from an underarm holster. “I’m Agent Jenna Thorne, with Homeland Security.”

  “Federal Protective Service…” He read the information off the digital ID card. “Thought you guys were just security guards.”

  The wallet went back into her pocket. “Our mandate has been greatly expanded in the last couple of years.”

  “Right…” He nodded at the bracelet. “You expecting trouble from me, Agent Thorne?”

  “That’s part of the job.” She glanced up at the monitor cluster, and Jensen saw it rotate to present a different camera head to peer down at him.

  He made himself very still. If this woman wanted to play head games, that was fine. She had information that he wanted to know as much as the reverse was true.

  “You know why you’re here?”

  “People tell me it’s because I’m lucky.”

  Thorne went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Facility four-five-one is part of a network of medical clinics set up to help the victims of the Aug Incident reintegrate into society.”

  Despite himself, Jensen’s eyes narrowed. “Is that what they’re calling it? An ‘incident’?”

  “You name a thing and you rob it of its power, Mr. Jensen,” offered Thorne. “Nine-Eleven. The Vilama Superquake. The Cat Fives. The Incident. Give it a name and you can put it in a box, contain it. It’s an important coping mechanism. It helps people to rebuild.”

  “In my experience, it takes a lot more than that.”

  She nodded. “And you do have experience, don’t you? More than enough human disasters in your personal narrative. The situation in Mexicantown when you were with Detroit SWAT, the terrorist attack on Sarif Industries—”

  “They weren’t terrorists,” he corrected, then halted. He’d given her an opening, and he retreated from it, trying another approach. “You act like you know a lot about me. Maybe you could help me with something.” He tapped a finger on his brow. “Like where I’ve been for the last year.”

  Thorne spread her hands. “Here, Mr. Jensen. You’ve been here, as I understand it, slowly climbing your way back out of the coma you were in when they found you in the Arctic Ocean.” She leaned in. “What I’m interested in is where you were before you took a swim. What you were doing at the Panchaea facility and what part you played in its collapse.”

  “I don’t recall.” But that wasn’t true, and they both knew it.

  Built as part of an experimental weather modification program, the keystone in a process that would attempt to reverse the creeping trends of global warming, Panchaea was a vast complex rising up from the sea bed, layers of complex systems using current control, iron seeding and dozens of other methods to turn back the clock on the thawing of the polar icepack.

  All of it a false front, of course. Jensen didn’t doubt that the reasons for building Panchaea, and the people who had the vision to make it happen, were genuine. But others had taken that ideal and used it as a cover for something sinister.

  His personal crusade to learn the truth about the attack on Sarif – the attack that had almost killed him – came full circle in the closing months of 2027, as Jensen had journeyed to that hole in the ocean and learned what really lurked down there. Thinking machines that used kidnapped human beings as component parts, devices turned to the work of a callous, secretive power group that had been lurking in the shadows of human civilization for centuries.

  And with all of that, the fruits of a plan originated by one bitter genius who had been rejected by his greatest discovery. A Frankenstein out to kill his monster. A Daedalus intent on tearing away his wings.

  “Were you present when Hugh Darrow died?” Thorne’s question was a scalpel, bright and cutting.

  “I don’t recall,” he repeated. But he did. Because he had been there, and he had seen what Darrow had wrought, firsthand.

  The man the world had once called the father of human augmentation technology, forever prevented from experiencing his creation himself thanks to a rare genetic disorder, Darrow had devised a scheme that was breathtaking in its scope and its sheer horror. The scientist had engineered a way to reach almost every augmented person on the planet at once, via secretly implanted biochips that triggered a catastrophic neurochemical imbalance – an artificially induced psychotic break. Their fight-or-flight reflexes stimulated beyond all rationality, those affected sank into a haze of temporary madness. In their wake, there was death and destruction that burned cities, shattered lives and tore a ragged wound in society. Darrow wanted to show the world that his creation was a dangerous mistake, to make people fear it – but beneath that, it was his buried spite at being left behind that made him lash out… and millions were still paying the price.

  Jensen had been spared, for reasons he still wasn’t fully certain of, but people like Stacks, the others in Facility 451 and
elsewhere had been forced to endure the plague of madness. Darrow’s scheme was cut short, but they were still suffering.

  Worse still, the people behind Darrow, the ones who wanted to use his mechanism to control rather than destroy the augmented… They were still out there.

  “After the incident, after all the damage done, it was inevitable that Panchaea would be wrecked… But there is evidence that you were in the core of that facility, just prior to the final collapse of its structural protection systems.” Thorne cocked her head, studying him with her blank, doll-like cyberoptic eyes. “What did you see in there? How did you get out when the flood controls went offline?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Recall, yes, so you keep saying,” Thorne spoke over him. “Darrow was insane. He got what he deserved. No-one on Earth will question that, not after what happened. But the loss of Panchaea… There’s a lot of unresolved issues surrounding that. A lot of blame that until now has been unassigned. Do you follow me?”

  “I went there to stop him.” The moment the words slipped from his mouth, Jensen regretted the admission. “And I nearly died because of it. That’s all I have to tell you.”

  “Really?” Thorne raised an eyebrow. “So, with Darrow at the bottom of the sea somewhere, we should all just move on? Is that what you think?”

  He shifted in his chair, frowning as his arm remained firmly set in place on the table. “You’re the one who talked about coping. Rebuilding.”

  “For that, we need to know who gave Darrow the means to do what he did. The man might have been a billionaire but his resources weren’t limitless.”

  Jensen concentrated on maintaining a neutral poker face, but it wasn’t easy. Pieces of memory kept rising out of the depths of his thoughts when he least expected them, sometimes triggered by a word, a sound or a smell. When Thorne talked about Panchaea, things he might rather have forgotten pressed into his consciousness, fully formed and real.

  At first, Jensen had felt a directionless kind of anger burning away inside him. A fury directed at ghosts he couldn’t name, couldn’t see. But with each passing day, each hour, more and more of it was coming into sharp focus.

  Illuminati. The word was ancient, heavy with contradictory meanings, double-speak and fantasy. It was a catch-all term; it conjured up images of cabals stocked with old men intent on running the world, of self-selected elites ruling the lesser masses by guile and force. Decades of sensationalist fiction and half-truths made it seem more legend than reality. Just a scare story, a lunatic conspiracy theory for the credulous.

  But the fiction was the fact. Jensen had learned that through bloody example, in the aftermath of the attack on Sarif Industries and then in the days that followed. While Hugh Darrow’s part in the Illuminati’s complex web of schemes had ultimately been stopped, the puppeteers holding the man’s strings had faded back into the shadows, untouched and unpunished.

  “He must have had help,” Thorne was saying. “Dangerous allies. People who need to be brought to justice.”

  They have operatives everywhere. A warning voice sounded in the back of Jensen’s thoughts. “Guess you got your work cut out for you, then,” he said, after a moment.

  The truth was, trust and raw gut instinct were what had kept Adam Jensen alive in those days after the SI attack. Those instincts were telling him now that Jenna Thorne was not someone he could confide in.

  “Tell me what you know.” Thorne enunciated each word, coldly and firmly. “Otherwise, I’m going to think you have something to hide, Mr. Jensen. And those issues of blame will need to be considered.”

  He sensed something odd in the air of the room, a sudden feeling that made the flesh on the back of his neck prickle. Thorne was trying to play him; those cybernetic eyes of hers weren’t the only body-mods she had working to read his intentions. Jensen was willing to bet that the agent was also augmented with a social interaction enhancer, an insidious piece of tech that allowed the user to get real-time data from a conversation subject and manipulate them with it, even coerce them with a controlled pheromone release. He wasn’t going to fall for that.

  “You can think whatever you damn well want,” he said, his patience running thin. “But right now, if you’re not helping me piece together the blanks in my memory, or walking me out of this place, why the hell should I keep talking?” Jensen leaned back. “I reckon I’m done here.”

  Thorne seemed like she was about to shoot off some kind of sharp retort, but then she caught herself and reeled it back in. “For now,” she told him, and tapped the digital pad again.

  The buzzing from beneath the table ceased abruptly and Jensen’s arm jerked as it was released. He grimaced, flexing the artificial muscles.

  “We’re done for now,” she repeated, and left the room.

  * * *

  He told himself he was doing it just to keep his mind sharp, to try and conjure up a little of his old skill set, but after another day or two of walking the perimeter of 451, Jensen had the beginnings of an escape plan. It wouldn’t be simple, though. There were whole areas of the facility that were off-limits to the processees, and for now he only had rough estimates of guard numbers and security systems.

  And then there was the bracelet. He looked down at it as he walked, fingering the surface of the device. Jensen had no doubt it was broadcasting his exact location right that second, and unless he could find a way to spoof its signal or remove the thing entirely, any attempt to leave Facility 451 would be a wasted effort.

  No-one here was being told they were a prisoner, but the lack of open doors and the bleak remoteness of the location put the lie to that. Dr. McFadden had said something about the clinic’s isolation being for purposes of ‘safety’, and Jensen had to wonder exactly whose safety he was referring to. It didn’t take a lot to assume that anyone out beyond the fence line in the wider world, the ones who were not augmented, feared those who were. The ‘Incident’ had made sure of that.

  Jensen scowled at the thought and turned back toward the complex. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window as he passed, the black commas of his eye shield implants framing an angular face and haunted eyes. His beard was unkempt and too long for his liking, and the electric razor they had given him just wasn’t enough to tame it. In the end, he let it go, that and hair that had grown shaggy. He imagined that few who knew the Adam Jensen who left Detroit in 2027 would recognize the man he saw in the dull glass. He wasn’t really certain if he did. Looking himself in the eye, Jensen felt an odd sense of disconnection that didn’t sit well with him.

  Then he caught the sound of Stacks’s voice on the breeze and the moment faded.

  He found the other man in a shaded corner of the open quad, with three more of the clinic’s residents clustered around him in a threatening half-circle. The biggest of them was a broad, thickset woman with lank brown hair and a bodybuilder’s silhouette. She had worn, gunmetal cybernetic legs covered in swirling etched detail, and he pegged her as a former panzer-girl from the disbanded aug mixed martial arts leagues. At her side were two guys in the same nondescript jacket that Jensen wore. One of them had a mono-vision band across his face, turning his eyes into one seamless digital sensor grid, and the other had tech-tattoos that suggested he was packing neural implants of some kind.

  “You know how it goes,” the woman was saying, a sing-song lilt to her words. She prodded Stacks in the chest. “I mean, it’s us and them, am I right? Augs in here, natches out there. And natches ain’t gonna stick up for us. Augs gotta look out for augs, is what I’m saying.”

  “Yuh.” Mono-Eye bobbed his head in agreement, while his tattooed buddy stood by silently. Despite the content of the conversation, Jensen knew a shakedown when he saw one. The panzer-girl’s next words confirmed it.

  “That’s what we do. We look out. And it’s not much to ask that people give some consideration for that in return, Stacks. You get me?”

  “I just go my own way, Belle.” Stacks managed a weak smile. “Okay?”


  “No.” The woman prodded him again, harder this time. “Not okay.”

  Stacks caught sight of Jensen approaching at the same moment the guy with the tattoos did. The thug touched Belle on the arm and she turned to face Jensen. Her jaw hardened. “Well. New guy. You wake up now, sleeping beauty?”

  He ignored her. “Stacks. You got a minute? Need to ask you something.”

  Stacks took a cautious step past Mono-Eye, grateful for the out but wary about making it into something more. “Hey, Jensen, we’re all cool here.”

  “Jensen,” echoed the tattooed man. “The floater.” He laughed at his own joke, a quick nasal chuckle.

  Belle looked Jensen up and down with an expression that was somewhere between a sneer and a leer. She pointed at his hands. “What you got there? Sarif tech, right? I know the hardware. Top drawer.” She shrugged and ran a hand down her thigh. “Not my kind of metal, gotta say. I go TYM, all the way.”

  He didn’t look away. “What are those legs, Aries-model heavy mods? How’s that forty percent fail rate working for you?”

  Belle’s expression hardened and he knew he’d struck a nerve. Tai Yong Medical, the constant rival of Sarif Industries in the augmentation business, may have had a bigger market share but they lacked the finesse and reliability of Sarif’s high-spec engineering. She shrugged. “I’m good. Kicked a man’s head clean off one time. You wanna see me do it again?”

  “I’ll pass.” He beckoned to Stacks. “I need a coffee. Let’s get inside.”

  “See you around, Jensen,” Belle called out as they walked away, her words carrying after them.

  * * *

  Thorne stood by the window on the upper floor, and anyone who passed her by might have thought she was in some kind of fugue state. She stared down at the quad, her eyes losing focus as Jensen and the other processee moved beyond her field of vision. It would have been easy for her to run a wireless remote intrusion into the clinic’s security grid and keep following him via 451’s network of monitors, but there was no need. She’d programmed Adam Jensen’s tracer bracelet icon into her infolink’s head-up display and now she watched it drift away below her, a black diamond edged in gold moving through the corridors toward the cafeteria.