Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

  Jensen’s lips thinned. He’d experienced anti-aug sentiment directed at him more than once, from subtle prejudice like people crossing the street to stay away from him, to outright bigotry with cries of ‘hanzer’ and threats of physical violence – but now there was a new hostility he sensed in the people around him, a mix of fear and anger bubbling away just beneath the surface.

  The train slid to a frictionless halt and the doors automatically hissed open. Jensen took a step toward the closest carriage, and heard Pritchard call out his name to make him wait, but it was too late. He had one foot off the platform when he found himself face-to-face with a pair of police patrolmen in black and orange body armor. They blocked his way on to the people mover, the mirrored visors across their faces making them look robotic and inhuman. “Where d’you think you’re going?” said one of them.

  The other cop jerked a thumb at a decal on the window of the carriage, right next to the NO SMOKING/NO FIREARMS sign. The decal showed the simple stick-figure icon of a male and a female against a black background with a green border. Jensen had never seen it before, and there were a dozen of them, plastered on to the windows of five of the six carriages of the people mover. “Know what that means?”

  “Enlighten me,” said Jensen.

  “It means naturals only,” said the first cop, and he shoved Jensen back a step with the heel of his hand, his other dropping to the grip of a nightstick hanging from his hip. He nodded in the direction of the rear of the train. “Get back there.”

  Jensen was tired and it was making him short-tempered. He hesitated on the brink of giving the two patrolmen some choice words, but reeled back the urge, remembering his own advice to Stacks.

  The rearmost carriage of the monorail bore a different symbol on the doors, the same man-woman icons but this time bordered in red. He noticed that both of the abstract figures had an arm or a leg colored crimson to indicate the presence of an artificial limb.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Stacks.

  “The segregation rules came in a while after the incident,” Pritchard told him. “Augmented humans are second-class citizens these days.”

  Jensen followed them aboard, and glanced down at the homeless encampment in the park as the people mover sped away from the station. “And everyone just let it happen?”

  Pritchard eyed him. “Do you really think that people gave a moment’s thought to the rights of the augmented after seventy percent of them went on a psychotic rampage? Things moved fast, Jensen. Anyone who didn’t accept the decommissioning of their cyberware had to sign up for registration, stringent controls, enforced licensing… compulsory confinement and hardware removal for the non-compliant ones. These days, if you’re an aug and you’re not eking out a life on expensive, insufficient nu-poz allocations, you’re either rich or you’re indentured to someone who is.” He spread his hands. “It’s a brave new slave economy.”

  The bleak tone in the other man’s words was something Jensen had never heard from Frank Pritchard before. Beneath his usually waspish and arrogant exterior, something had changed. Like everything else, it seemed, Pritchard had gone through a lot during Jensen’s missing time.

  “I saw the towers,” said Jensen, nodding toward the city skyline. “What happened to Sarif?”

  “The man or the company?” Pritchard gave a humorless chuckle.

  “Both.”

  Stacks stood at the window, watching the buildings flash by, while Pritchard took a seat across from Jensen and leaned close, lowering his voice. “Around here, David Sarif isn’t a name you want people hearing you say. Remember all his bold plans about making Detroit ‘a beacon city’, about bringing back technology, prosperity and jobs?” He shook his head. “All gone, crumbled to dust. That golden future he talked about? Turns out it was toxic.”

  The last time Jensen had seen David Sarif, his employer was at the Panchaea complex, having arrived there as part of a political gambit only to become caught up in Hugh Darrow’s apocalyptic plans. He remembered Sarif imploring him to confront Darrow and make the right choice for the greater good, but after the collapse of the facility, Jensen had not known if the man had made it out alive.

  He listened intently as Pritchard laid out the whole sorry story. Jensen wasn’t surprised to learn that Sarif had got away aboard a private mini-sub, but as the hacker explained, it wasn’t without cost. “His submersible was damaged getting to the surface, and by the time the UN rescue ships got him on board, he was suffering from severe nitrogen narcosis. He was in a coma, you see? And so he slept through most of everything that came after.”

  A coma. Jensen felt a strange flicker of recognition. Sarif and me both, dead to the world while everything we knew unraveled.

  Pritchard went on. “In the weeks that followed, people were desperate for someone, anyone, to hold responsible for the incident. There were attacks on every augmentation manufacturer worldwide, on tech labs and research centers… They burned down the LIMB clinics.”

  Jensen nodded grimly. Liberty in Mind and Body International, also known as LIMB, were the world’s largest network of cyberware clinics, and for many they were the modern face of human augmentation. They would have been the most immediate, most visible targets for any angry retaliation. There was a kind of horrible irony in that, as it had been covert agents working through LIMB who laid the groundwork for the incident’s night of chaos, by implanting biochip controls during a mass firmware upgrade that let Darrow’s signal do its work.

  “One by one, all the major human enhancement corporations have gone under. Isolay was the first to declare bankruptcy, then Kusanagi, Caidin Global…” Pritchard trailed off. “A couple of the little fish are still swimming, but they won’t last beyond the end of the year. The only one of the majors that is holding together is Tai Yong Medical.”

  Jensen scowled. “Figures. They just roll right on, like nothing has happened.” Both men knew that Tai Yong was backed not just by the Chinese government, but also by the powerbase of the Illuminati. With such forces behind them, TYM was the one corporation that would be able to weather the storm.

  “When the stocks of every other augmentation company crashed, Tai Yong was there to swallow them up,” said Pritchard. “And with Sarif on ice, the board of directors at SI folded.” He pointed toward the darkened towers of the distant office building. “So now, everything that matters has either been bought by the Chinese or burned out by people who wanted some revenge…” He looked away and sighed. “I was one of the last to leave. I was there on the day they formally shut the place down and boarded it up.” A note of helpless anger entered his voice. “I don’t know, I thought I could do something… try to keep things going! But when Sarif woke up, when he finally came back… I think it broke something inside him, to see his dream torn apart like that. He couldn’t stay and watch it die by inches.”

  Jensen nodded. “I can believe that. I never figured David Sarif for the kind of man who handles failure well.”

  “I don’t know where he is now,” Pritchard concluded. “I reached out to him through some back channels, but so far… nothing.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best.”

  The other man scowled. “Easy for you to say. While you dropped off the face of the Earth, I’ve been hanging on by my fingertips.” He looked away. “In order to keep my head above water, I’ve had to… go back to using some of my older skill sets, if you catch my meaning.”

  Jensen could imagine what that meant. Prior to his gainful employment as head of digital security at Sarif Industries, Frank Pritchard had moonlighted as a black-hat hacker. The poacher had turned gamekeeper – and now back to poacher again, if Jensen understood correctly. “We do what we have to.”

  “You don’t have to be here.” Pritchard gestured toward the window of the carriage, as the monorail curved around the side of a tall, crumbling brownstone and into the downtown sector. “The world already thinks Adam Jensen is a corpse. Why not let it stay that way? Go off the grid and
don’t come back…” He sighed. “I’m thinking about it myself.”

  “No.” Jensen shook his head, a cold surge of righteous anger tightening in his chest. “I’ve had enough of being one step behind them.” He caught himself before he said the Illuminati. Pritchard knew full well who he meant. “They broke open my life. They destroyed everything that mattered to me. I lost all choice about who or what I was…” The black polycarbonate fingers of his hand closed into a fist. “I’ve got a year-long gap in my memories. So I’m done letting them take from me, or anyone else.”

  Despite himself, Pritchard let out a derisive snort. “What do you think you’re going to do, Jensen? Take the fight to them?”

  He met the other man’s gaze. “You know me well enough to know the answer to that question.”

  “You’re deluded.”

  “No.” Jensen looked away as the people mover slowed to a halt. “I just don’t have anything left to lose.”

  * * *

  “Cold here,” said Stacks, as they walked down the stalled escalators from the station and out on to the windblown street.

  Jensen nodded absently as he looked around. They had emerged near Derelict Row, a sprawling construction site that in 2027 had been the beginning of a planned redevelopment initiative. Now it was a colossal heap of wreckage resembling the remnants of a war zone. What walls were still standing were covered with a layer of fly-posters bearing strident anti-aug slogans – PROTECT OUR FUTURE, KEEP OUR STREETS HUMAN, ARE YOUR CHILDREN SAFE?

  More of the dispossessed congregated around the ruins in a ragged shantytown, and from it Jensen caught the odor of greasy, cooked meat on the breeze.

  “I’m gonna go get me something…” Stacks went on, catching the same scent.

  “That’s rat they’re barbequing over there,” Pritchard told him. “Just so you know.”

  “I ain’t choosy. Just hungry.” The other man jogged across the street and started a negotiation with a vendor.

  Pritchard watched him go. “Do you trust that person?”

  “He saved my life, helped me escape the WHO clinic where we were being held. I owe him for that.”

  The hacker eyed him. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “He hasn’t given me a reason not to trust him,” said Jensen. “And right now I need as many allies as I can get.”

  Stacks came back with a stringy hunk of meat on a skewer, attacking it like he was starving. He walked with difficulty, limping with each off-step. “Y’all wuh-want a bite?”

  “I’ll pass,” said Jensen. “You okay?”

  “Stiff,” he said, by way of explanation. “Where now?”

  “This way.” Pritchard started walking.

  Every other building was dark and unlit. Those that hadn’t been covered with metallic safety panels to lock them off from potential squatters were skeletal frames that had been denuded of everything. Blank, dark voids where windows had once been looked back at them like the eye sockets of a skull, and everywhere there were piles of debris.

  “After the incident, a lot of these places were just left to rot,” said Pritchard. “No-one had a reason to come back and rebuild.”

  They turned a corner and Jensen saw a familiar sight – the Chiron Building, the apartment complex where he had lived during his time working for Sarif. The Chiron looked different now; there were heavy poured-concrete jersey barriers blocking off the main entrance, the kind that one would see on a military base. Outside, an automated security bot rolled back and forth on an endless patrol, its scanners projecting a fan of amber laser light across its path.

  On the wall of the apartment, Jensen saw the same ‘naturals only’ symbol that had been on the side of the train carriages. The robot spotted him and turned in Jensen’s direction, rising up on its wheels to point a gun barrel toward him as a warning. He ignored it, and fell back into step with Stacks and Pritchard.

  “Just how much of this segregation crap is there?” he demanded.

  “It’s everywhere,” Pritchard told him. “I’ve heard talk on the net about so-called ‘safe harbor’ cities outside the US but I don’t know how true that is.”

  “This isn’t what I wanted…” Jensen said to himself.

  Stacks made a negative noise. “You and me both, brother.”

  “Down here.” Pritchard cut through a trash-choked alleyway, emerging behind a squat, slab-sided building with a partly collapsed roof. “This is it.”

  “The Rialto…” Jensen peered up at the darkened movie theater. “I thought this place had been bulldozed.” Faded billboards showing weather-stained posters for decade-old feature films hung on the façade of the cinema, and toward the front where the ticket booth had been there was only a portcullis of metal security fencing.

  “That was the plan,” said Pritchard. “But like everything else around here, the incident got in the way of that. It’s isolated, it has a power train good enough for my needs, and most importantly no-one bothers me.” They circled around to the back of the building. “Of course, it’s not exactly the Hilton-Fujikawa, but as I’m extending you the hospitality, you’re in no position to complain.”

  Jensen had been quietly taking note of the gang tags spray-painted on the walls since they had got off the monorail, his old cop instincts coming to the fore. When he had lived in the city, a street gang called the Derelict Row Ballers considered this area of Detroit as the buffer zone to their turf – but the DRB’s red diamond symbol wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Instead, Jensen picked out multiple instances of three yellow letters – MCB, the initials of the Motor City Bangers, the sworn enemies of the DRBs – scrawled in prominent locations.

  He glanced at Pritchard. “Since when has this part of downtown been Banger territory?”

  The hacker blanched. “Let’s just say they expanded their reach after the incident. With no serious police presence in the aftermath, the MCBs made their move. Their competitors are either dead or they fled.”

  “Yo, Snakey!” shouted a rough voice, and Jensen saw a figure climbing out of a car parked beside an overturned dumpster. The man was wearing gang colors and sported a pair of skeletal cyberarms. “You talking trash about us, man?”

  Three more gangers in MCB yellow got out and stood with him. They’d been staking out the rear entrance of the Rialto, and Jensen chided himself for not catching sight of them before they got too close.

  “Oh, crap.” The sudden shift in Pritchard’s body language spoke volumes. He clearly knew these men.

  “Friends of yours?” said Stacks.

  “Oh, we good buddies,” said the ganger with the aug arms, before Pritchard could answer. As he came closer, Jensen saw that he was missing an ear, the lobe replaced by the grille of a surplus military aural augmentation. He had to have been listening in on their conversation as they walked down the street. “Ain’t that right, Snakey?”

  The other MCB members sported at least one cyberlimb, mostly low-grade Tai Yong athletic models, and they all carried pistols in their waistbands. Jensen felt underdressed without a weapon of his own.

  “What do you want, Cali?” Pritchard feigned annoyance, but Jensen could tell he was worried. “I’m paid up with you people. We don’t have any more business.”

  “Oh, issat so?” The one he called Cali shared a snarling chuckle with his friends. “No, man, that ain’t the way it goes.” He advanced, and his gang mates came swaggering along with him. “See, Bangers run things here now. So you live on our turf, you a…” He paused, fishing for the right word. “A tenant.”

  Pritchard folded his arms. “I made a trade with Magnet,” he insisted. “Burned the police jackets on a bunch of those augs you’re wearing so the cops can’t trace them. In return, I get my place and I stay out of your way.”

  Cali shook his head, running a hand over his goatee beard and grinning. “Nah, nah. See, Snakey, you too useful, is what it is. Mag, he the boss and he got other jobs you can do.”

  “I’m not interested.” Pritchard sho
ok his head.

  “Ain’t about what yo’ skinny white ass want, geek,” snarled one of the other gangers. “Do what yo’ told. Maybe you and your ladies here get to keep breathin’.”

  Cali gave a shrug and cocked his head. “So, that’s how it is. See, Mag’s real busy right now with a big deal, but he’s gonna come around here when he’s done—”

  Jensen decided that things had gone on long enough. He stepped forward. “Maybe you don’t hear so well with that aug after all.” He put himself between Cali and Pritchard. “Frank doesn’t want to play ball. So why don’t you be on your way?”

  Cali fingered his beard again and giggled. “Well, look at this slick son-of-a-bitch! What are you, his manager?”

  The thug who had shot his mouth off pulled a snub-nose Copperhead .40 revolver from his belt and let it dangle at the end of his arm. Cali saw and smirked.

  “Just a work colleague,” Jensen corrected. He flexed his arms, feeling the mechanisms within shift under the impulses from his nerves. With the inhibitor cuff long gone, he was free to deploy his augmentations at full offensive capability. There was a sudden snap-click of spinning micro-gears, and a pair of meter-long blades extended out of hidden slots in Jensen’s wrists. Black alloy with fractal monomolecular edges, the weapons were capable of slicing through most materials like butter. The smirk on Cali’s face froze and his eyes widened to saucers as Jensen put one of the blades right under his chin. “Careful there,” he told the gangbanger. “Don’t make any sudden moves, unless you want a real close shave.”

  The thug with the revolver hesitated, and Stacks took the opportunity to take a menacing step forward, bringing up his heavy duty arms. He opened his dual-thumbed claw hands wide and let them rotate slowly around his wrist joints. “Uh-uh, Youngblood,” he told the other ganger. “Take a muh-moment there.”

  Cali swallowed – slowly and very carefully – then raised a hand to wave off his comrade. “Hey, be cool. Just giving Snakey a message, right?” He backed away from the blade edge and Jensen let him go. “Mag, he be coming around, is all.” Cali retreated toward the car, trying to gather up a little of his earlier bravado. “You better be ready to put in some work. And make your boys here be civil.”