Deus Ex: Black Light

by James Swallow

“Finally, an intelligent suggestion,” Pritchard agreed.

  But Stacks had his attention elsewhere. “I don’t reckon they’re gonna let us walk out of here easy…” He nodded in the direction of the open doorway. Jensen turned to see a half-dozen figures crowding out in the corridor, and the concealed chip he had found was suddenly the least of his concerns.

  * * *

  In the spill of white light from the lab, Jensen saw nothing but angry and desperate faces, all of them sunken and hollow with malnourishment and withdrawal. They were street scavengers, the lost and homeless reduced to existing on the ragged fringes of society, just like the girl they had encountered back at the mech-ghetto camp.

  Pritchard pulled his stun gun and retreated back. “Jensen!” he hissed. “I told you this was a bad idea.”

  Two of the scavengers had firearms – a stocky, scarred man and a jittery, thin woman both carrying Widowmaker shotguns that had to have been looted from the Detroit police. The others had an assortment of makeshift clubs or blades.

  The first through the door was another woman, whose left arm was a broken mess of damaged aug parts. She brandished a huge combat knife like a short sword in her other hand. “You try anything, you’ll regret it,” she hissed, but the warning was more desperate than it was threatening.

  Her companions with the guns followed her in, while the others loitered cautiously outside. “How’d you get it open?” demanded the scarred man. “You Tarvos? Tai Yong?”

  Before anyone could answer, the thin woman licked her lips and drew a bead on Jensen’s head. “Let’s just smoke these creeps and take the salvage. This ain’t gonna be like last time at the Junction, getting cut to pieces by their goddamn army!”

  The Junction? The name raised a red flag in Jensen’s thoughts, but he didn’t have time to consider what it meant. “We don’t want any trouble,” he said, raising his hands.

  “They’re here f-for the nu-poz,” said Stacks, wavering on the verge of standing up but unwilling to risk the wrath of the scavengers. “Ain’t that so?”

  “You’re gonna give us all you got,” said the woman with the ruined arm. It was a bald statement. She put no anger there, only weariness and resignation. “Or you’re gonna die for it. Your call.”

  “We got needy people,” said the man with the scars. “Kids, some of ’em. So we ain’t got no choice.” He raised his shotgun and pointed it toward Pritchard.

  Jensen let the moment hang, and then finally he lowered his hands. “No,” he said firmly.

  “No?” echoed the thin woman, her voice rising. “Who the hell do you think you are saying no to us? I had—”

  He silenced her with a look. “No-one is getting hurt today. No guns or knives.” Jensen gestured at Pritchard. “Put the stunner down. We’re not fighting our way out of this.”

  “You’re a second away from being dead, friend,” said the other woman. Closer now, and Jensen could see she had twinned cat’s-eye cyberoptics. “And everyone here is about as desperate as they come. So you give it up or pay the price.”

  He studied them. “We’re not animals,” he said, his voice carrying out to the others in the corridor. “I know it can seem like that now, after what happened to us. Because of how we have to live. But all that came from outside, not from us. We don’t have to be the monsters everyone else thinks we are. We don’t have to turn on each other just for one last dose of nu-poz.” Jensen found the pack of drug ampoules from the cabinet. “Here, take this. It’s yours.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed, and then with a sudden rush of motion, she stabbed her knife into a nearby tabletop and snatched the packet from his outstretched hand. “There’s a lot here…” she muttered.

  Jensen turned to Pritchard. “The other labs on this floor… are there more neuropozyne stocks in them as well?”

  “It’s possible,” said the hacker.

  “Open them up. All of them,” Jensen insisted. He looked at the two scavengers with the shotguns. “You hear me? Take as much as you can carry. Meds, repair packs, praxis kits… You say you have people who need aid, so give it to them.”

  Pritchard frowned, then brought up his wrist-keyboard, working through a series of remote commands. After a moment, Jensen heard the thuds of other magnetic bolts opening in sequence further down the corridor. “Done,” said the hacker.

  “Just like that?” said the thin woman, distrust heavy in her voice. “You’re giving us a goddamn scav jackpot?”

  “Yeah,” Jensen told her. “Because you need it. Because you’re not thugs and murderers.”

  “Just desperate,” said the other woman, shakily taking a shot from one of the syrettes. The tremors that had been running up and down her damaged arm eased away to nothing.

  The scarred man let his weapon drop. “Thanks,” he began. “I hate this stinkin’ place. We scoured it for every damn piece of salvage we could find, then those Tarvos assholes set the robots shooting everyone who came near…” He called out to the other scavengers, directing them to gather up the vital medicines.

  The thin woman finally relented and let her shotgun drop to dangle at her side on a single-point harness. “Goddamn Samaritan, huh?” She helped herself to a handful of syrettes from the pack, eyeing them to make sure it was the real thing and not some sort of trick. After a moment, she took a dose and let out a low moan of relief. “Don’t expect nothing else,” she snapped at Jensen. “You get to walk outta here, so go.”

  “One thing before that,” he said, halting in front of her. “You said something about the Junction. You mean Milwaukee Junction?”

  “Yeah,” she said, with a shrug. “The Sarif factory on the edge of the city. We got a whole bunch of us together, went out there. Figured there would be stocks, maybe, or salvage…”

  “We needed the pozy bad enough to risk it,” said the scarred man. “But they killed a lot of us.”

  “Who did?” Jensen pressed.

  “An army of the sons-of-bitches!” snarled the thin woman. “No-one stuck around to ask them their names, yeah?” She pushed past him and stalked away.

  LOCATION UNKNOWN

  Lines of light ranged across a fathomless, unending digital void. The endless gulf resembled a virtual of deep space or the immeasurable depths of an abyssal ocean.

  This anti-place existed far below the strata of the global data network. High above it, billions of people cross-communicated via a myriad of social media portals, while mega-corporations traded valuable non-linear currencies and untold other waves of information washed back and forth. But here, living in the unseen spaces of forgotten server farms and the ghostly margins of the virtual world, there was still activity. Like the blind chemovores that swarmed around volcanic black smokers at the bottom of polluted seas, a tenacious kind of digital life also clung to existence in data-arid wastelands of the deep web.

  Above, a web of faint neon-bright lights pulsed with rays of shimmering code that surged between its threads like electrical pulses bouncing from neuron to neuron in a brain – but down in the dark net there were only the occasional blurred constellations of information, nested geometric constructs of lonely data shrouded by complex security programs that glittered in the utter blackness. Snatches of garbled, lost binary data flashed by, fragments of speech or music too fast to register.

  Adrift here was a glassy raft built from lines of redundant, meaningless code, a brief but fragile safe haven for the gathering of a fugitive few. Aboard it, a group of abstract digital avatars faced one another, their identities and voices heavily masked.

  A pixilated human form addressed the others. It was a phantom bled of all uniqueness such as gender, race or vocal tonality – but still there was an urgency behind the words it spoke. “Thank you all for coming. I appreciate the risks you are taking by linking to this nexus, but I believe what I have to say will make it worthwhile.” No-one replied; it was unprecedented to gather so many of the Collective in one place, even if that wasn’t a physical locus. Face-to-face communic
ation was almost unheard of in their world of digital dead-drops and multiple blinds. “I have confirmation,” continued the human avatar. “I’ve traced and double-checked the location. He’s resurfaced, after all this time.”

  Nearby, another of the virtual selves – this one a winged skull that drifted about in quick, darting motions – fixed the human shape with its empty eye sockets. “That’s why we’re here? I’ve never been convinced by the great stock you put in this man’s ability to get things done. Do I need to remind everyone of what happened at Panchaea? How can we know what effect that had on him?”

  There were three more avatars waiting motionless on the raft, but none of them volunteered a reply to the skull’s brusque question.

  “A fair point,” allowed the human. “Our predictive model does draw from old data, that’s true. But I believe that he’s ready to deploy. We’ll make certain of it, of course. But it would be foolish of us not to use this opportunity. We’ve waited a long time for these conditions to come into synchrony. I admit, I thought our window had closed. I’m pleased that is not so.”

  “And if you’re wrong?” demanded the skull. “How can we be sure about him?”

  At length, another of the avatars spoke. This one was a glowing light, made to resemble a distant star as viewed through a telescope, and it pulsed with a woman’s voice. “Like Janus says, we’ll keep a close watch. If it comes to it, I can make sure he stays on the sweet path.”

  There was a wry sniff from the avatar closest to the human shape, a silvery letter from the Cyrillic alphabet that morphed randomly from one character to another. “Are you sure you can handle him, little sister?”

  The voice behind the star ignored the comment. “You’ve all seen the intercepts. We need someone who can be proactive, someone outside the group. Our boy’s the best choice.”

  “We are committed,” agreed the human shape. “I’ll set things in motion.”

  The last avatar – a featureless cube made of blue crystal – finally spoke. “If he becomes aware he is being manipulated—”

  “This isn’t manipulation,” interrupted the phantom. “We are just showing him the way.”

  The Cyrillic symbol glittered and shifted shapes. “I doubt he’ll see it like that. Not the forgiving type, you know?”

  The human avatar paused, glancing up toward the distant glow of the global network. “We’ve been here too long, our encryption is decaying. They’ve set seekers after this node.”

  The cube spun on its axis. “Time to go, then. We all know our assignments. Make contact again through the usual channels.” The avatar lost definition and faded away, the word DISCONNECTED flashing briefly across the space where it had stood.

  “Roger that,” said the star, and followed suit. A moment later, the silver letter winked out, leaving only the human and the winged skull to stare blankly at one another.

  “Fifteen seconds to intercept,” said the ghostly avatar. “Seekers incoming.” Above them, distinctive streaks of color were now visible, dropping toward the glassy platform on spiraling paths. The objects resembled comets, but moved like sharks.

  The skull did not seem to notice. “We can’t afford to let the Illuminati have another victory, Janus.”

  “To them, every outcome is a degree of victory. That is why they think they will win.” The human shape looked away. “We’ll prove them wrong.”

  The last two virtuals severed their connections and the raft where they had stood broke apart like sand, dissipating back into the endless digital noise of the networks, as if the clandestine meeting had never taken place.

  The hunter-killer programs swept in, their dog-smart synthetic intelligence anticipating targets to pursue and subdue. An analogue of disappointment washed over them at finding nothing, and they looped listlessly away.

  THE RIALTO – DETROIT – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  At first the sound in his thoughts was like a rattle of rainfall or the rumble of faraway thunder, but as Jensen rose quickly to wakefulness the noise shifted and changed to the irregular clattering of fingers on a keyboard.

  He opened his eyes and righted himself, careful not to disturb Stacks, who was snoring lightly on a folding camp bed across from him inside the yurt-like bubble tent. Jensen watched the other man for a moment. Now and then, Stacks would twitch in the depths of REM sleep, the tiny motors in the joints of his iron fingers giving a faint buzz as they gathered into fists and relaxed over and over again. He wondered where his companion was, down there in his dreamscape. Jensen suspected it was not a good place, and for his part tried to reach for a remnant of whatever dreams he had just left behind.

  Jensen came back with nothing. Usually there was the ghost of a memory, the faint tracery of an emotion, but he had nothing to hold on to. It came to him then that he hadn’t clearly recalled a single dream since the day he had awakened in Facility 451 – or was it just that his mind didn’t want him to carry them into the waking world?

  He scowled, shaking off the morose thought, and quietly left the tent. Across the wide stage of the movie theater, the endless tapping continued, and Jensen found Pritchard hunched forward over a keyboard, his expression slack but his eyes totally focused on abstract digital figures on a tall, narrow screen.

  He helped himself to some water from a salvaged purification module and approached the hacker, who didn’t look up. “Just so you know,” Pritchard told Jensen. “There’s no maid service here, so clean up after yourself.”

  He looked around at the sloughed walls and tumbledown surroundings. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Pritchard paused to grab a handful of caffeine tablets and tip them into his mouth, crunching them down dry like they were candy. “To keep me alert,” he said, by way of explanation.

  “Right,” said Jensen. “What are you working on? Is that… a game?”

  The typing stopped and he closed the program window. “It’s a tactical simulator,” Pritchard corrected. He shot Jensen a look. “So what exactly are you doing here? I understand your white knight thing back in the lab that saved our lives—”

  “And it was the right thing to do,” he interjected.

  Pritchard went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “But what do you propose to do next? You came to Detroit because you needed somewhere to lie low, but that’s not really your style, is it? Now you’re grumbling about picking up where you left off with your crusade against Darrow’s mythical cadre… Are you going to move on or are you going to stay here and keep drawing attention? Because I need to know, I need to… modify my situation…”

  “You want us to leave?” Jensen folded his arms. “You want things to go back to how they were, with you getting shaken down by gang members and doing petty cyber crime just to keep your head above water?”

  “Nothing I do is petty,” Pritchard shot back.

  Jensen hesitated. In truth, he had a lot of questions himself that he couldn’t answer – but somehow coming back to Detroit after everything that happened at Panchaea felt like a step toward some kind of closure. He had the very real sense of a chapter of his life coming to an end, but he wasn’t quite there yet. “Hate to break it to you, Frank, but I don’t think lying low is really an option. There’s more going on here than just a city falling to pieces. You heard what those scavengers said. Somebody is raking through the ashes of Sarif Industries, and I want to know who and why. These things aren’t happening in isolation. There’s a connection…”

  Pritchard frowned. “I admit, that subject is vexing me as well. So I’ve been looking into it.” He brought up a new display window on the screen. “You’re not going to like what I found.”

  Jensen peered at the data, but the lines of code there meant nothing to him. “Spill it,” he demanded.

  “You’re right that someone is systematically raiding the Sarif facilities in this city and looting them.” He held up a hand. “And no, I’m not just talking about the homeless and the dispossessed searching for some doses of nu-poz. I mean someon
e organized. As for who they are… That’s still unclear.”

  “The next question is why?” Jensen voiced the uncertainty, but he was already assembling the answer for himself.

  “Remember back before everything fell apart, that whole situation with the Typhoon augmentation prototype Sarif had designed for the military? You know how valuable he considered it.”

  Jensen nodded. After recovering from the assault on Sarif Industries that had almost killed him, Jensen had been called back into work early by the company CEO in order to deal with an anti-aug activist group threatening the Milwaukee Junction factory. He remembered very clearly how David Sarif had stressed the importance or saving the Typhoon prototype as well as the workers being held hostage.

  Pritchard went on. “The fact is, that wasn’t the only military-focus hardware SI was looking at. Nanoblade enhancements, variants on the Typhoon, other implanted weapons… Sarif had a lot of secret projects in development that he didn’t share with the rest of us.”

  “I figured as much,” Jensen said grimly. “But that stuff was hypothetical.”

  The hacker’s lip curled. “You know Sarif. You think he’d leave an interesting technical challenge on paper? He might not have planned to sell them, but I’m pretty sure he built them… And that’s what our mystery men are looking for.” He brought up a different data window. “Every Sarif sub-office in the Detroit area has been broken into in the last couple of months, that’s why TYM ordered Tarvos to up security at the tower.”

  “So we know it can’t be Tai Yong doing this, then.”

  “After all the trouble in Hengsha, they have their own problems to deal with back home. If they didn’t, they’d be here in force. No, this is someone else.” Pritchard shook his head. “The manufacturing plant at Milwaukee Junction has been shut down since the incident, but it’s the most likely place where this tech would have ended up. And if our unknowns get hold of these prototypes, then there’s no telling where they might resurface. I don’t need to tell you, Jensen, these are deadly weapons. In the wrong hands…” He trailed off.