Deus Ex: Black Light (7 page)

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.

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.”