Deus Ex: Black Light (2 page)

There were people here from all ethnicities, all walks of life, and a broad spectrum of ages and backgrounds. There was only one common denominator: everybody had an augmentation of some kind, from replacement limbs to cyberoptics or neural implants.

The character of the clinic’s residents was the kind of forced-together, beaten-down community he had seen in skid row districts and shantytowns, or the envirorefugee camps in the Kansas dustbowl and the flood zones down in Florida. At first, the other ‘processees’ – no-one ever called them
patients
or
inmates
– kept their distance from him, leaving Jensen to eat alone in the cavernous cafeteria or walk in silence around the yard during the hours of weak daylight.

And that was okay. He needed the space and the time to get his head straight. To put everything that he could remember into some semblance of order. It came slowly for the most part, now and then in jagged fits and starts. Reminiscence was strange that way. Fragment by fragment, Jensen reassembled himself. McFadden told him blankly that he had been in a comatose state for months, and he personally had never expected Jensen to recover.
A man doesn’t cheat death twice
, said the doctor.

“Beg to differ,” Jensen said aloud, answering the memory. His breath made a puff of white vapor that escaped into the air.

“What’s that?”

He turned as someone came walking his way, deck shoes that were way too light for this chill climate crunching on frost-covered asphalt. Jensen saw a stout man with a round face and the kind of deep, leathery tan you only get from a lifetime of working outside. He had the fuzz of an ill-kept beard and a bald, slightly uneven head. Jensen stood taller than the new arrival, and as he met his gaze, he saw the man had natural eyes. Curiosity was clear there, but caution too.

“Nothing important,” Jensen told him. “Just thinking out loud.”

“Right on.” The man wandered to the fence line and placed both his hands on it. Like Jensen, his body was mechanical from shoulders to fingertips. But where Jensen’s cybernetic arms were athletic and sleek in design, this guy’s augmentations were heavy sleeves of battered metal that resembled parts of a construction vehicle scaled down to human size. Thick hands with an additional thumb each side made claws and held on to the chain links of the fence. The metal barrier creaked audibly under his grip. “Some view,” he added.

“Better without the fence,” Jensen replied.

“I heard that,” the man replied with feeling, then turned and offered him a handshake, as if his reply had been the right answer to some unspoken question. “Folks call me Stacks. You’re Jensen, right?”

He accepted the gesture. “You know me?”

Stacks nodded toward the clinic, where two orderlies in heavy parkas had gathered to watch the pair of them, another monitor drone circling lazily over their heads. “Heard them say your name.”

Jensen studied the orderlies. He’d seen the stunner truncheons they carried and the Buzzkill tasers in their quick-draw holsters. Why the WHO needed armed guards in a place for healing people was a question that nobody had a good answer for. But then again, none of the orderlies had visible enhancements of any kind. Being around so many augmented people had to make them nervous. He looked away. “West Coast, right? Where you’re from?”

The other man broke into a brief grin. “You got it. Tell that from how I talk?” He didn’t wait for Jensen to reply. “Yeah, from Seattle. Lived there my whole life, until…” A shadow passed over his face. “Well, y’know. I was a steeplejack. Building towers and alla that. What about you?”

“I used to be a cop.”

Stacks nodded again. “I figured. You got the look.” He paused, clearly framing his next words. “People are wonderin’. They ain’t seen you before, then here you are. Questions getting asked.”

“Let me guess, you drew the short straw.
Go talk to the new guy
.”

He chuckled. “Something like that.” He went on: “Most of us have been here a while. Tends to be that folks get rotated out, if they’re lucky… But not a lot of fresh faces come in, know what I mean?”

“I really don’t,” Jensen said, watching him carefully. “New here, like I said.”

Stacks eyed him. “Well, not exactly. I mean, you been here a while too, but on ice, yeah? There’s a bunch of folks like that, in the coma ward. Never woke up. Not like you. Sleeping beauties, we call ’em.”

“McFadden told me I was lucky.” A gust of cold wind whipped around Jensen’s shoulders. The clinic had provided a thin, military-surplus jacket, and he pulled it close. “I’m not really feeling it.”

When Stacks spoke again, his tone shifted. “There’s talk about you and the other sleepers. Say you were out there, in the middle of it all when it happened. Right at the heart of the action, up in the Arctic. That so?”

Icy salt water and crushing pressure
. He tensed at the memory. “Panchaea.” Jensen said the name without thinking. It was as if uttering it opened another floodgate in his memory. He was assailed by a rush of confused images, all of them dominated by a vision of a hole in the ocean, an endless black well into nothingness. He shook off the moment. “Yeah. I was there.”

Stacks’s face hardened. “Were you
part
of it?”

“No.” The answer was as much a lie as it was the truth. Jensen held up his machine hand. “We were
all
part of it, right?”

“Yeah. True enough.” The grim cast in the other man’s eyes faded. “I… I lost my wife and my daughter that day.”

“I’m sorry.”

Stacks gave a hollow sigh that seemed to come from miles distant. “So am I.”

Jensen changed tack. “How long have you been here?”

“Since it happened.” Stacks let go of the fence and stepped away. Jensen saw the orderlies visibly relax. “I lost a lot. Up here.” He tapped his temple with a thick metal finger. “Gettin’ right takes time, I know that. But I thought I’d be done by now.” He shot a look at the two guards and gave them a humorless smile. “They’re scared I’m gonna do somethin’ crazy. Rip a hole in this here fence and make a run for it.”

“Are they right?” Jensen glanced up as the first drops of a dirty rain began to fall.

When Stacks replied, it sounded like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Might just be, one of these days.” He started walking. “C’mon. Too damn cold out here, man.”

But as Jensen turned to follow him inside, he saw that a third guard had joined the other two. A severe-looking man wearing a data monocle, he scanned the yard and found Jensen. “You,” he called out, his voice carrying. “Got a visitor.”

Jensen’s jaw stiffened.
Who knows I’m here?

“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.