You look around. You sift through stacks of paper and get-well-soon cards, rifle through your desk drawers. You have to get up (groan, strain, bite your lip as aching meat tugs against metal) and search all over your room before you finally track down your tablet. It was hidden in the folds of the blankets from the last time you actually slept in your bed. You power it on (you had to buy a new one that'd actually register taps from your new fingers) as you start your slow shuffle back across the bedroom to the 'work table' you pushed up against the wall. You set the tablet down and turn on the desk lamp.
"You will need: a balance truing caliper- okay I did not prepare for this."
So you do prepare, with the rather generous payments Sarif's been dropping in your account weekly. You read the ebook cover-to-cover (so to speak) and buy everything it so much as tangentially mentions needing on impulse. Not like you're a big spender otherwise. You start with wood of course, and does that ever turn out to be a good decision. Your new hands slip constantly, clumsy fingers letting tools slip every other time you try to file out another tooth in the gear or turn a screw. They shake. Why would they shake? Is it psychosomatic? Is it real? You make a mental note to ask at your next LIMB appointment but you never do.
There's something fascinating about it. You were sure you'd swiftly get bored but you don't. Every time you foul up another piece out of clumsiness or just misreading the instructions, you... well, you won't lie and say you dauntlessly forge on ahead. You give up about a dozen times, but for lack of anything else to do you always go back to it. You increasingly find your focus shifting from moving your hands with exaggerated care to envisioning what the finished product will look like. You get the gears finished, every tooth hand-filed and true. You get the electronics done even faster, relishing the opportunity to just follow instructions instead of doing any more tedious filing. A simple motor and a battery that could power it for forty years. You set to work screwing it together, feeling a strange sense of anticipation. Is this how hobbyists feel all the time?
You turn a screw too enthusiastically and crack the main cog completely in two.
The assembly goes in the bin. Four fingers of whiskey go down your throat. You sleep on the couch for ten hours straight with baseball on the TV in the background for every last one of them.
You wake up. You stare at the ceiling. Your head resting on your left hand, you slowly stretch your right up towards the ceiling. Full extension. No pain. Just a little tingling, itching maybe. You flex your fingers as wide as they'll go, then close them into a tight fist. You turn your arm this way and that, fascinated by how the light ripples across the high-gloss matte-black. Obvious synth-muscle from shoulder to elbow, merging seamlessly with a hard shell casing and articulated fingers. You think about the mind-bogglingly complex internals beneath the surface. You think about how you haven't really thought about it at all.
You order better materials this time. Then you get back to work. You bought anodised metal this time, and you hand-paint the numbers. This time it'll work.
It takes even longer to make the cogs and gears. You're working every time the cleaners come so the piles of shavings just pile higher and higher, long past the point of reason. You redo the electronics rather than scavage them from your failure, content to let the whole thing rot wherever the cleaners ended up moving it. Motor, battery, gear assembly. Screwed in tight, all to the letter.
You get a hammer and nails just to put it up on your wall. It's a basic thing, no housing or anything, just bare gears with a motor glued and screwed in the back. Two big cogs side-by-side, one with numbers marked 1 to 12, the other 0 to 55. Minute and hour. According to your HUD it's off by two minutes and it's hard to tell where exactly the 'needle' is meant to be but you don't care. It keeps ticking along perfectly fine. Black with gold numbers, slightly wonky but in your own hand.
Your head starts ringing, a little more figuratively than you expected. A little gold-edged portrait appears in the upper right corner of your vision. Infolink. The one aug package you were actually told about. Turned on the moment it was medically safe, to only be used once absolutely necessary. The name of the caller appears too, but you recognise the voice anyway.
"Jensen?" Malik's voice. "You there?"
"I think so," you say to the empty air.
"Almost wish I hadn't caught you," he says. "Six months is a hell of a short time to come back from the dead. Trust me, I wouldn't be calling unless I absolutely had to. I was in my wingsuit halfway up the Renaissance Tower when I got the 911."
"What is it? What's wrong?"
"Turn on the TV."
You cross the living room and do so. Figuring Malik isn't talking about the ad for Metalweight UFC, you switch it to Picus News. You're immediately treated to a helicopter shot of the Sarif Industries Milwaukee Junction manufacturing plant surrounded by the burning hulks of various vehicles arranged like makeshift barricades.
"-second attack in six months, this time with a clear culprit - the domestic terrorist group known as Humanis. While there have been confirmed sightings of hostages and shots fired inside the facility, no demands have been forthcoming."
You shut off Eliza's dulcet tones. "What's that have to do with me?" you ask the empty air. "SWAT's trained for this."
"Sarif pulled the extraterritoriality card on them. He's holding them back until he can send you in."
"
What!?" You whirl right, as if Malik were standing right there. "That's insane, he-"
"He wants to explain it to you in person. He's in the back. I'll be on the roof in five to pick you up."
"... copy that."
You get dressed, properly, for the first time in what feels like a lifetime. Combat boots, long dark trousers, dark T-shirt. Your hip feels distinctly naked without your sidearm but you ignore it. You go to the door. Pause. Retrace your steps back to the closet and push to the far end. Retrieve the heaviest hanger. Thumb open the piece of paper folded and taped to it.
'We'd never recognise you around the office without this.' Signed by as many people could fit their signatures on the tiny little piece of paper. You exhale a little harder through your nose, and put the empty hanger back on the rail.
Loose litter and dust fly across the rain-slick helipad as Malik's VTOL descends. The landing lights cut a harsh shadow behind you, an oil-slick that slowly stretches out longer and longer the closer she gets to the ground. Your coattails flap and dance impressively in the wind. You stand still as a statue, watching, waiting. How are you going to face Sarif like this? How are you supposed to charge into the plant, guns blazing, and fix everything when you don't even know what parts of you are what any more? The VTOL touches down, landing gear sagging a little as it takes the weight. The side door swings up. Sarif's there in one of the seats, waiting.
"Eve!"
One thing at a time.
Ill-used cheek muscles flex. With a brisk
fwik your eyes are shaded, hidden behind slightly gold-tinted lenses of industrial sapphire. So that's what those were for. That'll make things easier.
"Boss," you say neutrally, and climb up into the VTOL. Sarif shifts in his seat as you take yours. Neither of you bothers with a seatbelt. You just study each other as Malik slowly lifts off, angling the craft towards the Milwaukee Junction plant. The silence doesn't last long. Never does with Sarif around.
"I told Farid to put us down on the roof," he says. "I don't want the crowds seeing you go in."
"Fine. So long as you two are gone the minute I'm on the ground," you say tersely. "Who are these guys, what am I up against?"
"Pro-human purists, or so they say," Sarif says with audible disdain. "The same purists who've been firebombing LIMB clinics for serving non-humans all over the country."
"You buy that?"
He shakes his head. "It's no coincidence they hit us today, hours after we moved the Typhoon in for mass-production."
"The
Typhoon?" you repeat. "That's-"
"-what Megan and her team were working on the night of the attack, I know," Sarif tries to finish for you.
"I was going to say 'potentially race relations' worst nightmare'," You correct him sardonically. "Who's on point for these guys?"
Sarif makes a few taps on his phone and raises the screen in your direction. You lean forward a little, elbows on your knees, and inspect it closely. It's a shaven-headed Latino man with an eyepatch and a full goatee.
"Name's Zeke Sanders," Sarif explains. "Comes up a couple times in the system. Ex-military."
"He's human," you say. "And a man. Team that hit us was a troll and two women."
"Doesn't discount the possibility he's just a dupe." Sarif puts his phone away. "No way he got inside our plant without help."
"Fine. How am I handling this?" Terse, businesslike. Plenty of time for some more choice words when lives don't hang in the balance.
"First priority is the Typhoon," Sarif explains. "I'm keeping SWAT out until you've secured it."
"I'm sure they're thrilled." You couldn't resist.
Sarif's face darkens slightly. "Like it or not it's my legal right, Eve. And the Typhoon is a special order for the alphabet agencies - if it's not delivered intact and still a secret... well, I'm sure you'll get the job done right. If you see an opportunity to secure the hostages then don't let me stop you, but just remember you can't be everywhere at once."
"Got an armoury in here?" you ask. "Or am I taking on those purists with my bare hands?"
"Actually, yeah. I had the guys at security bring out a few choice pieces of equipment before we took off. Didn't have time to take you back to HQ to pick something out personally." Sarif moves his legs to reveal a heavy-duty case hidden in the shadows beneath his seat. "Can't exactly send you in there with an arsenal, but as far as rules of engagement go, I'll defer to you. You remember the layout?"
You pause for a moment, casting your mind's eye back to the last time you did an inspection. "Yeah. Offices have plenty of small rooms and right corridors, but the old auto floors are like football fields."
"Right. So what're you thinking?"
[ ] Lethal. If something goes wrong you want to put them down before they put you down.
[ ] Non-lethal. You're not looking to start a firefight in there, and frankly the more of 'em are left alive the better chance you have of getting someone who knows something useful to squeal.
[ ] Short-range. You don't plan on lingering in wide open spaces if you can help it, and in close quarters you'll take every advantage you can get.
[ ] Long-range. You can take them out personally if you bump into anyone traversing the offices. You'll need that distance on the old auto floors.
