This was the first time Seraph had ever seen a... fresh... implant. Usually, they were all in neat little bundles, converted into a hockey-puck like disc, all clean and ready to be inserted into a reader. Adapters fitting the same standard design let you use one to run a starship, a drone, but this...
It was a lump of metal, wires, in roughly the right shape... but it still had tiny bits of blood and nervous tissue on it beneath the clear plastic. It was a rush job that was both a bit disturbing, and made her think of her own implant.
Right now, even as she looked at this lump of metal, a similar one inside her own skull; perhaps a slightly less compact model, this 'Sue' had the latest United Worlds model; was ever-so-slowly replacing her brain with metal filaments. As it did so, her thinking became slightly faster, her memories more clear; unfortunately in a bit of an uneven way; the memories she made before getting the implant would take over a decade to become perfectly clear the way things she remembered right now were.
Her memories of her apartment, and of this 'SUE' character, were so good that if she were an artist she could perfectly reproduce those cybernetic eyes from memory... while her childhood, her long-deceased parents.... not so much.
How long had Sue been implanted? Had his childhood memories survived, or was it just his personality and more recent memories?
There was a scan of the state of his corpse, at time of retrieval. A note that he was an augment, and thus she was allowed to do whatever she wanted with him; they were operating on the assumption that there wouldn't be anything worth selling when she was done, and that he probably wouldn't give any useful intel.... but if he could, they wanted to try.
She glanced over at the sim that had Jacob in it. It wasn't connected to the larger network; a deliberate choice, in case someone was such a good programmer they could somehow migrate a virus in the sim. Well. Should she partition it off, put Sue in a separate one? She looked at the disturbing mass... and sighed.
She hadn't told Jacob that Sue had -just- turned her into an Augment, deliberately. The truth might sound even more suspicious. But Sue might be useful to an escape attempt....
Ugh. She'd talk to Sue alone first. bring them together if it seemed proper.
She slotted the disc into the console and tapped a few keys to bring up a new sim; this one based strictly on Sue's genetic profile, rather than a scan. Without the cybernetics... it was obvious why they existed.
'Sue' was a hot-world augment, from the looks of it. Body covered with numerous light blue filaments that absorbed and dissipated heat, naturally looking like a layer of blue fur that would allow the subject to survive in temperatures where water would boil on exposure to air, eyes designed to survive exposure to extremes of temperature and light, looking more like slits... looks like they just shaved the fine layer of hair off of their body, maybe used a cream to stop it from regrowing... and either had the implants for other reasons, or to make them look like a normal human... cyborg, at least.
...Or was he? This was just a sample. It was fully possible that Sue had been altered, or had just a sample of someone else on him. The Alliance didn't tend to keep many augments that looked that... exotic... around, except for plantations on otherwise uninhabitable worlds.
Ugh. Well. He would know it was a sim the moment he woke up. And when he saw her, she'd see how he reacted.
***
Waking up to his natural vision was... completely unexpected. Surprising. He hadn't looked through his biological eyes in over a century. The feeling of fur... less old. He shaved it down when he wasn't on a hot world, but he'd last gone home less than a decade ago, so that wasn't too odd...
He sighed. Well, hell. He was dead, and in a sim. And they weren't bothering with trickery. So. Torture... it...
He saw the face in front of him. The girl he'd just injected. Was that... had he seriously just.... he knew she was intel. But not what department she worked for. Had he managed to turn.... if she was.... god, she must think he was some sort of brilliant spy, picking exactly who would be responsible for interviewing him if they managed to kill him, and turning her.
He smiled. "Well hi there, miss Glass! Fancy meeting you here. I don't suppose you've given my proposal any thought?"
She glowered at him. "I can dedicate enough processing cycles here to make you experience a year of torture for every day that passes, or more, or even just hook this implant up to a solar battery pack out in the wild and leave you to run for the next few thousand years, at accelerated time, experiencing absolutely nothing, just trapped unable to feel, see, hear, nothing, until the parts finally fail. I don't need you, and we're unlikely to get much use from you. Nobody expects anything here. If I fry your brain, thats exactly what they think is gonna happen anyway."
The figure didn't move from where she was sitting behind the desk. 'Sue' couldn't help but feel a bit of fear there. There's a reason he had a self-destruct rigged to his implant, and a reason they'd stopped him from triggering it.
"...So. what do you want?"
"I've got a plan to get offworld. Legally and without being scanned. I can definitely get myself, and enough stolen data to fill my datapad and make me set for life anywhere the Dubs or your ASU friends have influence. What might pose a challenge is getting brain-chips out, like yourself. I'm reasonably certain your friends would pay me handsomely for getting some of their people back intact. So. What I want is a means to get them out of here."
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"...Them? Not me, then?" She must be bearing a grudge. Which... was somewhat justified.
"No. You killed Richard, and tried to kill me. You don't get to bargain for your life, you get to bargain to avoid thousands of years of torment. You still get to achieve your goal, if you care about that, though... with that gene-mod you injected me with, I'm motivated to leave, and I know your bosses will pay. So. Do you want to help me get some of your friends out?"
Well, fuck. This wasn't going as well as he'd hoped. "You'll need me for this, but I can help you get anything you want offworld. I'm a pilot. I've got a stealth ship buried out in the middle of nowhere. I load up, hop us to orbit whenever there's a storm... which is fairly often, around here... and I can get you into orbit, and then out to independent space."
"Stealth ship... sounds mostly like bullshit. And I already have a pilot. More than one former ASU eager to get offworld, actually, stuck on brain-chips, just like you. Where's the ship?"
She already had.... hell. How many of the ASU's people had they captured, and interrogated, like this? Was the whole organization compromised? They needed to setup new security measures... or not use implanted people for work in Alliance space. But... almost everyone got implanted, eventually.
It... was a problem. "Stealth is a relative term, she's got extremely low emissions and.... And if I want to show you in person, you'll just leave without any of us?"
"Essentially. There's a convention I've got a ticket to. Thanks to the fact Intel already did an in-depth scan of me, they'll help me bypass security on the way out, and I don't care about security on the way in. So.... the only reason I'd have a use for your ship is to get your fellow ASU people offworld."
"....Let me talk to them and know that you really have some that need help, and I'll give you the coordinates."
She frowned. "If you tell them you injected me, or that I'm not bringing you because you killed me, I'll just leave the lot of you. Strictly need to know. Don't say a word that the Alliance doesn't already know, just in case... I might end up having to leave them behind, and unlike you, destroying some of them would be suspicious."
"...Okay. Fine."
***
She sighed. This was nonsense. Why take this risk? Was it the money, or was it over sympathy?
She dialed up the Jacob sim once more; to him, only a few moments had passed before she reappeared... looking at him in that cold way that established she wasn't really there, emotionless, direct. "I've got another ASU operative. He's not one of the ones I'm gonna try to get out, because he killed my cat, but he claims he has a ship here. Wants to talk to you."
Jacob blinked. "He... killed your cat?"
"He had a tranq gun. Shot me with it, and the cat, too. The kind of dose that will knock out a human.... Anyways! He wants to talk to one of the people I'm going to bring out if I can, before he'll tell me where the ship is. Maybe pass its location to you in some sort of code. Unlike him, I want to get you out alive, so I'm fine with taking you along to find and fly the ship."
The man stared at Seraph for a moment. "...Thats.... I get it. But is it right to leave him in the Alliance's hands over a cat?"
"Saving you is a risk. Saving him is a risk. I can probably get out fine on my own. I'm not risking my life and future over the asshole who killed my cat. A brain chip isn't something that I can just hide in a rank badge like I can for the data I'm stealing. Each one I take is taking up space, taking up mass, and increasing risk. I can just about guarantee getting my badge through with a drive containing terabytes of data from the Alliance, and let your people know how we hunt for them. I can probably carry through a handful of brain-chips. The only way I can get a bunch of them is if this ship thing is real... and even so, I still have to slip them out of security."
She shook her head. "So. I'm gonna bring him in next, then we'll bring in the ones I'll be trying to sneak out if I just fly there legally. Just use caution what you say; nobody is watching right now, but they might be able to recover recordings later."
She simply vanished, moments later.... and in her place, 'Sue' appeared, in the same chair, looking a bit confused.
Jacob blinked... and looked around, then at the man. ".... I take it you're the one who shot her cat?"
"...Yup. You're the pilot she'd rather use over me?"
"Well, I can fly a ship, and I didn't shoot her cat. So I guess. Jacob Rawlins, formerly out of..." He frowned, glancing up. "...An ASU vessel. Was lost on the job with all hands. They stuck me in a simulation until I gave them an emergency code and directions, and... then this lady dragged me out. I thought I was on a desert planet for a year, struggling to survive. Turns out I was actually just being fooled. Stupid as all hell. Hate sims."
'Sue' nodded. "Tyler Proxima. Mercenary sometimes, ASU operative always. I was supposed to tag an Intel officer, convince them to give me something, anything, useful. Figured I'd sell it to the dubs, then give a copy to the old lady. She... kinda likes me. We met on Ash."
Jacob sighed. "Never met her before, but I went through Ash myself."
Tyler studied Jacob for a moment. "I've got a ship. Gunship sized, has both excellent emissions control and the hull absorbs radar like crazy. For the first six or seven hours of flight, she can run cold and quiet, and you only spot her on a telescope if she gets in close... except when she's lifting off, or landing. I'd prefer to get out myself.... but this intel lady is motivated to get out before they find out she's an aug. So.... better someone gets out than nobody."
"Handle much different from an assault shuttle?"
"Not really. Bit more engine power, bit heavier."
Jacob sighed. "Yeah... I can handle her. Gonna tell me where she is?"
"Safehouse Tiamat mean anything to you?"
Jacob thought for a moment. There were no names for safe-houses. Just 3-digit codes, a letter and two numbers. "No. Safehouse Ninety-Nine mean anything to you?"
A soft chuckle. "Sorry, its a nickname. And a bit of a confirmation. T-42. If you know what that means, you can find the safehouse. If you're ASU, you'll be able to get in and fly the ship." He glanced up. "If you're planning on shutting me down now, thats all he needs."
After a moment... Tyler vanished. Replaced by a familiar figure; the massive, heavyset figure of Victor, who'd been part of the muscle on the last mission... followed shortly by more figures, both familiar and not... as well as the same woman from before; dark-skinned, wearing an Alliance uniform.
"Alright, folks. I'm gonna make a few calls. See if I can smuggle you all out on my existing flight. Test the waters. If it looks good... I'll be hooking a few combat drones up to receivers and getting them set so you can rescue me... and yourselves... if things go south. I've already explained to each of you solo whats going on. Feel free to hash things out decide what to do, I'll leave this running for a while, just remember... this is a sim... and the Alliance may be able to see all this later."