I had two more days of leave to burn when I finally made up my mind.
I was about to do two things. One utterly illegal, and the other merely frowned upon and career-hampering.
The latter was simple, in between burning up some of my ridiculous numbers of frequent flier miles, I switched off the standard transponder features in my lace, and set it to safe mode. As far as the UN were concerned, I'd dropped off the grid.
Well, I wasn't truly gone, if someone really cared, they could divert a sat to track me, or key in the multiple national panopticons to keep an eye on me. I doubt they'd do that, at least for now, I'd been a Good Boy so far. Combined with the fact I'd finally used my leave, I suspected my handlers would just assume I was going on a bender in Vegas without wanting my wife to eventually find out about it. Still discouraged, because UNSEEN operatives were expected to keep a track of their personal lives to reduce the risk of infiltration or other factors that could potentially compromise us. Turns out, in a Police State, there are a lot of eyes on the cops.
Vegas had found itself in an unenviable position in the 2030s, with the proliferation of ESPers, precogs and clairvoyants. It had personally come as a surprise to me that anyone mathematically illiterate enough to gamble in the first place would care about the risks of encountering the rare metahuman who had somehow evaded detection, and yet the whole business did run on irrational sentiment after all.
But Vegas always bounced back, and it came back with a vengeance. Flush with the wealth from oil sheikhs in the Middle East frantically liquidating their sovereign wealth funds, trillions of dollars had poured into the the city, and that money had been greedily piled ever higher, with massive starscrapers bigger than Mammon's erection, ever more grotesque casinos aiming to out-do the one next door.
Surveillance inside the casinos was practically on par with Atlas and other government blacksites. Dozens of precogs were on payroll monitoring every dice roll and RNG machine. It was the only real way to handle the issue, precogs were the best counter to precogs. AGIs scanned every facial tic, every byte running through your lace, and there even was a casino that prided itself on premises inside a pocket universe, where you could let the House fuck you while knowing for a fact nobody else was watching.
The very streets were quasi-psychedelic, the robocabs literally rolled dice to determine fares. Pheromones and airborne drugs wafted from dens of vice, some of the world's most talented spatial distorters crammed far more x, y and z into the Vegas strip than could have ever plausibly fit, and the whole thing gave me a headache.
I found my target, an other unassuming residential building housing those unfortunates who called the city their home. It reeked of piss, with a pile of municipal cleaning bot corpses stacked high as a warning to the next one that attempted to make entry. I felt a contact high just from swiping my finger on the door.
A woman let me in, her face gaunt, her eyes unwilling to rest on my face. She'd seen too many Parrots and just barely lived. She led me through the muck, past sofas piled with wireheaders using their drugs of choice, be with neomorphine or just some shady VR sim.
She handed me a card, with a stylized spider on the back. My lace practically red-lined from all the errors looking that looking at it threw up. Her hands began trembling short after, and she had already wet herself. I wondered how she'd gotten herself into this mess, she probably had half a dozen more such transactions in her before her brain looked like a kuru victim's.
I then headed to a VR hotel. It was the kind of place that catered to supes that couldn't get standard neural laces, and boasted a combination of massive processing power and lax supervision. As long as you didn't try to instantiate a seed AGI on their hardware, they gave no fucks as to what you got up to in there.
I settled into a pod, making sure not to use my occipital jack. I flashed the card at the machine and received a string of instructions in response. Done, I ordered a wipe of all memory, and walked back out into the Vegas sun.
I was directed to go west, taking a cab as close to the DMZ as was allowed, and then walk into the Mojave on foot. My contacts would ensure that the autonomous defenses on the US side wouldn't eviscerate me, and the Californians had an open doors policy to would be American refugees.
The heat was sweltering, even with my enhanced heat dissipation systems, I was chugging down water like a pig before I'd gotten half a dozen kilometers from the nearest road.
I scanned the seemingly featureless desert for hours before I first spotted a bell.
It was the entrance to a nest made by a trapdoor spider. I knelt down, and gently plucked at the visible threads. In response, I felt the spider tug back twice. She knew I was knocking.
It was an absolute pain to locate two more, even cheating as I was with thermal vision goggles. But, ignoring the fact I was scrabbling around on the ground cold-calling spiders, it wasn't too hard.
All three done, I decided to head due west, but without a fixed destination in mind. I'd followed the procedures, either they'd let me in or they wouldn't.
I'd scarcely gone another kilometer before the first curls of mist sprang up incongruously in the baked desert heat. It wasn't even mid day.
I kept walking, and it grew thicker. An alarmed bleep indicated my lace had lost GPS and GLONASS, and was getting conniptions because I no longer had any way to call for help if the need arose.
The mist condensed and congealed as I kept moving onward, eventually thickening into thin strands of spider-silk I tore through without care. My lace beeped again in alarm, its fallback dead-reckoning location tracking was going haywire, I was both headed straight and yet going in spirals, like a bug following a strand of webbing.
At least the silk was mercifully cool on my face.
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The watchers tired of my plight soon enough, and a particularly dense patch of mist suddenly evaporated to reveal a man standing there, evaluating me. He slowly chewed on tobacco, seemingly content not to speak until I did.
"I'm here to see the Lycosan." I told him. He hawked, and spat on the desert sands, which were still sizzling hot despite what my skin was telling me.
"Business or personal?" He drawled, scratching at his grizzled beard.
"Call it personal for now. UNSEEN doesn't know I'm here." I told him.
"Smart call, Blue Man. I'm glad you remembered to drop the heat this time." He replied, pulling out an old tablet on which he started drawing with a stylus.
"What?" I asked him, thrown off his phrasing. What did he mean, "this time"? I hadn't had any dealings with the Lycosan before.
He just smirked in response. I hoped he was just fucking with me.
"Shut up and look at the drawing. Turn off any Parrot Pluckers you've got running on your lace. In fact, I want the lace switched off." He ordered, putting on a pair of polarized sunglasses. I sighed, and performatively went through the sequence of taps and blinks that truly removed all the filters on my visual perception.
"No, I meant it. Off." He reminded me.
It had been years since I'd actually turned off my lace, to disable it entirely was akin to leaving my eyes behind by this point. But I still complied, following the ritual to disable it and overriding all the alerts.
He nodded, scanned me down with some kind of wand, presumably for detecting EM radiation, and turned the tablet around. It stung my eyes, but I tried not to blink. A spiderweb again, but the strands were as sharp and unforgiving as barbed wire. It cut into my sensorium, leaving bleeding gashes in my vision.
Once he was satisfied that I was sufficiently entranced, he drew out what resembled a laser pointer with a glowing tip, and traced a shape in the air in front of us.
There was the characteristic pop of air pressure equalizing, and genuinely cool air rushed out of the opening he'd made.
I stepped through gingerly, being careful to stay away from the edges. Depending on the means by which portals were made, the corners could be even sharper than Alia. It would be a pain to explain a missing limb.
The moment we were both through, he dismissed the portal. We found ourselves in what resembled the bowels of a seagoing vessel, except converted into the world's most eclectic bar.
It took me a while to re-establish that the last parrot I'd seen hadn't given me a stroke, because everyone inside was weird. Like Star Wars cantina scene levels of weird, and with scarcely better CGI.
There was a lady straight out of a 1920s costume drama, when society women took to smoking using that dainty little pipe because cigarettes were too uncouth to touch their lips. Something like that, because I wasn't able to use my lace to look it up.
Of course, weird fashion wasn't what drew my eyes to her. She had a Centauri warform on a leash. I eyed the monstrosity that was the size of a Pyrenees with the temperament of a unneutered Chihuahua with great unease. I had no idea what she was using to control it, but she must have had some means to keep it in check. Otherwise I'd have been walking into an abattoir.
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She winked when she noticed my glance, and blew a perfectly heart shaped cloud of smoke in my direction.
"Dafuq you lookin' at blueberry?" The warform asked me. It sounded like it smoked Camels without a filter and listened to late 90s rap on repeat. I quickly averted my gaze amid an outbreak of laughter from some of the other denizens.
One more thing I'd come to take for granted was the fact I could understand what people said. With the ubiquity of translation software, you could speak out loud from Timbuktu to Kanyakumari and expect yourself to be understood. Not here, with my lace offline, I was inundated with conversations that spanned a whole bunch of languages. From distant memory, I could make out Hindi, Tagalog and some creole and patois. The majority spoke English, but they seemed to flaunt their polylingual nature with pride.
I spotted the man who had brought me here, in the midst of pocketing change from the bartender as both smirked. I knew my misfortune was being played off for a laugh. I felt ungainly too, with the lace offline, my bionics no longer felt exactly like an extension of my body. I walked up to where they sat.
"Well, is she ready to see me?" I asked him.
He downed his drink and burped performatively.
"Ah su'pose yuh could seh she is, bredrin. Mi ago buzz yuh in."
Great. He'd been speaking slang so heavy that my lace had been translating it all along for my sanity.
The kind of door meant to hold back a flooding compartment after a torpedo had poked a hole in the hull creaked open, and I stepped through into an altogether different style of room. It was practically Geigeresque, and I half imagined my boots making squick sounds as I walked over what could be best described as living tissue. Thankfully, it was just another hallway to pass through, and one more blast door later, I found myself in what could well pass as a respectable office, albeit antiquated. Walnut furniture, bright colors, a Spiderman poster from the 2029 reboot, and in the midst of it all, a woman who resembled the outcome of a radioactive human biting a spider.
She was spindly, limbs long and covered in fine fuzz. Two pedipalps stuck out of her jaw, drooling sticky saliva that a patient servant wiped away with care. I suspected that she had more than the usual number of eyes, given the visor she wore, with multiple goggles and cameras akin to antiquated quad-NVGs.
The Lycosan.
Thankfully, she spoke Standard English, without any of the added lisps I'd expect from lips that grotesque.
"Dr. Adat Sen. Imagine an UNSEEN official of your rank paying me a visit. Here to serve a warrant, are you?" This prompted more laughter from the hangers-on.
"Him a move real desperate, Miss, mi did have half mind seh di bullshit we tell him woulda mek him call it off." The man said, sitting down on one corner of the table.
She leaned forward to examine me closer. I could just barely make out unblinking eyes beneath the lenses.
"A blue man. We get more of them looking for our services than you'd think, since you're so eager to label us Public Enemy Number-" She glanced at the man, it involved less head turning than you'd expect.
"Uh, tree now? Dat depends pon if yuh ah count di Centaurs, Miss." He mused.
"I don't have time for games. Can you do the things your reputation claims? Or should I find some other way of handling this."
The man laughed again. "Yuh have di wrong idea, UN man. Ova yah so, we nuh give two raasclaat 'bout weh yuh business. Cum, show me yuh badge, try fi mek mi dance. Yuh aguh sorry yuh did." He flexed his hand, which began to glow red hot. I could feel the warmth from a distance, it wasn't just embedded LEDs.
I surreptitiously began the bootup sequence for my lace. It wouldn't be nearly enough against what I was facing, but I was sick of being taken for a fool.
"Oh, one real feisty!" He exclaimed, as the detector now in his pocket began beeping.
"Enough. Let's see if he can walk the walk. What do you want, blue man. A promotion? Breakthrough in a tough case? Your dick to stand up again? Lycosa can do all of that." She whispered.
"It's my wife. I want to ensure she makes it back home safe and sound." I told her, making her smack her pedipalps in contemplation.
"Expensive. I read your files, Dr. Adat Sen. Your wife, she's a big shot teleporter. No less than several dozen simulations that involve her. I can tell you this much, she's inextricably linked to half the fleet movements in Alpha Centauri. No easy way to sever the thread." She mused. More mist began forming in the small room, this time, the strands were even more tangible, floating before her as she gently plucked at them. It made a sound, quite mellifluous, even if I wouldn't quite call it music.
Lycosa was a Class 5 Meta-Precog, a segment in the classification scheme that pretty much consisted of just her. The metaphysics of precognition were complicated, to say the least, with all sorts of order of operations, interactions or weird edge cases to consider. That's before you get into how they interacted with reality manipulators.
A higher ranking Precog would be able to supersede the predictions of others, in case they came into conflict. Truly Class 5 or 6 Precogs tended to have reality manipulation powers that let them both predict and manipulate outcomes.
In contrast, Lycosa was more the master manipulator, the spider lurking in the middle of a web not of its making.
She could visualize all the predictions that other Precogs made, including their strength, accuracy and precedence over one another. With her will, she could bend the threads, intertwine them with each other, and in some cases, tear them outright and make the prophecy null. If done just right, she could bring about certain specific outcomes, but at the cost of throwing other Precogs into disarray. The costs usually outweighed the benefits, at least as far as the UN was concerned. She and some others might well disagree.
Lycosa had been on the Most Wanted list for years now, and the cumulative bounty on her head was several billion USDE at this point. But of course, the usual means of tracking down such individuals, the use of clairvoyance and precognition, only served to alert her and let her actively throw off their pursuit.
Still, she'd have ended up black bagged by any number of organizations if she had been all on her lonesome. It was her relationship with Lumen that kept her alive.
Ah, Lumen. An explicitly metahuman supremacist group, they advocated for the control of political and not just military power by the supes. They consisted of draft-dodgers, supes who had evaded the mandatory national and international conscriptions. Most such groups had been systematically exterminated; some redoctrinated, others subjected to the procedure that somehow bore my name, and a few were simply put down for good. But they'd continued to be a thorn in our side, mustering just enough public sympathy to avoid being labeled terrorists.
The dozens or so ne'er-do-wells haunting these premises must have been her cell. Lumen ensured each clique was autonomous, so that being compromised wouldn't entail the end of the organization.
As expected, they had significant affinity to the Penitents, since they felt no shame in demanding worship themselves. But of course, no supe could denigrate themselves by becoming a Penitent, and the latter wouldn't be allowed to join Lumen in the first place.
"Just tell me if you can do it. Remember that I obviously want there to be no catches, I should be satisfied by the outcome and alive to see it." I couldn't let them take the easy way out.
"All things are doable. But this work commands a steep price. Can you afford us?" She questioned, leaning back in a manner not feasible for typical spines.
"Name it. But I'm not a traitor, I'm not going to compromise the war or betray UNSEEN. If you want me to play one nation off another, then I'll do it. That's got to be worth a lot of money right?" I asked her. I really wouldn't go any further, for all the love I had for her.
"We will have multiple boons to ask of you. But for a teaser of what's at stake, your wife currently has an 18% chance of making it home alive in the coming 2 years. Does that loosen your tongue?"
My lace hadn't come on fast enough, I had already broken out in a cold sweat.
"I can assume some risk on my own life, if it's that bad. But I won't compromise on the rest." I declared.
I was making a mistake. People would likely pay a few millions to see me dead. But what other choice did I have?
"Very well. We will demand three things of you, with the passage of time. The first is that you must see El Presidente dead, bring the hammer of the UN down on him regardless of what the American bastards say." She slashed with her sharp nails, cutting a dozen strands of fate before my eyes.
Was it such a bad trade that I'd almost do it for free? He deserved to die for what he'd done.
"Done. It might take time, but he'll hand me some rope sooner or later." I affirmed, sealing someone's death warrant. I could only hope it wasn't mine.
"Smart man. Remember, you want to succeed. The sooner we apply our forces, the easier it'll be to improve her chances. It's not something easy that you're asking of us.." She began to move her hands like someone playing a harpsichord, plucking at newly manifesting threads. They split or tore with little pops, and I bent the future to what I hoped was a better outcome.