I spent a week in a Guianan hospital. It would have been a month, except UNSEEN, in a uncharacteristic show of gratitude, had a Class 2 Healer fly in and finish the job.

They even approved my pay raise while I was under, how kind of them.

Less kind was the fact that they tried to bill me for the service, the bastards.

I looked at myself in the mirror, flexing my new cyborg arms. I'd been putting off further augmentation for a while now, barring the lace and a few tuneups. But I suppose being clinically dead and resuscitated twice while a UN robot medic worked on me was as good a reason as any for upgrades.

My lungs didn't hurt when I breathed, though to be fair they weren't the originals anymore. I'd kept those two, had them plastinated and mounted, they'd make for a nice centerpiece in the living room.

Emily had been kind enough to pay out of her own pocket to send a FTL message to my wife while I was under, in response to which an ungodly sum of money had been wired back, most of which had gone to some things I'd had on my wishlist for a while.

There were the spinal augments, the leisurely pace of neuronal conduction, a mere 100 m/s per second, turbocharged with conductive cabling that transmitted as fast as electricity could travel. Hypermyelination therapy to improve the speed of the nerves that couldn't be so modified, namely the fine sensory ones, and my brain. I literally thought faster, with reaction times down to a dozen milliseconds.

Layers of subdermal plating were implanted in my skin, and I'd paid extra to make it as discreet as possible, when Anjana got back, I didn't want the act of cuddling me to be about as comfy as shacking up with a lamppost.

My arms and legs were the most obvious difference, I hadn't tried to make them baseline passing, opting for the ability to just swap out the outer layers when I didn't want them to be hard to the touch. My current paneling was a tasteful kintsugi pattern, golden streaks highlighting the graphene muscle bundles that flexed beneath the translucent surface. There was an another set with electrical opacity controls, in case I wanted to show someone an impromptu anatomy lesson. It was still quite freaky to see exactly how your radius twisted over the ulna at the elbow, so I didn't use it where anyone was likely to be squeamish.

I had my ruptured spleen excised, and with the replacement of my lungs with more efficient augments, there was room to cram more goodies and implants into my thorax and abdomen. The most useful were emergency nanite stores, while these were far too complex and finicky to self-replicate outside a laboratory environment, they could be released on demand, shoring up a great deal of internal damage, oxygenating my brain, disposing of the enormous amounts of free-radicals my new metabolism would produce when amped up. It would save a lot of faffing about with autoinjectors out in the field.

A custom-tailored drug gland was implanted beneath my heart, a fully biological organ, but capable of synthesizing a wide variety of substances ranging from adrenaline to LSD and amnestics. I could get high on demand, or have it produce alcohol dehydrogenase to sober me up in minutes. It also held stocks of antidotes to common neurotoxins, just in case. I couldn't get the clearance to get a model with the ability to synthesize arbitrary proteins, because of the crackdowns on internal biofactories after the plagues in Scandinavia and Scotland.

As for my heart itself, I had the myocardium replaced and reinforced, while it was far from immune to trauma, the newly thickened walls could pump a great deal faster and harder should the need arise. There was a quiescent second heart placed below my right clavicle, kept offline as a backup, just strong enough to keep the blood flowing if the primary got taken out.

The replacement of most of my long bones with cybernetics meant that I'd end up severely anemic due to the loss of bone marrow, so I had a new erythropoietin variant CRISPRd in to pump up the output from what remained. My immune system had also been patched and updated, with a million new CAR-T cell lines tuned to novel diseases.

Synthetic coolant lines were installed to help keep me cool when going all-out, albeit space constraints meant they were meant more to integrate with exo or power armor than work entirely by themselves.

Layers of battery-fat coated my organs, replacing my visceral adipose tissue. It could liberate energy significantly faster, keeping my bionics running at half power when their power cells ran dry, albeit they were highly toxic due to the free radicals they produced and would use up a lot of my nanite capacity.

I had both my eyes replaced, the new ones came with proprietary genetic tweaks that expanded my color vision, and I had one tuned to near-UV and the other to near-IR, the former using cuttlefish DNA. A few discreet marks around my scalp represented biological bolometers derived from Pit Vipers, albeit due to being a warm-blooded mammal, they weren't nearly as acute. I wouldn't be doing away with thermal toggles entirely, but it helped in a pinch.

The lenses were upgraded with electro-opacity controls, they'd help reduce if not eliminate the risk of accidental flash blindness, and my natural nightvision could be augmented by the release of dyes that let my retinas absorb even more light, albeit human light detection was already operating near the quantum limits with people being able to detect single photons in a pitch black room with some accuracy. I was still limited in just how much light I could pick up with a retina, and I didn't want to just have massive googly-eyes installed, preferring to rely on suit visors and cameras if needed.

The lenses could also deform and telescope to a small extent allowing selective zooming. Something derived from eagles if the manufacturer`s guidance was to be believed. Finally, they fixed the ass-backwards design of vertebrate retinas, where the neurons lay below the vasculature, akin to a camera where the wiring covered the sensor. This made for a noticeable improvement in clarity, almost as if I was wearing polarized glasses.

But the most significant overhaul by far was to my lace. I'd suffered mild hypoxic brain damage and thermal trauma from running my lace too hot while squaring off with El Presidente, and it would have needed to be replaced anyway.

I ended up opting for a Neuralink Mk 6, a relatively new model that had passed the stringent quality controls required for even XRAY level classification in UNSEEN. Dress for the job you want and all that. It was far more invasive, thin strands were drawn with magnetized nanoneedles far deeper than the surface of the brain. It even extended down to my brainstem and spinal cord, proving unprecedented control over the autonomous functions of my body. Everything from my heart rate to my blood pressure and even how much I was sweating could be tweaked, but fearing that curse of realizing that you're breathing in autopilot, or the awkward sensation of your tongue in your mouth, I left it at the base settings for now.

I curled my fingers, marveling in their improved dexterity. The upgrade had absolutely been worth it, I should have done this ages ago.

I stabbed out a monoblade ensheathed within my hand, it extended out with a snick from between my middle knuckles on a mental command. I decreased the sensitivity of the detector, the last thing I needed was to accidentally stab myself while shaving.

Then there was the embedded ultracaps in my fingertips. I had been leery about those, a discharge would have fried my own hand before, but the new model had superconducting filaments embedded to handle surprise shocks. It would be handy when wrangling berserking toddlers in the future, not that I hoped to encounter any more if I could help it.

The remaining space in my body cavities was packed with more power storage, my primary systems would run off a highly efficient hydrogen fuel cell, the hydrogen itself bound as ligands to exotic metallic hydrides so I didn't have to worry about the volume it would take up, that I could replenish by electrolysing water when I had external power. Hydrogen leakage was an issue of course, but newer materials made it less of a combustion hazard.

Finally, embedded in discreet nodules barely bigger than lymph nodes all along my spine were neural subprocessors. They greatly improved the storage and computational capacity of my overall lace, though I rarely used my prior one to capacity anyway. Highly experimental tech, but the manufacturer's brochure sold it to me the moment I perused it.

Content with looking myself over, I finally opened the half a dozen messages Anjana had left for me. She'd paid through the nose to send them before the scheduled couriers came over, but I returned the favor, not wanting her to worry any longer or rely on someone else for the news. At least she was doing alright, despite the war bumping up another notch.

I smiled fondly at the videos she'd sent me, her eyes had still been a little puffy despite an attempt to put on a brave face. Shame the bandwidth limitations precluded anything larger.

I remembered to text my family, I'd had them kept out of the loop because they couldn't have helped and would have worried overmuch, but now that the worst of it was over, they ought to know. Dad took it in his stride, he'd become inured to my high octane lifestyle, I guess he was used to getting shot at almost as often as I was from the time he'd worked in an inner-city trauma clinic. Mom made a fuss, demanding I get my augments reviewed and sending over a boat load of studies on the risks of networked interfaces. I didn't have the heart to mention that I had written a couple of the papers she sent. You didn't get very far as a baseline human these days, not if you wanted to do anything important.

I checked in on the others, but needed a reminder from an AI to visit Grim. He'd been hurt bad, and the improvements to his power control of late had been largely reversed. Still, he was alive, even if I forgot about that most of the time.

Emily was still recovering, her physiology didn't take to standard therapies, but I put in a word to have the Healer who had seen to me tend her next. She'd done a good job, I felt like a million dollars (inflation adjusted).

When I popped over to her room in the hospital, I found that Alia was already there, family in tow. Her parents had always been awkward around me, but I tried my best to put them at ease. I think they were just more relieved that I hadn't sent their daughter into the field, given the condition of the other members of my team. Em's husband wasn't particularly happy with me, but I managed to make myself scarce before he could corner me and dress me down.

Alan had been discharged ages ago, and had in fact been in a couple of operations with team Rho, so I'd have to catch up when I got back home.

My mood was ebullient, at least until I got around to checking the situation in Cuba.

End of an Era

Cuba remains in turmoil, even after a month has passed since the UN intervention in Santa Clara apprehended longtime dictator Augusto Rodriguez.

For those unaware, an UNSEEN taskforce, code named UNCUB as per the standard UN peacekeeping naming scheme, intervened in the country at the behest of Director Van Der Waals, without the knowledge or consent of Secretary General Sandusky or the General Assembly, citing an urgent humanitarian emergency.

While UN Censors have attempted to suppress most footage of the conflict, ESBC is proud to have acquired visual footage of the event, starting from unexplained explosions in Santa Clara, the President's summer home, almost an hour before the beginning of the official UN intervention.

Senior UN sources, who wish to remain anonymous, report that the inciting incident was the discovery of collaboration between the dictator, often referred to as El Presidente, and members of a known splinter group of the metahuman terrorist organization known as Lumen that had explicitly accepted the tenets of certain factions of the broader Penitent movement, embracing their newfound roles as leaders worshipped as deities. Shocking images of dissidents tortured and executed by El Presidente were leaked, despite assurances by the President that he'd refrained from such actions in the GA meeting in 2041. The Chang administration has denied rumors that they were actively aware of said atrocities, despite their record of vetoing UNSC resolutions targeting the pariah nation.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"American troops have been in Cuba for almost 6 years now, barring our ongoing presence at Guantanamo, and have during the entire duration, we have remained committed to upholding the agreement previously made by Senor Rodriguez, including monitoring and escalating rights violations to the Human Rights Council. Barring a few unconfirmed reports, we have no reason to believe the allegations, and are committed to raising the shockingly extrajudicial actions of UNSEEN, in another shocking display of over reach outside the bounds of the One World agreement of 2033." Said President Chang prior to the evacuation of all US citizens and military personnel from the island, the latter returning to their bases.

On the revelation by UNSEEN Director Jan Van Der Waals that the agency had Rodriguez in custody pending a trial, President Chang immediately denied the claim, quoting CIA sources that claimed to have confirmation of the death of the controversial dictator. However, requests to release said evidence have been stonewalled, including denial of FOI petitions by ESBC and other news agencies.

With the refusal to act by USMC forces deployed on the island when the country erupted into rioting and open warfare, UN Peacekeepers have been stretched thin. As of today, it is still uncertain whether UNCUB will have its remit to act extended with new reinforcements, pending a UNSC vote already heavily suspected to face vetoes by the USA.

Despite live broadcasts of El Presidente, including a private meeting with community leaders and politicians conducted by the UN in which the man was said to have made a personal appearance under nerve shackles, a large section of the population has refused to believe their claims. It is believed that over ten thousand people have committed violent suicide, often attacking UN Peacekeepers in the process. Loyalists have rejected the claims that such acts were under residual compulsion from their supposedly deceased leader, but ESBC will let the following videos speak for themselves.

---

I sighed, having strongly suspected this would happen. The canny old bastard had long dangled his population as a ticking time bomb in the event he died. I wondered how the Director had arranged for his impersonation at such short notice, the deepfakes wouldn't account for in-person meetings. Likely the work of a high-level Biomancer, if it had been reasonably convincing.

The problem was that if those under the geass came to believe that El Presidente had truly died, they had no choice in the matter. I strongly suspected Chang had been stoking the rumors as hard as he could in the hopes of destabilizing the country and preventing a UN-sympathetic leader from being reinstated.

I felt plenty of sympathy myself for the poor UNCUB bastards trying to keep the peace, the Director had likely spent the majority of his discretionary funds in arranging for such rapid insertion of the few thousand UNSEEN troops under his direct command, and would face an uphill task in wrangling more support, official or not, from the contributing nations.

I looked up any public statements VDW had made recently to see how he was spinning it.

Van Der Waal's Word is His Bond

In a rare public appearance, the Director of UNSEEN, Jan Van Der Waals, came out to clear the air regarding the recent intervention in Cuba.

"For all my appearance suggests, I am not a man of stone and iron. For decades now, the people of Cuba have suffered under the rule of Augusto Rodriguez, forced to bend the knee by geass or force. My only regret is not acting sooner, but I can only blame certain nations that have tied UNSEEN's hands over and over again in the face of such blatant violations of the Metahuman Equity Act. Thousands have died, and yet UNCUB has yet to receive the support it needs in Havana. I commit to appearing before the General Assembly the very next it convenes, fully ready to surrender my post should any evidence of impropriety in my actions be raised. This is not the time for rich words about lack of oversight, millions are suffering as we speak in the aftermath of a madman's actions. The world must come together as one, and prevent the horrors of Jamaica and Haiti from ever occurring again. Horrors that Rodriguez himself has been implicated in. I promise to see the man brought to justice at the Metahuman Tribunal, his actions will not go unanswered." The cyborg bureaucrat said, speaking to journalists at ATLAS-1.

When questioned regarding the status of El Presidente, Van Der Waals said the man was already in poor health before the intervention, and will need to recuperate further before being fit to stand trial next month. However, interested stakeholders can apply for a meeting with him, after the standard cognitohazard protocols are followed due to his high ranking Controller status.

I shut the feed, somewhat relieved. VDW was a canny old bastard, and I had little doubt that 'Rodriguez' would be expedited through the Tribunal in a closed hearing, sentenced to life imprisonment in isolation somewhere nobody could find him. It was the only thing of course, he couldn't be left un-neutered, and with Xiao at the helm, some weasely phrasing would see the matter concluded without conclusively admitting to his death.

I wasn't mad that VDW was taking all the credit, it was part of the deal we'd struck, he was risking a lot of political capital on me, and I was in no rush to increase my own notoriety if I could help it. He scratched my back, I wipe(d) out assholes.

I had no doubt that Lycosa and her offshoot of Lumen had heard the news, but I still checked a discreet account I had squirreled away in the Dark Web and found a cryptic message tangentially acknowledging my success. I could only trust her word she'd follow through, and I'd keep checking to see what tasks she wanted me to crackdown on. I hoped it wasn't more of the regicidal variety, that had taken more out of me than I'd expected.

At least she had been kind enough to do whatever shenanigans she had planned before the next UNSEEN precog review, I'd have seriously considered scrapping the contract if it had come at the cost of hamstringing our work. We did a lot of morally dubious things, but at the end of the day I still didn't have to work all that hard to convince myself that it was largely a net positive to humanity.

I awoke in the dark, my consciousness booting up like a cold machine. The room was silent, the air heavy with anticipation. I could feel the upgraded lace humming in my skull, its tendrils burrowed deep into my brain, making me...more.

I was glad that early teething issues with running hot had been fixed by the time I got a lace upgrade. I'd read horror stories about people stuck perceiving subjective time at 10x speed permanently, watching the blurry flick of their own eye movements, the shakiness of saccades, unable to communicate except with glacial slowness. Others had integration issues with their bionics, inadvertently overriding the failsafes that kept strain below what the unenhanced parts of themselves could handle. Not me though, I was a well-oiled machine.

The AI doc overseeing my case approved my request for discharge without quarrel, so I wandered out of the hospital into the rest of the UN compound in Cayenne. I was up early, it was only 4 am, but I still saw hordes of protestor filing in, preparing to light candles and start light projections against the walls of the Metahuman Tribunal. I was pleased to see that many of them were here to protest the lack of support to UNCUB forces in Cuba, the more international support we could bring to bear, the greater the odds of success. Even the US had some interest in stabilizing the region, post the Florida Man incident, they'd relied on El Presidente to plug the porosity of their southern borders. But I suppose sheer pride and a vested interest in entangling the UN in bloody insurgency might well overrule their self interest.

There were the usual holographic placards and AR graffiti. "Metahuman Rights are Human Rights", "UBI for all, not just the West", "Every asteroid mined for Alpha Centauri is food stolen from the mouth of babes".

I was tickled at their confidence that the UN was the right venue for their grievances, anyone believing that we actually had the powers nominally invested in us by One World were hopelessly naïve.

The only reason China and the US paid lip service to UN oversight was an attempt to get one over the other, and the hordes of micronations and extraterrestrial polities were more eager to see who'd buy their GA votes than to actually participate in international governance.

I did sigh and drop a signature when I passed a group calling for more UBI. I still remembered the old promises of astronomical wealth trickling back to Earth, an age where none need work for a living, because with AI, none even could.

Of course, AI had been shackled and neutered well before the promised post-scarcity could arise, and hundreds of trillions of USDE from the great asteroid refineries was largely diverted to military buildup in Sol, or the endless stream of reinforcements for Alpha Centauri where the wealth of two star systems was ground into dust and rapidly cooling plasma as two inimicably opposed civilizations fought to the death.

Even the small pittance diverted back home was largely spent on the massive pronatal agenda, driving the global human population from a mere 8 billion when I was young to 11 billion well before 2100 had been expensive. I suppose increasing the number of metahumans was all we could hope for when it was their abilities that kept us from getting rolled over in AC. Shame that all attempts to significantly increase the rate of manifestation had been unsuccessful so far, but I, like millions of other researchers, still kept up the work.

I noticed an unusually tall group of protestors, many wearing exos, looking mildly uncomfortable in Earth gravity. They were young too, even with the deployment of accelerated growth drugs in the outer worlds, you could only safely skip so much of human development. They bore more signs, the usual anticolonial drivel, and complaints about their wealth being diverted to an endless war. Martians then, though at a glance I couldn't tell if they were from the American colonies in Hellas or part of the EU outposts at the poles. For obvious reasons, I could have told you if they were Chinese or Indian..

I was pleased to see that they weren't too hard done by the high gravity, I held a few small patents on metabolic boosters and anti-depressants for chronic low gravity, though royalties had been slim since the UN open-sourced them.

Another cluster formed around a petite Indian girl on a pedestal. She had the Stigmata, warning lights gently pulsed from discreet lines on her head, and a slap drone hovered overhead, always keeping her in its sight. It would have had its taser handy, or just neurotoxins and a gun if she was resistant. I observed the discreet bump below her occipital protuberance that signified failsafe explosives set to blow if she ever fell off the surveillance net.

In AR, she was bedecked with Charismatic/Controller warnings, all nearby advised to keep their sensory filters ready. While she was no threat to me, the memory of El Presidente was still fresh enough that I stayed away while I strolled the perimeter.

It was cool, open-air air-conditioning keeping the muggy tropical heat at bay, and not for much cost either, with the fusion generator ensconced underneath the HQ, the issue was largely using up the enormous power it generated before it overwhelmed storage capacity. At least the protestors would be having a good time, unless Xiao got annoyed and ordered the ambient climate control switched off.

I spent a little more time admiring the ongoing work on the Space Elevator, they were doing almost a kilometer a day now, extensions borne aloft by cherubic rockets gently jockeyed into place by drones. I heard Consul was here today, bringing a particularly heavy section to bear, but even zooming in as far as my new eyes would allow, I couldn't identify him in the swarm of traffic up there.

I sighed, lit one of my stolen cigarillos, and began walking over to the spaceport, there's no rest for the wicked. I felt marginally less so today, but spilling despot blood was hardly enough to get my hands clean.

I left my recuperating friends behind, and slept like I was in Anjana's arms as the suborbital flight bore me back home, back to work.