Fike spun his chair, reaching out with a beefy, scarred arm to slide open a panel on the wall behind the desk. With a practiced motion, he pulled out an odd device — some kind of array of sensors — on the end of a jointed arm.

Turning back to face me, he smiled, and the device lit up like a six-eyed metal imp peering at me over his shoulder.

"Just a few scans while we get into it," he said — as if it were no big deal.

"Scanning what? And who's doing the scanning?"

Fike's eye twitched. I took it as an indication that it was too much of a bother to explain. "It's linked to MiniMax. And we will get into that eventually, I promise. It's just not time."

I sighed, leaning back in my chair. "Alright. Let's have it."

The ex-fighter nodded approval. "Tell me about your job before you wound up in the shelter."

"Not much to tell." I shrugged. "I worked on interfaces for Edison's cars. MiFi stuff, augmented reality, that kind of thing. I was on the team that figured out how to feed the 360-degree optical and LIDAR into a driver's NUI without…you know…making them puke their guts out."

Fike chuckled. "Yeah, I would think that'd be sensory overload."

"Way too much to process consciously," I said, nodding. "So, I took an idea from these tactical visors we had in GreySec. They processed ambient sounds and overlayed these little visual markers on your POV. Like if there were footsteps, you'd see some fuzzy lights where the sound was coming from. Gunshots, you'd get different lights, and the color would tell you how far away and what kind of weapon."

Fike looked impressed.

"Yeah," I continued. "Top-shelf tech. For Edison, I changed up the feeds so drivers would only get little sensory cues from the LIDAR and cameras. A faint shadow if a car was behind you, that sort of thing. Only takes a few hours to get used to it now."

"Not bad. Sounds like you're pretty good with an NUI."

I shrugged in modest agreement. I was good with modding NUIs. No doubt.

"Tell me about the visors."

I tilted my head. "The GreySec ones?"

"No, the ones that got you disemployed from Edison."

The pride drained from my body, and I slumped back in my chair. "Oh. Uhm…how do you know about that?"

Fike pointed to the glowing, six-eyed contraption above his shoulder and smirked.

I found myself resenting the little articulated bastard, even if it was just a cluster of lenses and sensors.

"I was using the fabrication lab in our department to modify AR visors. In a way that's frowned upon by the Consortium."

"You were unlocking them for untraceable MiFi access, right?"

"Yeah. Giving them spoofed NIDs so they could talk to the TaoCom net. It was for the opt-outs, you know? Just peeps who didn't want a corpo chip running in their brain 24/7."

Fike nodded slowly. "They have their neurocoms deactivated, but when they do that…"

"…they lose access to ninety-percent of everything," I cut in. "No MetaNet, no coms. Good luck driving a car or paying for your NuBurrito. Getting hassled by badgers because your MiFi isn't pinging. It's a high price to pay just because you don't want Ren Xie's spyware in your brain."

"You sound like you want to join them. Be an opt-out yourself," Fike grinned.

"Nah. But I get it. I totally get it."

"I'd say it's sort of admirable, helping peeps survive in their own way. But you sold those visors, didn't you?"

I shot him a flat look. "I did."

Fike stared at me, unreadable, for a long minute before cracking his knuckles and reapplying his smile.

"Now, fill me on your stint with the Greys."

I heaved a deep breath. "Rather not."

"Jakob," he said, raising an eyebrow.

My head flopped backward, and I shut my eyes. "I signed on for motor transport. Made sense, 'cuz I was always into cars. Figured I'd get to travel, see something other than Hope Mega before I kicked."

I opened my eyes, leveling them at Fike. His expression told me I was supposed to keep talking.

"What I didn't know was that GreySec has some deep roots in military tradition. Trace the corporation back a hundred years, and most everyone involved was in this American military thing called the Marines. Eddie Greysen himself, Founder and CEO extraordinaire, was some General way back Pre-Collapse. Anyway, one of those traditions was that everyone in the uniform, whether you cooked chow or wrenched trucks, was a fighter."

"Makes sense," Fike said.

"Does it? I didn't think so. I mean, I had some fun at the rifle range during training, but I didn't sign up for any front-line skitz."

"But that's exactly what you got, right?"

I nodded, my eyes fixed on the desk between us. "Not even two months into my first deployment. They put me at Camp Condor, right on the outskirts of Appalachia. One of fifteen camps along the border to keep the Remnant U.S. from necromancing any old 'Manifest Destiny' ideas. Anyway, Condor is closest to Mount Weather, and we would have a lot of corpo paper pushers come through on diplomatic assignments to the RUS capital.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"I'm in Motor T, so I'm also driving a lot of the time. And I get stuck in a convoy hauling some blueblood from HighCastle to the RUS's little underground headquarters. Convoy gets to the outer perimeter of Weather, and there's a straight up riot breaking out. Remmie soldiers are pushing back a few hundred protestors, all of 'em swinging signs and screaming in their faces.

"You know, here's a fun fact…these chungi definitely don't call themselves the 'Remnant United States'. Nah, they think they're still in charge." I barked a chuckle. "They actually call Appalachia 'the United States of America'. It was right there on the sign. Completely ignoring that they've been hiding in a hollowed-out mountain for a hundred years. They're struggling. Have been forever now, and their leadership just keeps pretending. But their people, whoever's still living out there, they aren't buying it, right? They're pushing on the fence, trying to break through to get to their president, or whatever, probably to shove a picket sign up his deluded ass.

"I'm just watching from the OGRE. We're waiting for the mess to clear up so we can get this VIP through the gate. Then some fragwit gets impatient and starts shooting. I see muzzle flashes all around the crowd of civvies. The Remmie bastards are just cutting 'em down, point blank, and I jump out of the cab with my SA-13 cocked and locked. Everybody's dismounting, and I look back, my Master Sergeant is leaning into the corpo VIP's transpo. He pops up, hits us on comms, tellin' us to engage. Not the fraggin' Remmies cutting loose on civilians, though. He tells us to shoot the civvies running our direction. They're just trying to get away from this fuckin' slaughter, but…"

I couldn't go on. It may have been a retelling, but for my purposes it was a reliving. And that was a part of my past that I worked very hard to bury deep.

My eyes burned. They wanted to drop tears, but the rage in my face was burning them up before they could form. I blinked — hard — and didn't realize I was shaking until I looked down at my hands.

"Why did he give that order?" Fike asked, no longer smiling. He looked pained. He understood.

I sighed. "I have no idea. Protect the corpo-rat bastard in the truck, I guess."

Fike shook his head. A solemn expression, genuine as the organic flesh on his bones. The quiet around it lingered, punctuated by random clicks and whines from the six-eyed imp.

"What did you do, Jakob?"

"I…I stood there with my fraggin' mouth open, catchin' flies." I wiped my sleeve over my face. "Everyone else in the detail is taking shots, dropping the civilians before they get to our line. But all I wanted in my sights were the damn Remmies. But you start shootin' their regulars, suddenly you're just the opening act for another damn war, right?"

"But?"

"But this crowd surge is huge. Chaos. They can't shoot 'em fast enough, and they start overwhelming the convoy. Well, running past it really. They didn't want anything to do with us. But this one guy…"

I clenched my jaw.

"…this one guy, he runs right into me. I look down, and he's got his hand on my weapon. But he's not doin' anything. We just lock eyes, both of us fuckin' scared out of our minds. And it's like neither of us knows what to do. Then he just says 'I need this,' and he pulls on my rifle.

"Goes without saying I flipped out. Full panic. I knocked his ass to the dirt, then kicked the shit out of him right there. The crowd is still rushing past us, the other Greys are laying into anyone who gets close to the trucks, and I'm just kicking this guy like the whole riot was his fault. Just…railing into him with everything I got while he begs me to stop."

Fike looked to be on the verge of tears. "Did you stop?"

I swam in the recollection for a long second, like I was hoping if I thought it about long enough, the memory would change.

"Yeah, I stopped. And I put two rounds into his chest. Then I shot this woman who ran over to help him. Shot her right in the head. You know what a fucking spiked ball made out of nanofluid does to someone's head, Fike?"

He didn't. He was lucky.

"So, we get back to Condor that night and I'm put on administrative notice for hesitating. Docked two weeks pay, and my Commanding Executive tells me I'm one misplaced fart away from six months of shoveling rocks on the moon."

"Damn." Fike winced. "I don't know the GreySec life firsthand, but I know they don't like their employs making their own decisions."

A half-hearted chuckle broke through me. "No, bro. They do not." I scratched the back of my head. "I wish I would have emptied my weapon into that fuckin' corpo's transport while he had the window open."

Fike smiled, raising his eyebrows again in a silent question of my resolve. My eyes burned, and I couldn't bring myself to meet his gaze head on.

"S'pose I couldn't do that," I added, wiping my face. "No more now than back then. And back then, I still respected the chain of command. Flatlining a HighCastle VIP would have been unthinkable — like putting Jesus, Ganesha, and Siddhartha on a unicorn and then blowing up the unicorn."

My eyes darted around the little office, as I remembered where I was. "No offense, Fike."

The slab of muscle laughed in earnest. After a dismissive handwave, he reached up and pushed the scanner and its armature back into the wall.

"What, we done already?" I asked.

Fike nodded. "He has everything He needs."

"He?" I squinted. "Oh, I guess you still can't tell me."

Fike stood, straightening his robes before waving me out of chair with a smile.

I got to my feet. With no robes to wipe the wrinkles out of, I looked down at my open palms instead. Both my hands shook like valve lifters at high RPM and I laughed, freeing a single tear to roll down my nose.

"High-end wetgear isn't 'sposed to shake like that," I said, still staring at my fingers. "Reflex compensators, CNS filters…"

Fike reached across the desk and grabbed my shoulder.

"I like to think that humanity can always overcome technology," he said. "I based my whole life on it."

"And now you're here," I said, finally meeting his gaze.

"Exactly where I'm supposed to be. The Order represents the biggest experiment in blending humanity and technology that's ever been tried. A symbiosis of emotion and data, spirit and science. It always has, and unlike so many things in our world, it has never strayed from that path."

He dropped his arm and led me out of the small office. Fike waved to a pair of passing monks in the nave, then stepped off toward the transept elevators. After watching the monks glide by, their arms interlaced like lovers on a stroll, I hurried to fall in beside him.

"The science of religion, right?" I asked. "That's what this is all about. 'Unified Computational Theory'. That's how it all started."

Fike grunted. "Not far off. Back during the Collapse, it was more like groundbreaking science that shocked a world already reeling from plague and war. Practically overnight, scientists could explain gravity, evolution, and the miracles of Christ with the same set of rules. And they figured out how to prove those rules."

"The rules are what we learned in the academy. Everything that came from quantum research in the late 2040s. The hard stuff."

Fike stopped and faced me. "And what you learned didn't mesh with your beliefs?"

"What beliefs?" I said, smiling. "I mean, my mother was Muslim. Dad said he was Catholic, but he could have said he was anything. Mom prayed a lot, but I didn't see much else."

Fike grunted and nodded as if appraising my words.

"A common story these days," he said, finally. "You may learn more about that when you meet Elder Ogawa."

We approached the elevator and the doors slid wide with a metallic groan.

"Is that where I'm going now?" I asked.

"Sure is," Fike said, stepping in. "And it's where you'll learn whether or not you really belong here."

I twitched to a stop and cocked my head, still safe outside the elevator.

"And what if I don't?"

Fike grinned and folded his bulging arms in front of his chest.

"Embrace the Game State, Jakob," he said. "This is where you are, and this is what you're doing."

I raised an eyebrow. "Uhm…so?"

He pointed to the floor, beckoning me to stand beside him in the lift. "So, do it."