" Well, what I'm saying is that there are known knowns and that there are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns; things we don't know that we don't know." - Gin Rummy.
I normally know the exact moment down to the second when I fall asleep, but being drunk threw my senses out of whack. I woke up to an elbow in my cheek. Sileena, missing her shirt but thankfully in a bra. At the foot of the bed, Hyo was curled up, and on the floor beside us, Marauder was sprawled across the floor missing his shirt too. Thanks to the party my arm, cuts and bruises were all aching as well. It was a shitty feeling, but the kind that sort of made you smile.
“Ugh,” I commented. “Alright, get up. Time to go,” I told them.
“Shhhhhh not so loud,” Sileena said, shoving my face aside.
“Nope, come on. Deals a deal, up up up, abaho!” There had been a time for fun and rest, as I’d promised, but we had too much to do. Specifically, I did, but they were my problem as a trio so WE had stuff to do. We’d have to hit the ground running, but my connection to the computer told me the last layers of the decryption I was letting my computer work through on the actual device was nearing completion.
“I’m gonna find Jehrico. Get yourselves together please,” I said to a chorus of whining I almost joined in on as the room spun around me.
As it turned out, Miles and Jehrico were up already, some trick of magic preventing the two of them from getting even a tiny hangover. “Upgrade, you’re up early,” Miles spoke, black sunglasses keeping a far-too-bright sun out of his eyes and making me wish I’d brought mine with me. “Sleep okay?”
I gave him a shrug. “I don’t ever really get what you’d call a good night sleep,” I told him honestly. “I’m always restless even when the organic parts of my brain are out. I don’t feel as sluggish as I should, though.”
“Makes sense. I had a dream about a Cockatrice making landfall in Montana and turning the residents into stone, but I didn’t have anything to make a healing salve so I couldn’t save them. Wild as shit, right?”
“Cockatrice? Like the dragon-chicken?”
“Yeah, but the wild part is me not having healing herbs. Can you imagine?”
“Miles,” Jericho cut in from his seat behind his little brother.
“Don’t be a dick,” Miles commented lazily, standing from his resting position against the couch, and patting my shoulder shoulders. “Twice in a month? Careful Kenny, I might start to get used to seeing you around again.” I took the jab in stride and watched him take a seat beside me before turning to Jericho.
“I’ll level with ya kid,” Jericho began as I took a seat in a chair across from him. “We’ve pissed off a lot of people.”
“Of course we have, but we knew that was gonna happen,” I said. Jericho nodded, looking comfy in the off-white two piece suit he lounged in, black gator shoe hanging in the air from a lazily crossed leg. The smile he flashed had a gold fang within, a reminder to everyone that he was equal parts hood-godfather and ruthless warlord in his own right.
“Yeah we did. And I’ve been thinking… why do you think Kento’s PsyPro was in the City?”
“I only have a few theories,” I started as my old mentor gestured with a single, rough hand for me to go on. “Well, for starters I’d guess the thing needs a suitable host.”
Millie pushed open the back door of one of the houses that made up the villa wherever we were. I could have located this spot with GPS if I wanted to, but I was disinterested in that. She had a box full of clips in one hand and a bottle of Tea Tree Oil in the other. Dragging a tall barstool behind my chair, Jericho gave a response.
“Maybe, maybe not, but I figure there’s no way they didn’t have the time before he croaked to find someone, somewhere who could host it.”
You can remove the mind, what makes you, YOU. And put it somewhere else. Even into someone else, if need be…
As Millie pulled apart months of tangled hair on my head, I spoke through grunts and tender headedness. “Fair. Doubt it was a matter of finding someone willing to let their mind get wiped out too. Can’t imagine they’d waste any time getting their head of R&D back into the fold…”
“Yeah,” Jericho helpfully added.
“Unless that was the whole plan. Shit, maybe whoever’s at the top wanted to get rid of him?”
“Close, but no single person holds the reins in the FORGE, which means,” Miles added on and trailed off. His face had turned from the aloof young wizard into the wise but still young sage. I realized I’d been set up then.
“Kento might not have been very popular among his peers and underlings. Maybe they were keeping the backup for the information on it, but not because bringing Kento back would have been high prio,” I went on.
“And, if it’s lost while in Halogen’s care it doesn't look bad on them as much as on their lapdog,” Miles went on, and as Jericho say back I realized wh: Miles had stepped out of the hazy mask of apathy and exhaustion and into place as an advisor wise beyond his years. After I left it seemed like one thing had remained true. The temper of Millie was balanced by the calm of Miles.
“I mean, yeah,” I said as Millie worked with supernatural speed and precision, conjuring water to splash where needed with simple incantations.
“Stop tilting your head away from me!” she snapped and I froze. “Thank you.”
“But my question, then, becomes why,” I went on, “ Why not just keep it in the basement of your super secret research facility until you gotta call on it again.”
“My guess is that Halogen made some strongly worded promises she could keep it safe,” the less abrasive twin added and Jericho offered a nod.
“They would take that gamble?”
He sat forward, clearly about to push me towards the conclusion he had been meant to.
“Kendrick, you don’t know what you don’t know,” Jericho airily spoke like a nigga trying to sound deep without realizing he said something shallow as a kiddie pool.
“No shit.”
“He’s driving at a point, listen to them,” Millie spoke in a much calmer tone.
“Obviously you know you don’t have a lot of information to work with, but some things need to click into place, bro,” Miles added.
“Everyone’s playing at an angle. We only have our own cards to look at and the ones everyone else has already played. Whatever lightened up security enough that you managed this suicide mission played a part, but there was always a non zero chance someone would steal that thing. It’s too easy to say ‘Halogen’s holding it, so it’s not on them’ even if they don’t care about Kento. We know it’s the real deal, though, because Halogen’s been busy putting out hits on you.”
For half a second, I paled. Casually letting me know I was currently a wanted man in the underworld would have been funny if it wasn’t an actual threat.
“It’s also too easy to assume that Halogen’s plan to consolidate power was as simple as hiring as many attack dogs as she could. Scrap Pack’s huge, Kendrick. She’s got a bigger gang than me answering directly to her right now, without factoring in whatever she already had beforehand. The FORGE hasn’t made much noise about the theft, outside of whatever Halogen’s been up to, San has stayed completely off the East Coast, but he’s still stateside.”
“As far as they know, I’m knee deep in all of Kento’s secrets too,” I spoke in a quieter voice, “And as always you’ve been putting pressure on everyone not aligned with helping you with your own activity across the states. I get what you all mean: They don’t know what’s going on in our world either. Not fully.”
“They know that you’ve got the keys to the kingdom via that PsyPro in some ways, and a chip on your shoulder. Those are the cards that have been played. No one’s making moves with all the information, and the only thing you can do better than them, without a doubt, is get information.”
I understood what he wanted to impart on me in his frankly annoying way. “Coulda just told me,” I groaned and he raised a questioning eyebrow to goad me into speaking. “I gotta stay on my toes and not make the mistake I made at the parlay. I don’t have enough info to make a fully committed decision, and all the info Kento had won’t fix that so much as illuminate some things.”
“Or, in other words,” he said and I cut him off.
“I don’t know what I don’t know. Too many moving parts. Myself, the FORGE, Halogen, hell even you have an angle in keeping me on my a-game.”
“There he is,” he clapped.
“Halogen’s mad, but not so mad that she’s put everything she can bring to bear on the table. The FORGE is obviously not happy either, but they’re relatively muted considering your squad and our gang scored two big wins against them,” Miles spoke. “I’m proud of us, but the game’s changing before our eyes. I can sense it in the wind. I’m gonna do a tarot reading later.”
We talked shop a bit after that, mostly me talking him into parting ways with some supplies in exchange for telling him the juicier bits of what I found out front he PsyPro. Millie worked through my hair as the others slowly emerged and Jehrico entertained us. Miles and Marauder were very chummy in particular, with the former offering to help the latter make something out of that sledgehammer he’d stolen.
“So that broken arm is self-inflicted?” Jericho teased me. “Damn I’d hate to see what he looks like. Gaz respects strength a lot, so you probably bought yourself that conversation with him, if a little enmity. Fuck you wanna talk to that freak for anyway?”
“Holding some cards close to the chest,” I responded in keeping with our talk earlier. Gabe shrugged when Jehrico looked at him. “I got a plan, that’s all.”
“More unstable reagents in the mix, great idea,” Miles droned at me with mock admonishment.
“Hey, gotta stay ahead of the game somehow,” I admitted as Millie ran her fingers through my hair one last time. “I appreciate you, as always Mills.”
“Yeah, I know. Just do me a favor and don’t die while it’s fresh. Be a shame if my work went unnoticed till your funeral.” she said as I stood and turned to face her. “And also, trim your fuckin beard you look homeless.”
“Alright, that’s my cue. Jericho. Mind sending us back?” I asked, and he stood up, as did Gabe who had two duffel bags full of fresh gear and a backpack full of leftover food, Hyo who had three in each arm, and Sileena who carried… herself, stood ahead of him.
“Keep our talk in mind. Lot’s of candles in the dark,” he said as he swung one hand and reality sliced open, tearing as it had before to open a bridge between here, and home. Once we were through, I called back before it closed, “Now that actually sounded prophetic.”
----------------------------------------
Jericho had made it his mission to be a detached mentor figure for me my whole life. Somehow a one eyed, jaded asshole like him often had a better outlook and better insight than almost anyone else I knew. I wasn’t one of his anymore, but I also would never shake being one of the Daywalkers, and I had a sneaking suspicion that in a couple of weeks I’d be seeing him again.
Everyone had either showered or gone back to sleep, which left me alone with a towel over my shoulder, staring at the PsyPro. No rest for the wicked. It had been all I could do to even take a shower of my own, blood boiling with anticipation and leaking from the slashes I’d reopened partying too hard. I ran my tongue over my teeth, cracked my knuckles, and took a deep breath. If I was going to be possessed by a techno-ghost virus of Kento Yamada, I’d do so comfortably in my chair, without anyone worrying or fussing in the background.
In my hand I held a tablet.
In the back of my head, there was a whisper of concern over the danger, but just one more time I quieted it and closed my eyes. I was prepared for this.
With the contingency I’d put together, I reached out, feeling the PsyPro with my power’s third eye. Most technology feels alive in some way or another to me. Sometimes it’s the way a tree feels alive when you’re in the forest: ambient, there but not active. Other times it’s like a pack of wild hounds, raring to run you down the second it becomes “aware” of you.
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This little piece of tech somehow felt like nothing I’d ever felt before: eager to release the information barely contained within like a child hungry to spill out every secret it ever heard. Pulsing, aggressive, reaching to me as I reached out to access it.
I made contact, and…
Nothing quite happened. Well, something did happen, there was an explosion of data streaming into my mind, but it didn’t hurt the way an overload should. Rather instead, I found myself standing in a featureless, white void. Visualizing the PsyPro’s data in a way that I could easily parse was done automatically, parasympathetically, but I was confused as to why there didn’t seem to be anything.
No encryptions remained, there were no firewalls. Nothing should be hidden.
Even still, nothing.
“Okay,” I said and tried to focus on the information streaming from the PsyPro into my brain.
“Okay what?” someone asked, a heavy accent sharp and ragged behind me. I jumped, nearly out of my goddamned skin even in the simulated world, and turned to see a man before me, eyes narrowed in disgust, anger just below the surface.
He wore a crisp suit, tan with a blue undershirt. He was old for sure, but I wouldn’t have guessed older than 60 from his stature and complexion, nor from the roil he was actively quieting in his expression.
Anger that deep was hard to hide.
“Kento Yamada? Or rather… a simulacrum of him?”
He seemed to lose a bit of steam, surprised I had come up with that presumably. I fought back a smug smirk at that.
“You seem to be well informed on the nature of advanced and proprietary technology, which means you are either the replacement they have selected, or you are an intelligent thief. Well, as intelligent as one could be, making enemies as you have.”
I crossed my arms and tilted my head indignantly. “Aren’t you literally dead?”
“Death comes for everyone. Only a fool would mock a man for reaching the inevitable endstate we all rush towards from the moment of our conception,” he dismissed, and I had to admit I didn’t have an immediate response.
But, I did come up with something: “Yet here you exist, still speaking, trying to cheat your way around death. Which you’re doing better than most at, but who’s the bigger fool considering I literally am holding your life in my hand?”
“I would consider this a point in your favor, but you are currently trying to outwit a dead old man, and not exactly doing a commendable job.”
In order to not look as deflated as I almost did, I shifted gears. “So, on the note of this simulacrum of Kento,” I started and he cut in.
“I am every bit Kento that you would expect to have met if you saw the shell I left behind.”
“You mean your body?”
“No longer,” he responded. “In a decade of tests, and a lifetime of research I have concluded that what is removed in the process of creating a Psychological Preservation Operating System is the soul. My essence, my conscious, my ego, super-ego and id, the parts of my mind that build my immortal self has been liberated, saved somewhere else, and accessed now by you.”
“I have so many questions,” I admitted, “But primarily, my scans are showing an absolutely insane amount of data saved. Every memory… your thoughts, blueprints you kept in you perfect memory. It’s all here.”
He nodded and lifted a hand, seeming more eager to engage than our short, initial salvo of meretricious insults would have you believe. The empty space filled with information more clearly organized, and as I watched him call upon ideas, information and locations that were, as of now, alien to me I could also see how he was accessing them.
He widened his eyes in surprise.
“I see,” he spoke feeling my prickling advances into his very being via my power, and shut me out as best he could. “You aren’t merely one of the net-intruding mercenaries that my contemporaries at the FORGE have made an enemy of. You are a technopath?”
“Not just any technopath, but the best one in the world.” He re-narrowed his eyes and I forced my will on him, causing him to buckle at the knees as gravity weighed down on the form he wore.
“Kendrick Carter,” he spoke and righted himself, pushing out my intrusion once more.
“Got it in one,” I spoke exercising the full weight of my power to keep him trapped. If he receded now, this part of him that I assumed was the “consciousness” of Kento, then he would be giving me what I needed most of all: a backdoor into the rest of the PsyPro. He knew that if he wasn’t here to tie me up, keep me busy it was a matter of time before I started extracting everything he had.
And I would take everything that made up this man without a single reservation. Kento, head of Research and Development, was culpable for what happened to my father, and on a grander scale what the FORGE was doing to the planet and everyone on it. Corporate greed had driven him. Maybe even something more vile. I wasn’t exactly out to save the world, but one less Kento damn sure wouldn’t be frowned at by anyone suffering because of what he allowed.
“Listen to me,” he began as the safezone he was establishing around himself started to close in on him, “I need not be your enemy. As you spoke, I am little more than a dead man until I am given a host that I can merge with. Yours is a mind uniquely suited for this. If I were to be uploaded into a normal mind, I could take over and make some upgrades to bring my mental faculties back to what they were. They would become a husk, and I’d be reborn.”
“Not making a solid argument,” I pressed as I reached into the man’s mind once more, probing it for data and information the way someone might flip through a picture book. “Have you been consciously just waiting here for them to resurrect you?”
He paused, frustrated I’d interrupted him, and blocked me out again as I extracted blueprints and research data he’d been privy to. Juicy things I’d be reading in totality later on. Still, he answered me.
“Sparingly, just when the PsyPro firmware was updated, or in spurts of self-driven activity. I know it has been 6 months since my shell expired.”
“Interesting. I imagine it would be hell if you couldn’t just shut down your own mind while stuck here,” I spoke, and he nodded, shutting down an attempt to press down on him.
“As I was saying,” he spoke through gritted teeth while I kept up the pressure, making small progress step by step, little by little, “That is a normal mind. You, and your more advanced mind would be more useful if we melded together. Your psyche and my own, blended into one being. I could promise you the information within my essence here, and the price would be that we both lose ourselves to be something new. The possibility was one we accounted for when the first attempts at an upload on test subjects showed that this could occur. Instead, the currently personality would be extinguished.”
“Total lobotomy,” I said, pausing to listen to him.
“Complete, and from the inside without doing harm that couldn’t be repaired by giving the host shell a new soul.” My assault continued and he sighed. “Naturally, I wouldn’t make this happen to you, in part because it wouldn’t be as easy on someone with psychic abilities and psionic training such as yourself.”
“Why would you offer this to me at all?” I asked him as I felt his grip slip ever so slightly before tightening again. Limit testing him was only showing he could react to intrusion almost as fast as I could adapt and evolve any virus or brute force attempt to codebreak him.
“Because, even if you allow me to be stolen back, or someone kills you and takes me from you, there is no guarantee another opportunity would come up,” he half-truthed to me.
“And also because you know that your enemies within the FORGE aren’t planning on resurrecting you at all.” He held his words, picking carefully how to continue.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I am capable of limiting how much of myself would overwrite you. I could be more of a second voice in the back of your mind.”
“Devil on my shoulder?”
“It should be possible, yes. To ride along, be your backseat and merely observe and give advice. No more or less,” he spoke.
I mulled that over, earnestly wondering what that would entail, or even be like. “Say I was interested, how could I be sure you are telling the truth?”
He freely summoned a memory, some information that he had within the lockbox of his mind. I saw him actively testing this, taking a life and uploading it to the PsyPro, and then uploading that life with limited mind-melding programs and shackles to prevent total take over. Torture of the highest magnitude to do this to two people. The host would forever have a second voice he couldn’t quiet in his mind.
Insidious to lose your own personal sanctuary OR your soul in this way.
“No deal,” I said.
“I would willingly surrender my life to you, to be summoned only when you probed for me,” he almost begged.
“Why are you so desperate?”
“I long to exist in a shell once more, even if only when summoned. It would be greater to live through you than to be unable to live at all,” he spoke.
“What do I have besides your word here, Kento? We both know that even if you stop me from cracking your personal firewall, which is frustratingly strong by the way, I will find a way to break in one way or another. Why should I take the risk on a faustian deal?”
“I know of your hunger for vengeance. It has made you predictable,” he cut right to the point. “We have been aware of your campaign since Venezuela. Agents exist where you’d least expect. I would be another tool for you to pick up and use to bludgeon those whom you hate. Even if I stand to gain, even if there is a snag, you believe in your heart that you could overcome it.”
He wasn’t wrong, and that made me angry.
But he wasn’t fucking wrong about that. I had a bad habit of using things to the point of breaking, including myself. It was a bad habit that a lot of my inventions with Gabe weren’t built to last. I’d burned out so many shields and my arm just to punch someone, but damn did it feel worthwhile.
He wasn’t goddamned wrong.
Gabe knew I was going to burn out, and he was down to go with me. To be my right hand man.
Better than a tool, but Kento wasn’t wrong about me. About why I’d left the Daywalkers. I sighed, even though I didn’t actually need to simulate breathing at all.
“How does this work?” I asked him, and he reached out a hand, the floor bringing us close.
“You have to let me in.”
My heart raced as the moment finally came. A turning point.
The kind of decision that, once it was made, couldn’t be walked back. Access to information that would shine lights on everyone’s position, an ally I couldn’t trust, but one who needed me as much as I needed him. If I took this devil’s hand there was no putting it back in the pot, and I could see that he knew I was considering it.
Take a poor sinner’s hand indeed.
I reached out and took it, opening up my shell to him, and his grip was tight, his being flooding into me.
It felt wrong.
Overwhelming.
Burning.
Slicing.
Pieces of myself being torn to asunder and subsumed.
He laughed, having gotten what he wanted. “Thank you, for proving me right Kendrick Carter,” he spat as worry creased my face and he seemed to grow both in size and strength before me, everything turning dark as my vision swam and clouded.
“What are you… doing…” I got out, and scanned his form. His full soul and all it’s weight was merging with me here.
And not gently.
No, he was consuming me, everything that made up my mind and memory. Everything that made up the parts of me that were me, leaving my powers somehow untouched.
It wasn’t him sharing the space, he was taking it and wiping me out.
I was powerless.
“I will be sure to use this shell to its fullest to exact my own revenge against those who put me on ice. Your friends will be none the wiser. I promise to lead them better, to be less foolish with my decisions. Less brash and reckless.”
As he reached to the heart of my soul, he laughed more maniacally, finally feeling himself put proof to theory in a visceral act of brutality.
I felt fear, raw and real, but I couldn’t help but smile as my body turned cold as ice and I started to fade away. Seeing it, his own smile faded for a second and his brow creased as he realized nothing was going his way at all, and my eyes closed for the last time.
----------------------------------------
“What did you do?” Kento asked, staring at me, wearing my own face but unable to move any further.
I stood, unharmed and completely unmoved opposite a figure wearing my face.
In the real world, I held in my hand a tablet.
I’d written programs and inserted enough of myself into the damn things on jobs in the past that I’d learned to make a copy of my mind to lighten the load of intruding on software, even if they were rudimentary and only capable of doing something as limited as helping me hack a security system, as the one I’d used when I’d stolen the PsyPro had. I’d hijacked it’s systems and used it to access the PsyPro, and used it as a proxy to duel Kento until he overplayed his hand.
He’d never scanned me to see it was far more limited than a real mind should be. Wreckless. Brash. Overconfident.
Sure, he’d killed a version of me and took over, but he’d also given me what I needed: an in I could use to break through his mind. A viewpoint to how I could access the rest of the PsyPro. Once I had witnessed and analyzed that, it was nothing to force my actual mind to close off Kento who was now piloting my false, low powered counterpart.
My “shell” had never been me. His personality was trapped in the tablet. As soon as he’d wiped what was on the tablet out, I’d bricked everything.
“NO!” he snarled, unable to thrash or scream. He had no mouth, thus making the latter impossible. This was cruel, maybe, but he deserved it. Through his now strained connection, bottlenecked between two access points and unable to fully defend either, I immediately began rifling through his memories. Conveniently, without his “soul” or whatever to direct his memories to be obfuscated, the man’s perfectly preserved memories arranged themselves into catergories on their own. Useful.
Something particular caught my eye: Project Umbra.
No time to rifle further as in a moment of spite he did something to the device. “Fuck,” I spoke as things started to metaphorically burn. In spite, he seemed to be deleting himself.
“I’d say something witty,” I spoke as I cut off his control, preserving as much as I could before his tantrum deleted more than 60% of itself and corrupted anything more, “But there wouldn’t exactly be a point would there, Kento? After all, I’m speaking to a dead man.”
Before he could reprise, I muted him.
And without even a second glance at him in the meta-space of the network or the now-useless tablet I dropped on the floor, I deleted his personality, his ego, his super ego and id, and everything else that wasn’t pure data.