TRIARIISYSTEMS
TRIARII SYSTEMS // HUMAN RESOURCES DIVISION
You will own nothing. You will be happy.
You will remain loyal forever.
Emet Graves used to hunt people for a living.
Now a stolen secret is hiding in his skull — and the corporation that built them both wants its property back.
The year is 2085. A single corporation — Triarii Systems — bought a country out of civil war and never gave it back. In Cascadia City, the last clean air belongs to the corporate green zone and their massive arcology HQ; everyone else breathes the poison air of the Sprawl. Nobody owns anything anymore. You lease your organs, your intelligence, your right to keep living — and if you default, Triarii Human Resources comes to collect.
Emet Graves was Triarii HR: a headhunter who extracted or zeroed the people who tried to escape. An OP gone wrong took his arm, his eyes, and his loyalty — and left him carrying something dangerous: a trillion-dollar Triarii secret that the corp would level cities to get back.
When a dead-drop letter exposes Triarii's endgame — an act of corporate aggression that makes the 2nd Civil War look like a schoolyard fight — one broken enforcer and the ghost in his machine have to break into the most secure building on Earth to stop it.
Society is violently fractured into two worlds, stacked on top of each other. Scroll down and descend from the pristine top of the Arcology into the ruins of the Sprawl.
A colossal, hermetically sealed city-state over downtown Seattle. Tens of thousands of cradle-to-grave corporate drones live and die inside without ever breathing real air — from the manicured Terrarium Ring down through the server-stacked Brutalist Base to the Encased Monolith, where the C-suite and the true AGI mainframes sit in perpetual artificial twilight.
A colossal fortified concrete barrier that severs the corporate Arcology from the favelas below — the hard line between those who own the world and those who merely survive in its shadow. Nothing crosses without Triarii's leave.
The hyper-dense slums built on the ruins of old Seattle, where law is written in blood and scrap.
The biomedical black market — stolen cybernetics, cut in by back-alley ChopDocs.
A vertical shanty town swarming the rusted ruins of the Space Needle.
Tech-rebels and deckers, running a mesh-network off the corporate grid.
Where the cartels bring hot silicon ashore by stealth submersible.
"The Broken Sword"
Former Triarii HR headhunter, now a favela mercenary rebuilt in whining industrial-grade cybernetics. Carries a massive corporate bounty — and a stolen secret in his skull that could rewrite the world.
Clearance Ω required — record sealed.
"The Head Chopper"
De facto mayor and chief surgeon of Chop Hill. A chain-smoking cynic born in the "Before." His clinic is Favela Switzerland — where violence means a permanent ban, or death by turret. Rebuilt Emet. Knows something is living in his head.
"The Oppenheimer of Triarii"
Head of Triarii's Black Labs, tasked with bleeding-edge frontier research. He has spent his life in the gilded cage of the Black Monolith, building the chains that bind the world — and he wants out.
The first transmission has been decrypted. New chapters of Human/Resources surface here as they're written — raw, straight from the Sprawl. Register below to be pinged the moment the next one drops.
Jerry Kansky writes cyberpunk out of Fairhaven, WA. He lives with his lovely wife, 4 cats and a dog. His hometown is Seattle — the city that, in his fiction, becomes the corporate dystopia known as Cascadia. Human/Resources is his in-progress debut novel about corporate feudalism, salvaged humanity, and the people the system decides it no longer needs.
Join the mesh. Get notified when the first chapter of Human/Resources goes live — no spam, no Triarii tracking.
HUMAN / RESOURCES · A CASCADIA CITY NOVEL · JERRY KANSKY
— END OF TRANSMISSION —
The rain hammering the rusted scrap-metal rooftops of the Needle Drop smelled like sulfur and rot. It had been coming down for hours — hard, relentless, the kind of fat soaking drops that wet your gear to the core in the time it took to sprint from the WarCat's armored rear door to the overhang of the nearest favela shack. One of a thousand identical shacks, stretching as far as Emet could see. Which, through the downpour, wasn't far at all.
"Button up," Emet said, slapping a glowing red icon on his forearm NetDeck. His helmet unfurled from the matte-black collar of his armor — nanites and their tiny matter-reassemblers rebuilding it over his graying stubble and battle-worn face for the thousandth time. The suit was a Triarii Corp Recovery Assistance Carapace, but only the tech geeks back at base called it that. Everyone else just called it the RAC.
"Roger that, sir. Sealin' up," said Agent Simms, waving for the rest of the team to follow suit. "Hat's on, kids. Boss is havin' one of his feelings again."
Helmets snapped into place as the team approached the target building's cracked and crumbling art deco facade. The large display windows had long ago been shattered, replaced by graffiti-covered plywood, which in turn had been covered in rusting, bullet-pocked scrap metal. All of it looked ancient and dead, like something dug up from beneath the surface of one of those 'earth-like planets' the Corporation's deep-space probes kept squawking about back at command. A massive, impossibly ornate awning hung over the entryway, the metal caked and stained green with age, mold, and over fifty years of near-constant rain. The rusted cables holding it to the building were frayed and sagging, like even the metal had given up on what was left of the Emerald City.
"Nah, no feelings," Emet replied. "It's just coming down harder than usual. Don't want to ride home smelling like a wet favela mutt. Smells bad enough in the WarCat when you fuckers are dry."
"Speak for yourself, boss," said Lockheart. "I smell like daisies and desire." Emet could hear it in her voice — could picture the crooked drag of one crimson-painted corner of her lips.
"Speaking of bullshit," Roadblock growled, his gravel-laced voice so deep Emet could feel it in his chest as his RAC amplified it over the constant din of rain on the rooftops. "What kind of bullshit we expecting here? Does the corp want cuffs or coffins for these fools?"
"Cuffs. Definitely cuffs." Emet checked the ammo counter on his compact assault rifle — Triarii-manufactured, just like his armor — tapping the selector until the loadout screen read Non-Lethal in tiny blue LCD characters. "Word from on high is this asshole not only defected from the highest levels of what-fucking-ever at Triarii labs, he walked off with some sensitive black-project shit too."
"And they don't want him dead for that?" Lockheart said, placing a tiny magcharge — small and perfect for breaching doors — at each of the barricaded entryway's four corners. "What's that about?"
"Oh, they want him dead," Emet replied. "It may be cuffs today, but coffins is most definitely in this motherfucker's future — home office probably just wants to scoop out whatever's in his head first. HR is fucking hardcore, never doubt it."
"I hear that," Roadblock growled. "Those fuckers even scare me… and I work for them." His chuckle was drowned out by the muffled thud of Lockheart's magcharges detonating. The entryway shattered inward, metal and plywood vanishing with a shriek, leaving a ragged black hole beneath a rusted MACY'S sign now visible on the original facade. The green awning creaked and groaned, one corner drooping toward the cracked and scorched sidewalk.
"Focus up, Reaper Team," Emet barked. "Time to earn our paychecks. Lights up, heads on swivels." He toggled the light on his rifle and moved into the ragged black opening, weapon ready. Reaper Team followed, all four dropping into tight formation as they swept the darkness with their flashlight beams.
Total black swallowed him, devouring his flashlight to an anemic thread, dust motes shimmering and gone as he swept the beam across the space. The room had once been the lobby of a large pre-war department store; he could still make out the checkout counters through years of accumulated rot and debris. From under the filth, a plastic, too-perfect smile peeked out of a faded, peeling advertisement — a ghost of what had once been called the United States, grinning up from her tomb.
"Letting Mabel off the leash," Lockheart's voice buzzed through the comms implant hardwired into his skull, conducted through the bones of his jaw. Behind Emet, the high-pitched whine of Mabel's micro-rotors spun up as Lockheart tossed the little drone overhead. Mabel sped upward, her bright white LED spotlights flaring to life, flooding the room with flat, clinical light.
The lobby was enormous. Pillars stretched toward the crumbling ceiling and marched off into the distance toward what had once been a bank of elevators. The floor between them was dark green marble, mostly cracked or broken after years of squatters and vandals claiming the space as their own. Remnants of long-abandoned huts and makeshift shelters clung to the mold-blackened walls like putrid, cancerous lumps.
The lobby was still. Silent. Dead.
"This place is a dry hole," Roadblock growled. "Scanners aren't picking up shit. Someone back at the nerd shack fucked up."
"Maybe," Emet said, switching on his own IR/thermal optics. His view snapped into stark white and black as the AI in his suit commandeered his visual layer, scanning for heat and motion. For life.
"Mabel struck out too," Lockheart said, watching the drone feed relayed to her visor. "Looks like Road might be right… for once."
"Funny," Roadblock said, his voice anything but amused.
"This place creeps me the hell out," Simms said, sweeping his rifle's flashlight across the rotten, sagging ceiling. "I mean, where is everyone? Intel said there should be over a hundred scavs living here, at least."
"Yeah, and we know intel never gets shit wrong," Roadblock said with a rumbling chuckle.
Emet didn't laugh. The feeling he'd shrugged off in the rain was back, sitting cold and certain behind his sternum — the one he'd just told the team was nothing. Nobody emptied a favela for no reason. Somebody had cleared these people out. Or something had.
On his optics, a black shape shimmered into existence near the far wall, then vanished. His onboard AI tagged it red and threw a glaring MOTION DETECTED warning around the space where it had been.
"Tighten up," Emet snapped. "Movement front, near the elevators."
The team reacted with practiced precision, spreading into defensive formation and moving quickly toward the back of the lobby, weapons trained on the spot Emet's AI had marked on each of their interlinked HUDs. Targeting lasers winked to life, perfectly straight red lines cutting the dusty air, converging and bobbing as the team closed in.
"This is a Triarii HR action," Emet's amplified voice boomed from his suit speakers as they closed on the back wall. "Present yourself, hands raised and empty, or lethal force will be used." His voice echoed off the crumbling walls of the once-opulent space. Small cascades of dust and debris drifted down from the square light fixtures hanging precariously from the ceiling on fraying cables.
"Come out, dumbass. This only goes one way if you make us work for it," Roadblock bellowed, his deep voice thundering from his speakers like the voice of an angry god.
They were met with silence — the empty stillness only dead places make. The only sound was the rhythmic rasp of Emet's own breathing in his helmet as he waited, heart hammering, for what he knew came next. They never made it easy. And they almost never got taken alive.
The drone's flat white light washed the lobby in the unfeeling glare of an operating room, deepening the surreal stillness. Emet felt like he stood in some ancient tomb — one built for the retail gods and goddesses who'd ruled the US-that-was, in the years before the second civil war tore it all down. Before Triarii had set the world right again.
A flash of movement to his right. Emet barely registered the blurred shape of someone sprinting for an open doorway across the lobby, something cylindrical and black clutched in one hand. His visor stuttered — losing the figure and snatching it back several times a second, strobing the man's dash into juddering stop-motion toward the sagging doorway beside the massive bank of dead elevators.
Emet slapped the controls on his arm and his helmet slithered back into the nanite banks on his armored spine. Dust stung his bare eyes; he squinted against the drone's strobing spotlights as they snapped on and off the runner — a man, he could see now, in a filthy lab coat and a worn shirt and tie. Emet raised his rifle and pinned him in the beam.
"Last warning, asshole. Cease all resistance or we burn you down on the spot," Emet yelled, his voice suddenly small without the amplification of his RAC.
The man in the lab coat froze in the harsh light of Reaper Team's beams, face gaunt and terrified. Skeletal fingers gripped a cylindrical black object against his chest — tiny green LEDs racing along its hypnotic dark skin — while his other hand drifted slowly behind his back.
"Don't do it, buddy," Lockheart purred, her voice somehow threatening and suggestive at once. "Whatever you stole, it's not worth getting zeroed over."
The fugitive smiled — a smile that reminded Emet of the bleached skulls he'd seen in the aftermath of the Battle of Los Angeles, littering the scorched streets of what had once been the city of angels. It had been silent there too. A place of radiation, stillness, and death.
"You're wrong about that, officer," the man croaked, his voice shaky and reeking of dehydration and terror. "If they get their hands on it, we're all zeroed. All of us." His hand kept drifting toward his back. "Do you even know what you've been sent to retrieve? Can you possibly understand the importance of this moment?"
"We were sent to retrieve you, dumbass," Roadblock said, taking a threatening step forward, leveling his rifle at the man's still-grinning face. "And if you don't stop moving that hand right now, we're gonna retrieve your dead ass outta here in a body bag."
The man's hand froze, the smile sliding off his drawn face. A bead of sweat ran down from his thinning hair, cutting a track through the grime on his cheek. His chest rose and fell as he panted for breath. His bloodshot eyes darted from Emet to the rest of Reaper Team, still faceless behind their reflective black nano-helmets.
"Now — put down the device and raise both hands," Emet said calmly, lowering his rifle a fraction, hoping to talk the man down enough to get him into restraints while he was still breathing. "This doesn't have to go the hard way. We can all walk outta here together. No need for anyone to die today."
"I don't want to die here, officer," the man said softly, his voice steady and calm with a sureness that made Emet's stomach drop — the sound of a decision already made. "But I'd sure as hell rather go out now than spend the next thousand simulated years in a Triarii interrogation sim. I'm sorry."
His hand darted behind his back, eyes screwing shut. He spun, wrapping his body around the device — and for a brief second Emet saw the detonator clutched in his other hand.
Time ground to a crawl. Events came in flashes and juddering bursts. A pale thumb pressing down on a worn red detonator switch. Muzzle flash as his own weapon bucked against his shoulder. Non-lethal, the selector had read. At this range, there was no such thing. More blinding flashes and deafening noise as his team opened fire around him. Blood and gore hung suspended in the air as the rounds struck home, jerking the man like a rag doll. Then blinding light, and pain, and a sound like the end of the world on fast-forward.
Blackness.
Light.
Blinding white.
Burning. Boring deep into his skull like twin blades of plasma and pain.
Emet was lost in it, in the endless white, devoured by the pain. Memories ricocheted around his skull like so many stray rounds. A blurry image of a ruined lobby, sagging ceilings, motes of dust suspended in beams of light. Somewhere in the Needle Drop? Gunfire. Muzzle flashes. Rain on metal. A deep, rumbling chuckle. Pale fingers clutching… something. What? Then blood, a blinding white flash, and pain. An ocean of pain. Endless and eternal.
Then darkness. An impossible black, deep and bottomless. His heart hammered somewhere far away, somehow in time with distant, half-heard scav techno — the kind Emet had always hated. The whir of machines. The hum and crackle of dirty power through makeshift lines.
Flashes of orange flame. Blood splashed on concrete. His blood? Emet couldn't remember. Rebar and steel protruding from flesh. Metal and meat married in twisted, unnatural shapes. Sculpted monuments to agony. The memories were hazy, drenched in red. Footsteps and a hacking, wet cough.
It was dark again, this time for what seemed like an eternity. He reached out — tried to find something, anything. An exit? Himself? He found nothing. Not even pain; even that was gone, swallowed whole. And then, somewhere in the dark, something moved. He couldn't see it, couldn't hear it, but he knew: something else was in there with him. Something not him. Something alien. Something other.
Light — warm and orange — spilled in around the edges of Emet's vision. Shapes moved through the glow, shadowy and undefined.
"Fuck," a gravelly voice said between hacking, wet coughs. "He's rebootin'. I told you to hit him with a big-boy dose!"
"I did! It's just not working," said another voice — this one high and soft, a young woman's.
"Back down you go, you fascist asshole," the first voice mumbled, as a flood of coolness sloshed through Emet's mind like water dousing flame. His mind faded to black, to silence.
Time passed. Emet was aware for some of it, lost and drifting in the black. His mind felt like it was bouncing between moments, completely unbound from the time in between each thought. Was it seconds? Hours? Days? He had no idea. From time to time he felt the other, always out of reach, always on the edges of his perception. He wanted to scream, to call out, but the lines between his mind and his body were cut — slashed and wriggling in the black like the rest of him. Vivid snapshots punctuated the long stretches of nothingness — sometimes blood, fire, and agony; other times moments of peace in expensive-looking places he couldn't quite remember, familiar but unknown. But mostly he drifted in the black, unbound.
Emet felt a surge of current race through his body as warm orange light flared at the corners of his vision. He gulped in breath — the awareness of his body, that he still had a body, smashing into him with overwhelming force. He willed his eyes open into an oppressive expanse of light. Instinctively he tried to shield them with his hands, but his arms refused to respond. He gasped, suddenly lightheaded, and blinked rapidly to clear his watering eyes.
"Hey, look who's up," a gravelly voice croaked from somewhere behind him. "It's about fuckin' time. Was about to give up and scrap what's left of you."
Emet heard the flick of a lighter, the crackle of a long first drag, then a fit of hacking, wet coughs. The smell of cheap tobacco smoke filled the air, making his eyes water even more.
"Where am I?" Emet said, his voice barely more than a sandpaper whisper.
"Yeah, yeah, kid. We'll get to that," the gravelly voice replied impatiently. "We've got bigger shit to talk about first. You've probably noticed you can't move, yeah?"
"What the hell did you do to me?" Emet asked, panic rising in his chest like a surging wave. He struggled to move, but his body refused to respond.
"What did I do to you? I saved your worthless life, that's what I did, you ungrateful putz," said the man with the voice like a throat full of crushed glass. "Not that you deserved it. Usually we just scrap corporate assholes like you for parts. You dicks always have the best chrome, after all."
Gradually, Emet's eyes adjusted, and he caught his first glimpse of where he was — some kind of run-down workshop. In front of him — the only direction he could see, since he couldn't so much as turn his head — sprawled a cluttered workbench littered with tools, scraps of wire, half-repaired cybernetic augmentations, and crumpled bits of stained paper. Behind it stood a wall of humming servers, constellations of blinking LEDs winking on and off like tiny stars. A large black-and-white tuxedo cat crouched on top of the racks, loudly bathing itself, one leg stuck straight in the air like a little flag.
Over the server hum, Emet could hear unmistakable signs of life — of other people — somewhere beyond the walls. Muffled voices. The clank and whir of machines. Shitty scav techno drifting in and out of earshot. Laughter.
"Why can't I move?" Emet said through gritted teeth. "What the hell do you want from me?"
The man behind him laughed, dissolving into another fit of hacking coughs, then shuffled over to the workbench and dropped onto a rickety metal doctor's stool. He looked to be in his sixties at least — greasy strands of grey hair hanging over his face, occasionally hissing against the glowing end of the slightly bent cigarette dangling from his cracked lips. One eye caught the light wrong: a scavenged optical implant, chunky and mismatched, that whirred faintly as it focused. He wore a stained white lab coat, a pack of cheap favela-made cigarettes peeking from one breast pocket and a plastic name tag reading 'FUCK YOU' pinned to the other. A pair of ancient mag-goggles hung from his neck on a cracked leather strap; smoke wreathed his head like a pall of doom.
"You can't move because I'm not a fucking idiot," the man replied with a wheezing laugh. "I know what you HR assholes are all about." He ground out his cigarette on the workbench for emphasis, then immediately stuck another in his mouth and lit it, eliciting another round of wet hacking. "Not lettin' you run buck wild in my shop before we have a little talk. You get me?"
"If you know I'm HR, then you know holding me is a death sentence, old man," Emet snarled back, trying to pour as much menace into his cracking whisper of a voice as he could. The result was not as threatening as he'd hoped. "Let me go and I just might let you live."
"You need to work on your gratitude, boy," the smoking man replied, clearly unconcerned. "And the name's not 'old man,' it's Vance. Doctor Silas Vance, if you're feeling fancy — but everyone around here just calls me Doc. That big furry idiot is Pax." Vance gestured dismissively at the cat, now sprawled across the top of the racks and snoring like a busted compressor.
"I don't care who you are," Emet spat, rage surging inside him as he tried and failed to force his body to obey — to reach out and crush the old man's windpipe with hands he could feel but not move. "Tell me what the hell this is. What you want."
"This," Vance said with a smile, "is a rescue. You're welcome."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Emet's head swam, still lost in the chaos of the dark he'd surfaced from only moments before.
"I'm talking about second chances, man," Vance replied, waving his hands as he spoke, sending ash drifting around the room. "I'm talking about rebirth, reincarnation, reclamation!" The doctor paused for effect, fixing Emet with an intense gaze that seemed to come from a younger, more vibrant version of the man. "And I'm talking about the one-million-credit bounty those Triarii fucks put on your head for desertion, kid."
The words hit Emet like a slug to the chest. He struggled to comprehend them — his mind, trained his entire life to be loyal to the corp, refused to accept it, throwing up a long list of reasons the doctor had to be wrong. He opened his mouth to spit a venomous rejection of the very idea that the corp he loved, the corp that had raised him, would ever burn him without cause. Before he could get a word out, a cracked holoscreen winked to life behind Vance — Emet's own face, frozen beneath glaring red letters: 'TRAITOR — WANTED'.
"This is bullshit," Emet said, his voice thin and unconvincing even to himself. "You and whatever scav Anarchist Grid assholes you're working for gen'd this up." But even as he protested, some deep part of him knew he was looking at the real thing. Almost anything could be faked with AI these days — but everyone knew that any AI good enough to forge something this seamless, right down to the authentication code scrolling in the margins, was a Triarii asset through and through. And red notices were hard-locked. A red notice could never, under any circumstances, be faked.
"I wouldn't work for those AG asshats for all the blowjobs in the favela flesh shacks, kid," Vance snorted. "Besides, you know as well as I do that red notices can't be faked. This is the real shit. And this real shit is getting dumped all over you, corpo true believer or not." The doctor tapped a glowing green play button on the workbench console, and the video began to play.
"HR Reclamation Agent Emet Graves, once a hero of Triarii HR, has defected from the corporation that raised and trained him, turning his back on the loyal men and women of the corporation in a stunning act of rebellion and sedition," the silky-smooth female announcer's voiceover purred over clips of Emet and Reaper Team in combat across favela locations around what had once been the Emerald City. "Recruited by rebel forces sometime in the last twelve months, Graves turned on his brothers and sisters of the famous Reaper Team — the HR unit he has led for the last ten years — during a corporate-sanctioned relief mission to the favela neighborhood known as the Needle Drop. Tasked to deliver medical care and badly needed aid, Graves turned on his team, badly wounding his three loyal comrades and stealing the critical relief supplies, delivering them instead to his new comrades in the Seattle Anarchist Grid."
Terror and betrayal broke over Emet like a bucket of ice-cold water, the fear draining down to fill every crevice of his soul as he watched the notice play across the cracked, flickering screen.
"A first-order red notice is now in effect for former HR agent Emet Graves. The Triarii Corporation is committed to protecting all citizens of Cascadia City, wherever they reside, and in the interest of security is offering a one-million Triarii credit bounty for the capture or elimination of Graves. Contact your local Triarii HR representative via the CorpNet or at your local recruiting station for more information."
The doctor switched off the screen and studied Emet with an expression that landed somewhere between amusement and pity. He took a long drag of his stinking cigarette and let the smoke out slowly, never breaking eye contact.
"Now — what say you and I start over?" Vance said calmly. "We've got some heavy shit to talk about, don't you think?"
Emet stared at Vance for a long moment, his mind reeling from the sudden, total upending of his entire world — his entire life. He had been born into Triarii, raised by Triarii minders, educated in the Triarii military academy, and served with honor and distinction in Triarii HR, one of the most coveted positions in the whole corporate security organization. He would have died for the corporation — he almost had, more times than he could count — and the sense of betrayal running through him was like nothing he had ever felt. It was a feeling so unwieldy and massive that he kept trying to reject it, like he didn't have enough emotional processing power to absorb the monolithic scale of it all. All he felt now was hollow. A shell of the man he'd spent forty-three years bleeding and fighting to become.
"Yeah, betrayal's a bitch, kid," Vance mumbled around the cigarette hanging from his lips, like he'd been reading Emet's thoughts. "Trust me, I know." He waved a decrepit, nicotine-stained hand at the workshop around them, sending more ash flying. "Let's just say this wasn't the relaxing retirement I'd planned on."
Emet watched the old man, still struggling to absorb how fast everything had changed. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He blinked — and caught a tiny, barely perceptible whirring, something mechanical and foreign, as his eyelids closed and reopened.
"You're not the first corporate killing machine I've seen get the red," Vance continued, unbothered by the existential perfect storm surging through Emet's motionless body. "But if you listen to what I have to say, if you can trust me just enough to, you know, not kill me the second I set you free, you might just be the first one to actually survive."
"I'm listening," Emet managed, his voice a barely audible whisper under the persistent whirr and hum of the server racks and the bundles of ancient wire that covered every available inch of the walls and ceiling. In his head, a long-honed impulse to destroy anything — and anyone — that wasn't Triarii strobed freeze-frames of Vance's broken body across his vision in violent pulses of red. Then, for a brief second, something else — something other — wiped it all away, leaving behind a blur that might have been a face, brilliant and momentary as the fading afterimage of a flashbang in a dark room.
"Well, shit," Vance said cheerily. "I guess that's a start." The old man tapped the green control panel on the workbench again, and a different scene appeared on the holoscreen above his head — grainy, shaky footage of the aftermath of an explosion. Broken columns and slabs of concrete piled in towering heaps in what had been a massive space. Flames and sparking wire lit the scene in a spastic, hellish glare, and with each burst Emet could see splatters and pools of blood shining amidst the rubble. The camera crept toward a heap of shattered concrete and froze on a scorched, smoking combat boot protruding from it.
"Two weeks ago, you and the rest of Reaper Team were dispatched to the outskirts of the Needle Drop neighborhood to retrieve a corporate deserter and the device he smuggled out of Triarii's deepest, blackest R&D lab," Vance said, sounding every bit like the emotionless briefing voice Emet had heard a thousand times, at the start of every mission his team had been tasked with. "I'm fucking certain they told you nothing about who that deserter was, and what he was carrying. I'm guessing that kind of blind obedience is a feature, and not a bug, am I right?"
Emet said nothing, just watched the motionless boot jutting from the rubble at a sickeningly unnatural angle on the flickering holoscreen. Vance tapped the controls again and the view snapped to a high-angle wide shot — a hidden camera in the ceiling, Emet assumed. Grainy black-and-white thermal footage showed a team of Triarii HR operators entering the lobby — his team; he knew them by the grim reaper logos embossed on each armored shoulder — guns trained on a lone figure near the back wall of the abandoned Macy's. He looked tiny against Reaper Team's armored bulk. Even on the flat thermal recording, Emet could see him shaking.
"Your target was one Doctor Dieter Moreson," Vance said, a ghost of sadness making his voice heavy for a brief moment. "One of the foremost minds in the research and development of ASI — artificial super intelligence."
"Bullshit," Emet replied. "Even researching ASI gets you a death sentence. Triarii outlawed that shit during the war, and they were right to do it — I saw what happened in the scar firsthand. It was a nightmare."
"Oh yeah, they outlawed ASI research, man," Vance said through a series of wet sounds that could have been laughs or coughs. "I knew some of the poor bastards they executed in their goddamn show trials after the fighting stopped. But do you think for one second that they'd just give up on building a god — a god that they, and only they, controlled?" Vance coughed out a derisive snort and took another long drag on what Emet assumed was yet another new cigarette. "Not likely, brother. Not likely at all."
"I don't buy it," Emet replied, impatience warring with the maelstrom of emotions churning in his gut. "Gods can't be controlled — ASI or otherwise."
"Can I get back to my fucking story now, please?" Vance said with a testy wave of his hands. "Kind of important."
"Oh, by all means." Emet tried to shrug, but couldn't.
"Thank you." Vance took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and continued. "Like I was saying, poor Dieter worked in the Triarii black-project labs, somewhere deep inside the arcology — probably in the black tower itself — trying to solve the alignment problem for ASI. It's all well and good to bring an alien god into the world, but if you can't control it, sort of a shitty deal for everyone. Just ask those poor bastards still stuck behind the lines in the Denver exclusion zone." Vance tapped the controls again and the video zoomed in, showing a clear view of the black cylindrical object Moreson clutched in one bony hand. "As far as I can tell, he was trying to smuggle something out," Vance continued, tapping the screen with one long, ragged nail. "Whatever it was, he was more scared of it falling into Triarii hands — or, I guess, staying in Triarii hands — than he was of spending the next ten simulated lifetimes getting strangled by his own entrails in some torture construct."
"Well, what the hell was it?" Emet said after it was clear that Vance wasn't going to keep speaking anytime soon.
"No idea," Vance replied with a shrug. "You and the rest of your corpo-cult meatheads blew it into a million pieces. So, thanks for that."
"For fuck's sake…"
"Look, what Dieter did or didn't smuggle out of the lab isn't what's important, man," Vance said, cutting Emet off mid-sentence. "What's important is what it means." He took a long, contemplative drag, clearly enjoying the spotlight. Emet sighed heavily, grateful he could manage at least one physical response to broadcast his growing irritation at the long-winded doctor's story.
"It means that even at the highest levels of that fascist shit show of a corporation, resistance still burns bright. It means we have a chance, boy." Vance dropped back onto his stool, winded from the effort.
"What does all this crap have to do with me, Doc?" Emet said, his patience running out fast. "And what the hell does any of it have to do with why I can't fucking move?"
"Oh, right, right. I almost forgot," Vance mumbled around the filter of his cigarette. Was it number five or six since this exhausting conversation started? Emet had lost count. The cough was making a lot more sense, though.
"So, here's what I know," Vance continued. "My people got word that someone was coming out of Triarii, looking to escape that corporate gulag, and that they were bringing something important with them — something that could tilt the scales in our favor once and for all. We knew the where and the when. What we didn't know was the who or the what. And, of course, we didn't know that you and your goons would turn up and slag the whole place before we could get there." The doctor tapped the screen controls and the image flipped to a schematic of a human male body rendered in excruciating detail. "And that's where you come in, big guy. When Doctor Moreson clacked off his 'don't torture me to death forever' failsafe vest, the blast basically turned your ass into cat food. Honestly, what was left of you when we got there was… well, not pretty."
"How did I survive?" Emet said, confused. He was starting to worry that all of this — the doctor, the red notice, the stupid slurping cat — was some loyalty-test sim he was trapped inside. He'd heard about shit like that. Guys plugged into an HR megadeck, run through a scenario some Exec-level headshrinker cooked up, then quietly zeroed if they failed. He'd always assumed they were corp legends meant to keep everyone in line, stories privates whispered to each other in the gear cages. But now he wasn't so sure.
"You didn't," Vance replied. "My boys carried you back here to scrap your meat and chrome for parts, man. Dead like disco." The doctor tapped another key and a video played: a pair of masked scrappers, bodies wrapped in makeshift armor and augmented with what Emet would barely call 'secondhand' cybernetics, dropping a mangled human body — his body — onto an operating table. The surreal weight of watching footage of his own corpse made his head swim. When the doctor on the screen started operating, he closed his eyes instinctively, with a tiny whirring click.
"Imagine my surprise when the AutoChopper started throwing alarms and trying to revive you," Vance continued. "Damn near pissed myself."
"I'm hard to kill," Emet said with more steel in his voice than he felt.
"Hard to kill is one thing, kid. Missing most of your blood, both your eyes, and half your limbs is something else." The doctor rolled his stool closer on tiny squeaking wheels and patted Emet on the shoulder. "So here's the deal. I spent the last two weeks putting you back together, like some giant evil Humpty Dumpty, just so we could have this conversation. Your eyes were toast, so I swapped in some new ocular implants. Your left arm was hamburger, so I lopped it off and bolted on a series VII Ruskie milspec. There was a ton of internal and flesh damage, so I stuck in some subdermal armor plating and swapped out a few organs. Oh — and I pulled all those Triarii trackers and monitor implants you had in there. You're welcome."
"Why?" Emet struggled to move his head, to look down at what the mad doctor had done to his body, but failed. He stared daggers at Vance, terror rising in his chest like smoke from a wildfire. "Why?"
"Well, I am a doctor, after all," Vance said defensively. "Do no harm and all that shit."
"Bullshit!" Emet screamed. He could feel his sanity fraying at the edges. He had never wanted to escape anywhere more in his life than he did at that moment.
"Okay, yeah," Vance laughed his wet cough-laugh. "You're right. I fixed you up because I think we can use you, and I just hate letting something useful go to waste."
