Chapter 3

5 years ago…

A young, dark skinned man in black walked down the hallway of Overwatch's Swiss headquarters. The black hands of his carbon nanotube arms were in the pockets of his Blackwatch uniform and he wore a sulking expression upon his face. Up and down the halls, Overwatch personnel turned away from him, whispering to each other. The young man could not hear them at first, so he increased the audio sensitivity in his cochlear implants.

"Did you hear about that guy?"

"Yeah…another cyborg…"

"He's so young, though…"

"Old enough to wipe out an entire terrorist cell alone…"

"Good riddance, I say…"

"But did you see the bodies?"

"No way… He did that?"

"I don't wanna know how they covered that up…"

"Blackwatch really is the worst…"

The young man reduced his hearing, having gleaned the gist of the whispers. He sighed as he rolled his green cyber-eyes, having grown used to hearing such things these days, now that the existence of Blackwatch had been exposed to the world since the incident in Venice. Now his actions on missions were under constant scrutiny, actions that were at one time, never called into question. Even now, he was sure he was being called in to be reprimanded for his actions on his latest assignment.

He eventually found himself in front of the door of Strike Commander Jack Morrison, the revered head of Overwatch, seen as a paragon of justice and fairness. The young man in black just thought he was a pompous ass who let his fame as a hero of the Omnic Crisis go to his head. But regardless of what he thought of the man, he was still his boss.

The door opened and the young man in black saw Jack Morrison standing up, facing the large window at the back of his office that displayed a grand view of the Swiss countryside. The sun was setting in the distance, casting a warm glow over the room. However, Morrison's mood was anything but warm.

"Twenty-three," Morrison said, still facing the window.

"Sir?" the young man in black asked, the office door shutting behind him with a soft hiss.

"That is how many people saw you during your mission in Zurich two nights ago, Agent Verde," Morrison said, turning around and glaring down at the younger man.

"Well, it was really only twenty-two. I accidentally dropped one of the butlers off of the balcony," replied Agent Verde.

"What?! You killed him?!"

"No! I checked in with the medical unit this morning, he's fine! Hit his head pretty hard, though. Dr. Ziegler says he won't remember a thing!"

"Neither will the others once Professor O'Deorain is finished with them," Morrison lamented.

"There's a part of me that would really like to know how that biotic shit of hers works, but I know better than to ask," Agent Verde said, scratching his head.

"Dammit Agent, this isn't a joke!" Morrison said angrily. "Do you not realize the position you're putting me in?! I've got the UN Security Council breathing down my neck because you don't seem to understand the meaning of the word 'discretion'! That is the word I specifically used in your briefing, was it not? I urged the utmost discretion! And what do you do? You blow up half of a mansion, leave over forty people dead or maimed, and twenty-three—I'm sorry, twenty-two people, because of the one you hospitalized with trauma-induced amnesia—as witnesses to an Overwatch operation that wasn't supposed to have taken place!"

"Well, if you wanted subtlety, what did you send me in for? You know how I work!" Agent Verde protested.

"We chose you because you're an operative with a very low amount of public exposure. We thought you could handle a simple infiltration job without turning it into a scene from Demolition Man!"

"Those forty guys I trashed were wanted Talon mercenaries! Murderers and terrorists! No one is gonna miss them! Every day, more and more people just like them are running around doing as they please because your precious Security Council ties our fucking hands!"

"DON'T take that tone with me, soldier!" Morrison roared, slamming his hands down on his wide, oak desk with a loud bang. "Agents like you are the reason the public has all but lost faith in this organization! Even now, the UN is holding talks trying to decide whether or not to shut us down!"

"Shut us down?! No, they can't do that…can they?!" Rico said, his tone suddenly becoming more sincerely worried.

"They're seriously considering it," said Morrison, calming down and sitting in his chair. He clasped his hands atop his desk and his face fell from its previously angered expression into a more pensive visage.

"Overwatch was founded with the dream of protecting the world…and of being a beacon of hope that we, the people, could unite under a single banner, and together, accomplish great things in the face of impossible odds. Now…I fear the day is coming when we will all be forced to wake up from that dream…" he sighed heavily.

"Commander, they can't shut Overwatch down… Who will be left to fight for justice and peace if they do?" asked Agent Verde.

"You're right, they won't shut us down. I'll make those suits see the value in us yet," said Morrison, looking up, a determined glint in his eye.

"Sir?" Agent Verde once again asked, with a quizzical expression.

"Your next mission… It may yet see you, and by extension, all of us, redeemed. Come with me…"

Present day…

The man in black woke with a start in his bed. Looking at his surrounding, he put a hand to his head as his memory returned. After escaping from the bandits, Junkrat and Roadhog, the previous day, he had run nonstop several miles until he chanced upon a small motel along the side of the desert road. At first he thought he was looking at a mirage until he remembered that his cerebral cortex had been modified to allow him to filter out visual hallucinations. And as his body's reserves of energy, both biological and mechanical, were running on empty, he opted to stop in, having just enough money to afford the night.

He had risen from his slumber after his cybernetic biochip, the core of his body's cyber functions, triggered its daily diagnostic function. There was only one problem…

"A diagnostic? I thought I shut that function off years ago…" he said as he rubbed his mismatched eyes. "Automatically waking me up at five in the morning to send diagnostic reports to Dr. Ziegler…I hated that shit… Never did thank Winston for showing me how to hack that…" Rico blinked his eyes and tapped his right temple. His eyes lit up as they projected a holographic display of his body's internal systems. He tapped on an area near the display of his cranium that was lit up red and entered a few code commands on a digital keypad he brought up. The red area ceased its glowing. Sighing contentedly, the man in black went back to sleep.

A few minutes later, he jolted awake once again.

"RULES OF NATURE!" a crazed voice yelled in the man's ear.
"ONE PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNCH!" yelled another, as electric guitars shredded along with them.

The man in black rubbed his head as he brought up the holographic display again and attempted to shut off the music playing in his head. "Never thought…I'd regret having a built in music player this much," he groaned. But as he attempted to enter shut-off commands, he noticed a warning icon.

Tapping on it, it read "WARNING: AN UNKNOWN DEVICE HAS CONNECTED".

"An unknown device? The fuck?" he said, running a scan on himself. The scan detected an anomaly in his pocket, the area lighting up purple on the holographic diagram. Remembering the object he picked up in his scuffle the previous day, he drew it from his pocket. Now having the time to inspect it more closely, he saw that it was a strange, three-dimensional hexagon made of metal. Various wires and cables were sticking out of it, the frayed ends suggesting that it had been forcibly removed from whatever it had previously been attached to. Stranger still, was that it dimly pulsed with energy, indicating that whatever it was, it still had some power left in it. It must not have been very much though, because after holding it for a few minutes, the glow dimmed into nonexistence, and the warning icon disappeared.

"Huh…wonder what that was about," the man in black said as he set the object down on the nightstand next to his bed, and attempted to fall asleep once more.

The attempt was short lived.

The man in black's eyes snapped open as he felt his left hand suddenly ball into a fist and punch him in the face. "What the hell?!" he cried. His hand attempted to punch him again, but the man grabbed it with his other hand. His left hand convulsed and contorted, no longer in his control. Seeing no other option, the man in black disengaged the joints that fastened his arm onto his body and pulled it off entirely, throwing it on the floor. Suddenly, the arm sprang up on its own and launched itself towards the man's throat, latching onto it. The man in black tried in vain to pull it off as the upper section of the arm twisted itself to reattach to the empty socket. The man in black's eyes widened with horror as the joints locked into place. However, as they did so, he could the feeling of control returned to his arm as it rested back into place.

Moments later, a warning blared in the heads-up display of his cyber-eye.

"Unauthorized access to cerebral processing matrix?! Fuck! Gotta engage isolation and quarantine subroutines…and I haven't updated that software in five years! Fucking Tsai-Yong Medical software patches…" he grumbled. "Guess I'm gonna have to do this the old fashioned way… This is gonna suck…"

The man in black got off of the bed and tried to walk to the bathroom, but his legs kicked themselves out from underneath him, causing him to fall on his face. He cursed as he tried to move his legs, but found them to be dead weight, completely immobile.

"This is why they tell you to get your biochips checked every two years," he groaned as he dragged himself across the floor.

Reaching the bathroom, he pulled himself up to the sink and found the hair dryer, plugging it into the outlet. He then pulled himself over to the bathtub and opened the faucet. He then felt a sharp pain behind his right cyber-eye, as it unscrewed itself from its socket and popped out. The man in black barely managed to catch it before it fell down the drain.

Once the tub was full enough, the man in black breathed deeply and dunked his head in the tub along with the hair dryer which he had turned on. His teeth clenched tightly as electricity passed through his entire body. The lights of the entire motel flickered and went out for a second as the man in black gave himself an improvised electrocution.

After a few seconds of this, the man in black pulled his head out of the tub. He turned around and lay against the outside of the tub, his left eye rolled up into the back of his head as he silently twitched on the floor.

While most of his body's cybernetic functions had been rendered temporarily offline due to the quite literal shock to his system, his brain still worked, and in his head, the man in black thanked the bionics specialists who designed his body for providing him with built-in electrical insulation.

As his biochip rebooted, the man in black could feel his limbs again. He accessed his biochip's diagnostic subroutine and decided to let it run after all. After performing a full scan of his system, he discovered the anomaly, quarantined as a part of his system's automatic detainment-of-threats-upon-reset protocol, just as he'd expected to happen. What he didn't expect however, was the anomaly attempting to establish contact…

"Attempting connection? What the hell is this thing?" the man in black wondered aloud as he popped his cyber-eye back in.

His curiosity getting the better of him, in spite of everything that had just happened, the man in black established a link with the anomaly.

"Uh…hello?"

"What is this? Where am I?" said a young, feminine-sounding voice.

"I think the better questions are who and what are you, and what the fuck are you doing in my body?" the man in black asked, annoyed.

"Your…body? Oh no…oh dear…I had no idea this frame was already occupied! I'm so, so sorry!" the voice cried, dismayed.

"Uh…that's okay, no real harm done. I'm just glad I wasn't simply malfunctioning. I haven't had a proper tune up in years," said the man in black.

"That certainly explains why your hardware is so out of date," the voice said.

"Hey! Are you calling me old?! Because I'll have you know, I'm only twenty-six!"

"I wasn't aware that combat infiltration units were capable of surviving in your condition for so long. The Omnium must have taken great care in maintaining your frame."

"Omnium? Oh no, you're mistaken. You see, I'm a human."

"A human? That isn't possible. How am I interfacing with your neural network? Has the Singularity been achieved?"

"Not quite," said the man in black, raising an eyebrow. "I'm uh, what you might call a special circumstance. I was born a human, but due to a series of circumstances throughout my life, about seventy-five percent of my body has been replaced or enhanced with cybernetic augmentations. Right now, the CPU hardwired into my brain has you isolated within a quarantine protocol inside my neural net. It was the only way to stop you from hijacking my entire body."

"Strange. You still seem more Omnic than human, to me," said the voice.

"So what are you, then?" the man in black asked, growing increasingly annoyed. "An Omnic having an out-of-body experience?"

"I am…I am…I…" the voice began.

"Well? Out with it!"

"ERROR. MEMORY FILES CORRUPTED," said the voice in a more robotic tone. "I'm sorry," it said, returning to normal. "I…don't seem to be able to recall that information… All I have is my designation…AD-01E…"

"Well, I can't call you that. How about I just call you 'Glitch', since you nearly glitched out my whole operating system?"

"I said I was sorry about that!"

The man in black ignored the voice. "Well Glitch, as fun as it's been talking with you, I think it's time for you to get out of my head," he said reaching for the metal hexagon. "I assume this thing was your storage unit? How do I get you back in here?"

"Um…about that…" Glitch began, explaining the problem.

"What?! What do you mean you can't go back in the box?!"

"My data core has been on low power for about five years. Removed from its source, it was only a matter of time before it shut down permanently. That's why I had to transfer into you. You were the first thing I detected with wireless access and suitable storage space."

"Making me sound like a goddamn flash drive…" the man in black mumbled.

"I wasn't expecting your frame to already be occupied though," Glitch went on. "But I was desperate. I didn't want to…cease functioning."

"You mean you were afraid of dying?" the in black asked with a quizzical expression.

"Omnics don't experience death the same way humans do. But as I said, I have no wish to expire."

"Well that doesn't mean I'm going to let you stay here! But…I guess I'll let you stick around until we find you a more permanent residence," said the man in black, scratching his head.

"Really?!" Glitch said excitedly. "Thank you so much! You know, for a human, you're surprisingly generous to an Omnic. Especially one that almost hijacked your body."

"Don't worry, I won't be forgetting it any time soon."

"Well uh, if we're going to be together for a while, I believe I should know your designation as well," said Glitch.

The man in black sighed. "My name is…"

5 years ago…

"Agent Rico Verde," Commander Jack Morrison began, opening the door to an Overwatch briefing room, "say hello to your new team."

"Team?" The young man in black asked as he walked into the room behind Morrison. Looking around, he saw that the room had three more occupants.

The first, to his left, was a large, muscular, dark skinned man, bald of head and a short beard. He wore a sleeveless blue vest with Overwatch's emblem on the back. He sat cracking his knuckles as he stared at the new arrivals. "Edmond Briscoe, heavy equipment specialist," identified Morrison. The man, Edmond, nodded at the pair.

Agent Verde turned his head to the right and saw a shorter young woman with pale skin and dark hair, typing away on a tablet. She seemed too absorbed to notice who had walked in. "Sonya Blavatsky, infiltration and tech specialist," said Morrison. The woman looked up for a second, then immediately returned focus to her tablet.

And finally, to his great surprise, Agent Verde saw a nervous looking Omnic standing against the wall. Verde could tell he was nervous because, despite his static facsimile of a facial expression, he was rubbing his metal hands together, his head turning sharply to the door when it opened. When he saw Commander Morrison, he immediately stood to attention and saluted.

"And finally, this here is Hal Shodan, our newest Omnic field agent. At ease, son," Morrison said, holding up a hand. "Team, I'd like to introduce you to your leader for this operation. Blackwatch—I mean, Special Agent Rico Verde."

"Wait, wait, wait, hold on a minute. You still haven't told me what this is all about!" Agent Verde said, pulling Morrison aside.

Morrison pressed a button on a keypad on his wrist. A panel on the opposite wall opened up, revealing a video screen, which lit up, showing a diagram outlining a particular area on the continent of Australia.

"About five months ago, we received word that the Omnic Resettlement Zone has been experiencing attacks from a radical, anti-Omnic group calling themselves the Australian Liberation Front. From the intelligence we've managed to gather on them suggests that they're a collection of farmers, homesteaders, survivalists, radical militia, and other such types that have banded together to kick the Omnics, who were given the land by the UN, off of their land. The Omnics can't fight them off on their own and the UN can only offer so much aid. But we've got a Watchpoint in the area capable of providing assistance.

"I heard about that Resettlement Zone. It's good that they got a place to call their own, I suppose, but I also heard that a lot of people got kicked out of their homes," said Agent Verde. "Can't say I blame the Australians for feeling slighted."

"Either way, they've got a problem and it's up to Overwatch to solve it."

"Uh, no, this is the UN's problem, and it's up to those starched suits to solve it. From what I've heard, apparently some people have a problem with the way I do things, so this doesn't sound like a job you're gonna want me on, and I don't think the UN is gonna want the rest of Overwatch on it, either."

"You want to fight for peace and justice, Rico? This is it. This is the fight. We need to show the world what Overwatch really stands for. Only this time, you're going to do it with a team."

"Yeah, about that, Commander. Even if I wanted to do this, you know I've always worked alone."

"Yes, and that's the problem. You've always worked alone, so you've never worried about the consequences your actions have for others."

"You and Commader Reyes trained me to get the job done, not to worry about how I did it," Agent Verde stated defiantly.

"You get results, it's true…the kind of results that put innocent people at risk. Having other people to consider for a change should encourage you to be more thoughtful with your decisions. Plus, a little backup never hurts."

"Commander, I don't think this is a good idea…"

"True, it's a big risk I'm taking here, but the world still needs heroes, despite what the everyone else seems to think these days. And sometimes fighting for justice means accepting that you're fighting a losing battle. But I won't let the dream of Overwatch die quietly. And I don't think you will either," Commander Morrison stated, looking resolutely at Rico. "Or am I wrong?"

Agent Verde stared at the floor, then at the screen. He wanted to disagree. He wanted to say it had nothing to do with him. But he knew himself better than that. He wanted to fight the good fight as much as Morrison did. He sighed.

"Special Agent Rico Verde, reporting for duty, sir."