"Last night, Darth Vader came down from Planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn't take Lorraine out, that he'd melt my brain"

- Victor Vacendak, Blade Runner


THE DAWN OF THE APOCALYPSE LINGERED ON THE HORIZON, but the suits running GHQ were more concerned with making a strong showing at this month's quarterly review. Dark figures in even darker business attire were seated around a large conference table. They reviewed the latest customer satisfaction surveys, fiscal estimates, and an elaborate scale model for a massive alien ziggurat to be constructed in honor of the Great and Almighty Queen Mana.

"And for the last item on today's agenda," said the top executive, "Here is the latest asset acquisition from our delinquent collections department."

The hologram generator in the center of the table flickered on. Instantly, a life-sized rendering of Tsugumi in her interface gear appeared. Her image stood on the surface of the polished oak and glowed in a semi-transparent hue.

The three dimensional recording started from the moment Tsugumi's mind was breached. There was a look of surprise in her eyes for a few frames, then she violently wrenched forward clutching the sides of her head. Clawing at her temples through her long black hair, frantically shaking her head and staggering left to right, her painful shrieking played through the projector's speakers.

Her digital Danse Macabre ended in a single frame. Straightening herself on her feet, she started to lower her arms to her sides and emitted little more than a small, achy groan.

The hologram flickered like tracking lines on an ancient VHS tape. It skipped back to the beginning and played the through entire recording again. Tsugumi was trapped in a constant infinite loop, a demo reel of indescribable neural agony. The rest of the executives murmured in intrigue.

"I didn't know we were seizing whole individuals now," said one of the investors. "This is going to send property market into a buying frenzy."

"Good physical condition. All of the major components seem to be in working order. A little noisy, though. Looks like a decent procurement for something we dug out of the gutter."

"Isn't this the little tramp who's been sneaking into the central mainframe for the past month?"

"She was, until she hashed into the wrong gateway and made herself available for immediate psychological sterilization," someone close to the chairperson said. "Her name is Ada now. I believe she works in IT solutions."

"Well, at she turned out to be worth something. I would have thought she'd never be more than a pile of spare organs in a skintight trashbag."

"Doesn't this pose a conflict of interest?" another person asked hesitantly. "It's against company policy to use the medical files of other personnel for research purposes. This seems a tad… interpersonal."

"Ada recommended this review herself in her memo. Most of this material is from a point in time where what we're looking at technically isn't her body. The last unlucky thug to use it was a Class A Network Fugitive, and we hold no regard for her privacy."

The x-ray filter booted up, showing a close approximation of Tsugumi's nude form in a quick shimmering effect. Most of her body faded into pixels, turning into a close-up of the surface of her brain. The presentation focused on the deep throbbing vessels in the neural tissue, muffling her bloodcurdling screams in background audio.

"If you closely look here on frame 4,853, you can see the exact instant the convict's last original neuron is annihilated and her rehabilitated psyche achieves full awareness. It took the subject nine months to develop her own cognitive processes. We had those worthless brainwaves scrambled and overwritten in about 30 seconds."

"That's a suitable punishment for a piece of hacker trash. Is her pain threshold optimized?"

The hologram tried to represent the amount of duress Tsugumi's brain was under as pulsating branches of glaring red electrical signals. Numerical values representing her vitals changed into jumbled symbols and question marks.

"It's well beyond anything our sensors can calculate. It's impossible to measure how much agony this sewer rat is in. The neural renovation process is quite intensive both on our own resources and the patient's brain. We intentionally cause multiple stack overflows to thoroughly solder every nerve cluster during runtime and ensure there's no possibility for the patient's mental survival."

"I'm not so sure about that. Look at this. The data buffer isn't maxing out its bandwidth in even frequencies. You're letting the southern parietal lobe get off pretty light."

"Excellent observation. You're only the fourth employee to spot this since the operation was performed. We're already making all the necessary adjustments so the next patient can look forward to receiving full neural stimulation, whoever he or she happens to be and whenever they're stupid enough to be targeted by our counter-intrusion squad. How did you manage to detect such a small flaw?"

"Isolate position 39.593 in the audio stream. Do you notice how her squealing hits a flat note for just a moment before she picks back up again? There was a span of three seconds where the pain impulses in her brain tissue were slightly bearable."

"Interesting. We could use more people like you on the incarceration team."

The hologram returned to its original settings and once again showed Tsugumi as her whole self, writhing in misery while high density wireless signals pulverized her synapses into submission.

"Now," said the top executive, "Who has some suggestions on how we can incorporate this data into our business strategy? We need to help the consumers feel safe from these dangerous convicts while setting an example for anyone else who wants to cause problems."

The other committee members joined the discussion and began brainstorming how they could get the most use out of storming Tsugumi's brain. They went around the table providing their insight, each one more scathing and outrageous than the last.

"We could patent the mo-cap of the hacker's agonizing convulsions and license it out as a special video effect. People could use it as a screensaver or work it into some type of rhythm game."

"We could develop a mobile game where the objective is to turn all the puzzle blocks on her holo-screen against her so you have can connect to her brain. We'll play her mental reformatting over the victory credits."

"What would the Game Over screen be?"

"She'll be teasing the camera and encouraging the player to try harder. Have her give out hints like 'You can't just brute force your way through my brain stem. Look for some vulnerabilities in my ports,' or 'Storing up red jewels and chaining them at the right time will do more damage to my cerebellum' to keep them invested. The reward for getting a high score is a vacation to the inside her central nervous system. It practically sells itself."

"Let the pharmaceutical department see this. They'd have a field day tying her in with our over-the-counter pain reliever. 'Nothing can save this worthless fraud's brain cells, but at least your headache will go away!'"

"We could sample her screaming and use it as the startup sound for all of our future products."

"What about something for the advertising department?"

"Everyone loves word plays," someone responded. "How about we use a clear screenshot of this scumbag while her nerve impulses are really out of synch, add some geometry symbols around her, and throw on a marquee saying something like 'When GHQ's System Security is doing the calculations, you'll always find all the curves in the equation'?"

"That sounds like something Ada would be completely on board with. We could get her involved, put her in the background. Show off what it's like for someone who tries to attack the system."

"GHQ: No Body Gets Through Us," came one proposal.

"GHQ Network Sanitation Initiative: It Will Always Be On Your Mind," came another.

"Obey the rules on our servers. Your brain will thank you for it," came a third.

"GHQ: Security Updates Never Looked So Good."

"Surgeon General's Warning: Failure to follow online etiquette will result in total cognitive indictment."

"What about 'Stay outside our firewalls or get burned'?"

"GHQ Hacker Reform software: Bringing new meaning to savescumming."

"Respect company protocol. Don't become part of it."

"Attention blackhats: Our next tech demo could be you."

"Security Directive 4: Logging in to a cybercriminal near you."

"We could turn her into an educational exhibit detailing how harmful to society she was up until we reformatted her. Our PR people could put a great spin on it."

"Let's incorporate the cat motif on her hacking equipment somehow. How does 'Building a better tomorrow by dissecting one stray pest at a time' sound?"

"Don't you think that's a bit offensive toward domesticated animals? 'We make sure all our pets get their vaccinations' has a more positive ring to it."

"I think the best thing we could do is just superimpose a recycling logo over her and throw up a message that says 'Report cybercrime in your neighborhood. We'll clean up your trash.'"

"How about this one? Take this enhanced view of her sorry little behind and turn it into a banner. The slogan could be 'GHQ guards your network's backdoor from low life hackers by taking it straight to theirs.'"

"That's a solid idea, but we should use this frame instead. The way the inmate is straining to stay on her feet as the data overload paralyzes her gives her hips more symmetry and really brings out the details of the intergluteral cleft through her feedback suit. We need to go for maximum exposure if we want customers to notice."

"Ooh, that's almost as embarrassing as realizing you were dumb enough to let your brain get snatched out of your skull. I like it."

"What is that thing made out of, anyway?"

"A proprietary spandex polymer sealed with hyperconductive latex threaded with 9G motion transistors, according to this report from the skinning lab. It runs off her natural body heat."

"Did this thieving bitch really think she'd be invulnerable to us if she stuck herself in a giant condom?"

"In theory, perhaps. But functionally, it had the exact opposite effect. I think she grossly underestimated our efficiency and never considered us a threat at all. Being insulated in all those sensors amplified our own signal and turned her into a public hotspot for anything we could ping through her tiny misused head."

Tsugumi's desperate screams replayed from the beginning of the loop.

"Our topographic imaging of the intruder wouldn't be nearly as detailed if she had been naked during the operation."

"We did patch those issues in our in-house version of the gear, I'm assuming?"

"Of course. We would never be caught like fools with our firewalls down. We addressed all of the potential exploits in the suit's construction as soon as it was submitted to R&D. Ada is a strong proponent of safe data penetration."

"I think we need to keep this simple while still making a bold statement. Why don't we just use a close-up her breasts and give it the slogan 'Big Data'? The strain on her nervous system is making her nipples pop out a little bit in this frame."

"That extra spike in our transmission really lights up her circuits. I bet she's regretting lining her equipment with ionized microfiber there. That stuff can be like sandpaper if it stretches too much."

"Are you sure that's not just a wrinkle in her suit?"

"The biometric analyzer only calculates her as a B cup. Is the 'big' part really applicable? Maybe we should wait until another model with better quantity donates her services before we take the ad campaign in that direction."

"I think Fumiko is on to something. We can work with this. Aim the camera down 3 degrees and increase the shader effects by 20%. See? A little extra bump mapping makes her look perfectly ample without inflating her polygon count."

"You can really see the terror in her eyes if you pan up from that angle. Could we work her expression into the company logo?"

The board meeting continued like this for the next hour. The executives of GHQ had only good things to say as they projected next year's profits and celebrated Tsugumi's intracranial torment.


Author's note: The game is long over but the saltiness is eternal.