Mass Effect: Human Revolution

by IgnusDei

Adam Jensen finds himself in a time only dreamed of in vids, humanity is now part of a great galactic community that fears synthetics, and he struggles to find his place within it. Note: Primarily a DX/ME crossover, with elements borrowed and integrated from other Square Enix franchises.

37. Chapter 33 the Dream Machine Part 5

Deus Ex Human Revolution is the property of Eidos and Square Enix

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware and Electronic Arts

Mass Effect: Human Revolution

Chapter 33: The Dream Machine part 5

~[h+]~

---

Lieutenant Elsa 'Angel' Devereaux is protrayed by Mélanie Laurent

Capitaine Thierry Segal is portrayed by Tchéky Karyo

Sub-Lieutenant Zead 'Paladin' Taggard is voiced by John Rhys-Davies

Ensign Joachim Dietrich 'El Cid' Zoller is portrayed by Daniel Brühl

Ensign Hermes 'Trismegistus' Smith is voiced by Noel Clarke

Doctor Yussuf Nazir is voiced by Alexander Siddig

Ken Ruger (who is finally making his appearance) is played by Jackie Earle Haley

Molly the Bouncer is voiced by Kristin Bauer

Alpha and Beta are played by Ryan and Andy from Campblood dot org.

~[h+]~

---

VSE Acheron — Wanzer bay

A week ago, Ensign Joaquim Dietrich Zoller, a recent graduate from the Roland Programme, had received the news: he would be assigned to the Wanzer team aboard the Acheron: an old, but nevertheless storied and venerated star vessel. As Zoller heard it, it had foiled several Coalition plots to turn the current cold war into a blazing hot one. His friends had mocked him for not being assigned to a top-of-the-line ship like the Aquitaine, but Zoller was quite smugly happy to tell them that he was assigned as a marksman to the Silver Drakes.

The Silver Drakes! Even as he stood in front of what would be his new Wanzer, he could scarcely believe it. He was now part of a legendary unit, composed of the four best pilots the European Union had to offer... though he had yet to meet any of them, yet. For some reason, they had not seen fit to summon him for... well, anything. All he had done for the past few days was to report to the medical bay to see a British doctor by the name of Yussuf Nazir, to be tested for 'compatibility'. Compatibility with what, he was not told.

His exams over and with little else to do, Zoller decided to climb in the cockpit of the customized Stoßzahn Funf light-medium Wanzer, easily recognizable thanks to the prominent sensor fin on its head. It was a mostly stock machine, save for the two sturdier Whisk III arms. One of them carried a Ziege sniper cannon, while the other had a shield (an actual, physical piece of metal meant to block incoming fire) mounted on a secondary manipulator, leaving the hand free to steady the large weapon.

Next to the Stoßzahn, on its right, was a stock Liathach Heavy Wanzer, an armoured bruiser of a machine. It was equipped with two Egret missile launchers, a shield, and an impact rod. Next to it was a custom machine: A headless Rhino body with an engineering pack mounted on its back, two Tempest arms with integrated machine cannon arms, and a hover-type lower body.

To the Stoßzahn's right was a stock Zenith Gaul III, equipped with a shield, a Cemetery IX machine gun, a PAX-9 swarm micro-missile launcher, and a jetpack. This was Elsa Devereaux's machine, a Commander-type. Zoller was awed, as he had heard so much about the woman: many of the White Drakes' recent victories were attributed to her, and her aloof nature and unwillingness to make more media appearances had somehow made her such an alluring figure in his mind, an invincible angel of death. He had fantasized about fighting by her side ever since he joined the Roland Programme, and soon that dream would be a reality.

Zoller sank into the Stoßzahn's seat, and booted up the Wanzer's OS. Oddly enough, the controls were in Finnish... a language Zoller did not quite have a grasp of. He fiddled with the controls, trying to switch it to German or Spanish. He was making no progress until a bespectacled African man of medium height and build, clad in the blue uniform of the European space navy, climbed the Wanzer's maintenance ramp and peeked into the cockpit, standing in front of Zoller, who noticed that he had Ensign's pips on his collar.

Realizing that perhaps he should have asked permission to climb into the Wanzer, Zoller apologized and held out his hand. "Hallo! Ich bin Fähnrich Joaquim Zoller..."

"Sorry mate, Queen's English for me."

"Ah, yes, of course!" Zoller's german accent wasn't too thick, or so he hoped. "My name is—"

"Yeah, I got the gist of it: name's Hermes, Hermes Smith," he shook Zoller's hand. "Silver Drakes, Combat Engineer."

"It is good to finally meet one of you. I joined your unit several days ago, and I'm eager to serve as your marksman!"

Hermes said nothing, and Zoller wasn't sure if the man was angry or sad.

"...Have I said something wrong?"

"No, no... ah, bugger it all. It's finally happening, isn't it."

"I do not understand..."

"Look, did they tell you why you were coming here?"

"You lost your old marksman. Lieutenant Häyhä, I believe."

"That we did, and you're in his seat."

"Oh! oh, I shall leave it at once, I apologize!"

"Nah, nah, stay right where you are. We were going to have to calibrate the helmet to your brainwaves sooner or later. Might as well do it now."

As Hermes changed the Wanzer's settings, he explained that the Silver Drakes had been mourning the loss of Häyhä, who had been killed by, of all things, a focused stream of molten metal. What fired the beam? That was classified. The loss had been sudden, far too sudden and unexpected, and nobody was keen on meeting the new guy just yet.

"And for that," continued Hermes, "I have to apologize. Mind you, I don't speak for all of the Drakes, but there you go. Maybe we'll have a proper welcoming party some time later."

"That is not necessary," said Zoller somberly. "I would much prefer we celebrate me surviving my first sortie against an enemy."

Hermes smiled. Maybe this Zoller wouldn't be too much of an insufferable shithead, like Zead expected. "Yeah, I think we can all get behind that. We'll give Saren and the Geth hell."

"Saren? The Geth? I do not understand..."

Hermes activated his Omni-Tool. "Yeah, let me show you this vid..."

~[h+]~

---

VSE Acheron — Fighter Maintenance Deck

"So, is that the new meat?" asked Sub-Lieutenant Zead with a somewhat forced smile. The large blonde middle-aged scotsman took the boy's measure with a glance, and so far he wasn't all that impressed. He reminded himself to give him a chance. After all, Häyhä did not look all that impressive himself, but the man knew how to shoot like nobody else.

Ah, old friend, I shall miss you.

"That he is." said Hermes.

Zoller stood at attention, and saluted a superior officer. "Ensign Joaquim Zoller, reporting for duty, SIR!"

"Och! By my fine blonde beard... They sent us a baby kraut. Just bloody wonderful." Of course Zead had read the recruit's file: while born in Germany, Zoller's parents were in fact from Spain — Catalonia, to be precise. Zoller had lost his father at a very young age, and his mother remarried five years later to a German entrepreneur. A rich one, evidently, if he could afford to put his stepson through Tarsus Academy. Young Zoller had been groomed for greatness: he had the best gene-mods money could buy, the best education, and an ambition had been engraved into his psyche. And he was talented, too. Usually, one had to have at least several years of combat experience before being eligible to join the White Drakes, but Zoller's scores going through the Roland Programme had been exemplary.

In other words, Zoller was basically Elsa, only with dark hair. And equipped with a penis.

Zead sighed: Elsa had been a handful when she first joined, and he was not looking forward to smoothing this young pup's rough edges. "Well then, Hermes. Why did you bring the pup here? No, wait, don't say anything, let me guess. You're here for Häyhä's bird."

"That we are," replied Hermes. "You know we're going to have to acclimate the kid's brains to the control system, otherwise..."

"I know, I know... At ease, ensign Zoller. Let's introduce you to your dance partner in the night sky..."

~[h+]~

---

A flying Endymion, to the casual observer, looked like a fusion of a hawk, a wasp, and a coleoptera in flight, its thrusters appearing like sleek metal elytrons protecting wings of light. Its other, less noticeable feature was a cockpit that looked, for all intents and purposes, like a Wanzer's head, complete with intimidating, glaring optics.

As Zoller caressed the smooth diamond-silver hull of the fighter, the young pilot felt like he was touching a relic of the past, which was absurd, since this particular craft had been rolled out of the factory ten years ago... but Germany had quite the history with the Endymion series, one that Zoller deeply respected.

For it was Berlin that suffered the first ever kamikaze attack by the Lunarians' super-fighter, kick-starting the Luna War in 2082. A single Endymion fighter (nicknamed Die Einhänder) had come all the way from the Selene colony, and had carved a path of destruction and death that had cost the Berlin Polizei and Germany's Bundeswehr one hundred billion Euros in hardware, and had caused the death of over ten thousand pilots and twice as many civilians due to it constantly firing its weapons at... well, everything that moved.

The primary reason Der Einhänder had been so brutally effective was that it was effectively a combination of a space-superiority fighter and a guerilla. At the time, Germany was using a universal plug system for the weapons of its heavy vehicles, better known as Gunpods. The Einhänder exploited this with its single manipulator, seizing the Gunpods of its enemies upon destroying them, and discarding them when they were no longer of use.

As tactically versatile as it was, the Endymion had one major flaw: it was poorly armored. A single lucky shot from a police gunship had brought the terrorist craft low, ending a massacre that could have gone on to kill millions of people.

Across the world, the emerging supernations had suffered similar attacks, and shortly afterwards, Luna demanded the complete surrender of every nation on Earth. Their armies were to be disbanded and their governments dissolved, and complete obedience was to be given to the Council of Selene.

Earth did not surrender. All Luna had managed to do was wake a giant, and galvanize the entire world into a new space race.

Long story short, Luna lost the ensuing war. The spoils? Lunarian aerospace expertise, shared with both the OCU and the UNAS, which eventually led to the colonization of Mars, and, almost a century later, the discovery of the Mars beacon.

The Europeans, however, had played a bit of a trick on the other two super-nations: they had kept the schematics for the original Endymion for themselves, and over the past nine decades had improved upon the design, giving the Union a significant advantage in space combat. While the Gunpod system was no longer in widespread use, the EU's space navy still used it, preserving the Einhander's tactical malleability.

German engineers had designed the FRS series twenty years ago, using the latest in Mass Effect technology to improve its maneuverability and survivability against point defense systems. Its shields, like all modern fighters, could create an electromagnetic lensing effect that distorted the deadly beam of a GARDIAN laser. Even the plating had been improved: the silvery sheen was not decorative; upon being hit by a laser, the hull reflected and scattered the light, causing a bright flash that threw off a GARDIAN's IMREC completely.

Despite these upgrades, however, the Endymion was starting to show its age, and would soon be phased out in favor of the newer Astraea FGA mk I. The newer craft could handle two Gunpods, and could tear out any weapon system from any craft — tanks, gunships fighters— and use Omni-Gel conduits to integrate with it.

"It's beautiful," said Zoller. "When will I fly it?"

"Sooner than you think," said Hermes. "Let's get the controls calibrated to your brainwaves."

For Zoller, the process required him to simply put on a helmet and wait. For Hermes, it was a bit of a complicated nightmare. The calibrations required his full attention: One mistake, and Zoller would pay for it dearly.

Zead, however, was available to chat. "Is it true?" asked Zoller.

"What is, laddie?"

"That Lieutenant Devereaux is going to be a Spectre?" Zoller could barely contain his excitement.

Zead motioned the young pilot to settle down. "She's a candidate, boy. A candidate. Nothing is certain."

"Wunderbar! There is no one more deserving! The Council would be blind to reject her!"

"She still has to go up against Frost and Kim, and then ye've got Commodore Yang."

"Bah! Yang is a coward that hides behind his soldiers. He is not a true hero!"

"Aye, I agree. Yang is a chicken-necked, lanky little communist bureaucrat... but he's a smart bastard, and he's earned those pips on his collar, mark me words. Elsa will be needing an edge against him..."

"An edge?"

"...Damn, I've already said too much. We'll give ye more details once your security clearance goes up... until then, mum's the word, as Shakespeare once said. Is that understood?"

"I believe the phrase was: 'Seal up your lips and give no words but mum', sir."

Zead glared at him.

"... I mean, understood, sir." Zoller shifted uncontrollably in his cockpit seat. "Will I get to meet Lieutenant Devereaux soon? I haven't seen her anywhere on the ship."

Zead's face was crestfallen. "...Soon, laddie, very soon." But the truth was that Zead had no idea.

~[h+]~

---

VSE Acheron — Briefing Room

Not ten minutes after the calibration was done, the White Drakes, along with the 95th Star Tigers, had been summoned for a briefing.

Elsa Devereaux, of course, was not here, and after seven days of being ignored by her Zoller was starting to get a little frustrated. Eventually, a man stood behind the podium, and Zoller was surprised to see that it was the captain, which was unusual. It was the task of the Naval Flight Officer to give the briefing, not the captain's.

"Messieurs, prenez vos places," said the Captain. Thierry Segal, Master and Commander of the Acheron, was a scruffy Frenchmen in his mid-sixties. He had served on the Acheron for most of his career, starting as its Executive Officer during the retaking of Shanxi. After that one battle with aliens, he had acted almost exclusively against his own kind. The Coalition had yet to declare full-scale war against Europe, but it was coming, and it had been his job to foil their plans to start it at an advantage.

That was until recently, when Command had the bright idea to try and show up the Alliance and the Council by attempting to apprehend Saren Arterius with just the one ship. That had proven disastrous, and they had lost a good man trying to do it. And they were going to lose a good woman that had pushed herself too hard trying to save him.

"Today we welcome a new addition to the White Drakes," continued the captain. "Ensign Joaquim Zoller will be assuming Frederick Häyhä's role as their Marksman. I expect you all to treat him as you once treated Häyhä: like a brother. Now, with that out of the way, here is the mission..."

Captain Segal began his holographic presentation, which began with a bluish white sphere that represented Noveria, the planet the Acheron was currently orbiting.

"The primary objective for the White Drakes will be very simple. Alpha Wing, consisting of Taggart and Zoller, will escort a shuttle containing two VIPs launching from the Acheron to Nav One: the Dosadi Arcology on the surface of Noveria. The Star Tiger's wings from alpha to gamma will patrol the area and ensure that nobody approaches the shuttle. Now, before you start complaining..."

The hologram shifted to become a torus-shaped space station, surrounded by strange, insect like vessels. "Freeport S-9 was destroyed not four days ago by the Geth. Considering how close the station was to Noveria, I want everyone of you to be on full alert. After our last encounter with the robots, Saren may be looking for some payback. Of a more immediate concern..."

The hologram shifted to become two ships of similar design. One was larger and more angular, while the other was smaller and curvier.

"The USSV Durendal and the SSV Normandy were spotted by our IMREC telescopes in orbit around Noveria. The Durendal has communicated to us that they are here on classified DARPA business. On the other hand, the Normandy has not answered our hails and its stealth systems are engaged. Because of this, we suspect that the ship is currently under AIA control."

Everyone started muttering curses at this bit of news. The AIA was bad news. Everyone knew that, even Zoller.

"Child murdering bastards," spat Taggart, not shy about voicing his opinion on them. He was all too familiar with their agents. "I say we fire a Helios torpedo and vaporize the lot of them. Nobody will know!"

Segal glared at Taggart. "I would know. And since we have no idea what either ship is really up to, standing orders are to observe and only fire upon them in self-defense. Is that clear?"

The assembled pilot gave their 'aye-ayes', and Segal continued. "One last thing: White Drake Alpha, upon successfully escorting the shuttle, will proceed to Nav Two and await further objectives from Ensign Hermes. That is all. Are there any questions?"

Zoller raised his hand.

"Zoller?"

"Who will be the VIPs onboard the shuttle, and what will be his business on Noveria?"

"...Me and the ship's doctor, and for confidential reasons. Any other questions?"

~[h+]~

---

In the Endymion's open cockpit, Zoller waited while the techs made sure that his G-suit — a cumbersome garment made of thick polymers and red metal plates not unlike a twentieth century diving suit — was secured tightly. Doctor Nazir was there as well, making sure the suit's blood oxygenation system was in order. The bearded forty-year old Arab Englishman, satisfied that Zoller would be in little risk of losing consciousness making high-G turns, fit a small cylinder in an induction port.

"This, my young friend, is one hundred milliliters of Drive, an artificial nootropic reuptake inhibitor designed specifically for Endymion pilots to keep up with drones. A single milliliter can increase concentration, reflexes and perception of time by a factor of two. Five milliliters can increase them ten-fold. Of course, you are only to use it in times of emergency. Recreational use of Drive is punishable by several days in the brig."

Zoller shifted uncontrollably in his suit. The drug itself sounded amazing, but... "There are side effects, aren't there?"

Nazir nodded. "Not at first, and provided you use it sparingly, you may never develop a physical addiction. If you do..." Nazir pushed his glasses back into place with a finger. "...We'll have to cut you off, and that would cause all kinds of unpleasantness such as severe anxiety, anemia, sleep disorders, hallucinations, and erectile dysfunction."

The ensign gulped. "What... would happen if I were to overdose?"

"Well, have you ever taken a mycotoxin? You know, for fun?"

"Of course not! I would never be able to interface with a military Wanzer or an Endymion otherwise!"

"Of course not, well, overdosing on Drive is much, much worse. After the initial high and besides the subtle permanent nerve damage, you would immediately suffer from tachycardia and arrhythmia. If you survive that, psychosis would follow, and then homicidal rage, then a coma. If, by some miracle, you avoid becoming comatose, well, your pupils will remain dilated for days and... oh you get the idea, don't you?"

"Yes, sir. No taking the whole bottle."

"Oh, you can't. The suit's designed to manage your Drive intake. You are allowed one milliliter every two minutes, and one ten milliliter dose every half hour. Overriding the system is... well, impossible."

"...Then, then why did you tell me all those horrible things?!"

Nazir laughed, tapped him on the shoulder and let the techs encase Zoller's head in the interface helmet that would allow the young man to fly the Endymion.

The doctor made his way to the shuttle and entered it. Inside the cabin sat an athletic young french woman with short, straw like blonde hair, wearing a civilian attire composed of a plain skintight jumpsuit, a black coat, and sunglasses. She lit a cigarette, breathed in the smoke, and exhaled. Then she extinguished the cigarette in a metal tube, re-lit it, and took another lungful of smoke.

Then she extinguished the cigarette in the tube again, struggled to stop herself from lighting it again, failed, and resumed her ritual. She had been doing this for hours.

Nazir scanned her, checking her heartbeat. 162 per minute, a quick but steady rhythm. At least the stabilizer he gave her was still working. "And how are we doing today, Lieutenant Devereaux?"

"Allez vous faire foutre, docteur," she spat, then immediately regretted saying that. She pinched the bridge of her nose, frustrated, and took a deep breath of secondhand smoke. "Merde! I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

"That's quite alright, my dear." At any other time, perhaps Nazir would have been angry with her, but considering everything that had happened to her in the past few days, he decided to be patient with her instead. "I've met the new pilot. He's eager to meet you, so I'm told."

"Well, I don't want to meet him. It didn't take them long to replace Frederick, did it?"

"That's hardly his fault, you know."

"I don't care. I'm still mad."

Nazir nodded. Frederick and Elsa had been close. Not lovers, but close. From what Yussuf had gathered, Elsa had never been really close to her actual parents, and despite having access to the best education money could buy, had been quite the delinquent in her teenage years, and had kept that terrible attitude throughout the Roland Programme and beyond. Her bond with Frederick, a surrogate father of sorts, had tempered her into a fine soldier, and a hero.

...

"You could have died!" chastized the doctor.

"Is there anything you would not do for those you love?" she groaned weakly, the IV pumping her full of medicine.

...

Captain Segal entered the cabin, put his business suitcase in a compartment under his seat, and quipped: "This is a no-smoking flight, mademoiselle."

Elsa replied by giving him the finger without so much as looking at him, as she simply wasn't in the mood for jokes. She needed to smoke. It kept her sane.

Any other captain would have thrown her in the brig, Drive overdose or no. But while Frederick had been like a father to Elsa, Thierry had been more like a fun uncle to her, and she had been like a favored niece to him. The captain took his seat, and fastened his harness. "We will be launching shortly alongside the Endymions, just as soon as the Star Tigers launch in the Rafales. This won't take long, I promise."

"Bof... we could airdrop right on top of Dosadi. It won't matter: I'll die an old woman before I'm done with their paperwork."

"Don't worry, I have enough with us to 'grease the gears' as our English-speaking friends like to say."

~[h+]~

---

It was now morning in Dosadi, and it was almost time for Donna Morgan (better known as Aya Brea) to go to work. She had woken up at 5 AM (local time), before anyone else in the apartment was awake. The showering and small breakfast had taken no time at all, but the preparation of her make-up, her hair, and her clothes had taken close to two hours. The hair had taken the longest: she had been in the mood to weave in a string of pearls within her braided plait, a style that took painstaking patience to execute without breaking the string. By the time she was finished and had put her uniform on, Adam had stirred awake, and had begun his own morning routine, which had lasted about half an hour.

"I just received a call," she told him as he started making breakfast for Kasumi and Spooky."An EU shuttle escorted by two Endymion super-fighters just asked clearance for landing."

"I see. You think Devereaux's on board?"

"I know she is."

"Then I guess it's time for us to go."

"Wait."

She walked up to him and grabbed him by the chin, and inspected him like an old piece of art, yet to be appraised.

"Err..." Jensen didn't quite know how to react. Her touch was brusque, yet delicate. "It's not that I'm not flattered, but..."

"Be quiet," she commanded.

The bio-cosmetics that made him appear like a blonde and tanned twenty-five years old version of himself had been her handiwork. She had spent hours making sure that Jensen's face wouldn't set off every IMREC-enabled security VI in Middle Dosadi's vast camera network. Hours, spent in the privacy of her quarters, extending and bleaching his hair, filling his gaunt cheeks, replacing that hexagonal skin indentation in favor of a proper scar, and removing those stupid clip-on glasses. She had lost sleep at the idea that Jensen had somehow ruined the organic layer that she had fabricated and shaped with his heroics.

But no, they were still holding, and had not been damaged. She picked at his beard, and ran her hand across his hair. Then, she buttoned up the top of his shirt. There, perfect.

"You're not coming, not yet," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because I want you to be prepared. It's very likely I will have no intel on the facility that Devereaux will be taken to. Security is bound to be tight, and your support team should be prepared. I'll delay Devereaux in the meantime." she smiled. "I fully expect her to try and bribe me to bypass any paperwork, but that will only land her in jail. That should give you two hours, tops, before Scholar comes to her rescue."

"Assuming he even knows she's here."

"Oh, he knows. He's got spies everywhere, and I can name them all."

"So why don't you do something about them?"

"If I did, Scholar would make me Leng's plaything. I should go. Use the time wisely."

"I will, don't worry."

Aya put on her long jacket, grabbed her purse (with her custom pistol inside) and was about to step out of the loft when she stopped at her door's threshold. "And tell Goto and 'Hank' that my lingerie drawer is off limits. And that includes the rest of your zoo."

"And what about me?"

Brea said nothing as the door closed behind her, but Jensen thought he caught sight of a smirk, for a second, there.

"Huh. Didn't even say goodbye," Kasumi said out loud as she disengaged her Camouflage App and stepped out of the shadows. "Rude."

Her red wig looked disheveled, and her clothes looked slept in. "And I am soooo not interested in her underwear," she continued as she pulled out a pair of semi transparent black panties with multifaceted embroidery of black, opaque flowers and vines. "Those things look like they itch like a motherfucker! Seriously, who wears these things except strippers and prostitutes?"

"Put those back." Jensen ordered, sighing. "I'm making breakfast. You'll get bacon grease all over them."

"...I smell the making of an hilarious practical joke. It begins with bacon grease and ends with a swarm of dogs." Kasumi grinned like a cat.

"I think we all got enough shit from her, don't you think?"

Brea had indeed screamed at them for a variety of reasons. Kasumi, for picking her front door, Drebin, for disabling her traps (which, frighteningly, included a glass partition laced with a grid of explosive mono-filaments), and Tali and Spooky for cracking her desktop computer.

Jensen got the worst of it. Apparently, she had arranged for several locations where they could stay without arousing too much trouble, along with deliveries of equipment personalized to their skillsets. And Jensen had thrown that out of the window to indulge one of Hein's inappropriate attempts at humor.

But both Hein and Jensen knew what they were doing.

...

"Brea thinks she can move you like a pawn," said Hein. "Thinks she can control her tiny little world from the comfort of a little castle full of luxury. You're going to remind her that's not how we do things here."

"What do you care how she does things, as long as she does them?" said Jensen, as he stepped out into the artificial atmosphere of Middle-Dosadi. "We are fugitives and we are going to arouse suspicion all around her."

"All the better. She'll panic a little, it'll keep her on her toes... and I don't like the way she's been treating her assets for the past three years. Her 'patron' has been grooming her to lead, but he also spoiled her rotten a bit. He thought sending her to Tarsus' Balamb Garden would soften her a bit, but all that's managed to do is turn her into an insufferable snob."

"You sound... disappointed in her," said Jensen, but that wasn't the right word, now that he thought about it. He looked more sad, if anything... but Hein was always a hard one to read even in real-life, nevermind through a video chat window.

"I am disappointed in her boss. He should really know better." Hein sighed. "Take every opportunity to try and make her smile, Adam. Or, barring that, make her angry. She needs real human contact, not live chats and a chain of email correspondence."

...

"I think she'd prefer butter in them," said Adam, cracking a faint smile, and pointing at the fridge. "You know, for the itching."

~[h+]~

---

With breakfast served, Jensen, Kasumi and Spooky made light conversation, and before Jensen could work his way towards more serious matters, the thief asked the two men a question.

"So. Power Girl. Is she a clone or something?"

At their sudden shocked silence, Kasumi knew that she was right.

"Don't know what you're talking about," Jensen lied.

"...What he said," added Spooky.

"Guys, guys, it's okay, I mean, I can tell she's been modded, at the very least. For one thing her face is perfectly symmetrical: she tries to hide it by parting her bangs to the side, but it was pretty obvious once she tied it back to put on her makeup. And then she's got those puppies..." Kasumi grabbed her own bust, a comparatively humble C-cup. "I mean, they're definitely real, judging by the way they bounce, but they hold their perfect shape a little too well without a bra."

"Wait, how did you..." Jensen asked, but it dawned on him pretty quickly. "You spied on her."

"Well, yeah, duh!" She gave Jensen a bright smile. "I mean, whew!... I mean... wow! Wouldn't you? I mean, you can cloak and all."

"...No!" Adam protested.

Kasumi narrowed her eyes, her expression catlike and amused. "Uh huh."

"I would!" said Spooky. "But I'm more intrigued by the fact that you would, Kasumi."

"Well, Hank, if that is your real name..."

"It's not, but let's go with that for now."

"I... am plenty flexible when it comes to um... acrobatics."

Spooky gave her his best, winning smile.

Adam cleared his throat "Okay, guys? Enough about this for now."

"I could stand to hear a little more," Spooky quipped.

Adam dismissed him. "'Morgan' wants us to get some extra equipment to prepare for the mission."

"Right, the let's-stalk-a-french-girl one." Kasumi rolled her eyes. "So stoked."

"Are you in?" asked Spooky.

"Oh yeah, sure. I've got a year's supply of Soap riding on this... and Morgan wouldn't take no for an answer." She put a meaningful accent on the last part of the sentence. Morgan had been subtle, but she had implied that should Kasumi have refused she would have been found dead in a ditch somewhere. "Oh, and cash, and the chance at some interesting loot. I know for a fact that there are a few Salarians out there who would pay top nuyen for a sample of Europa Genomics tech."

"Well, that's good to know." Jensen nodded. "Got any ideas, either of you?"

Kasumi scratched the back of her head. "Well... You guys know about Ken Ruger?"

"Yeah," replied Jensen. "You called him at that nightclub. Something about his job going south?"

"Well, besides thievery I like to take the occasional Dream Run, nip some Stray Nightmares in the bud and let a whole bunch of Arcadia users get a peaceful night's sleep or a wet one without any disturbance. Ol' Ken likes to send other Dream Hackers like me to deal with them. It's good money and the work is never boring."

"Stray Nightmare?"

"I'll explain some other time. Anyhoo, Ken Ruger was always really paranoid about those Krypto chips, the ones that allow 24 hour access to the Arcadia Dream System? So he never got one installed. Instead, to log in, he uses a Dream Catcher bed."

"I've been in one of those... But those things aren't exactly portable, if you're thinking about us getting one."

"I know, I know, let me finish: when he gave me my last job, he said that he was going to get his hands on the brand new DC Mini — the thing fits in my pocket, no joke. With my Omni-Glove and implants, I can use that to jack into Arcadia by using someone as a proxy, and glean valuable info from people at the facility don't leave it conveniently stored in their datapads."

"...Hm, I dunno..."

"Trust me, it'll be well worth the time to get it."

"Assuming this Ruger is okay with parting with it."

Kasumi winced sheepishly. "I was kinda hoping you'd help with that. You know, make him give me the 'big intimidating guy' discount?"

"...I'll think about it." Jensen turned to Spooky. "Well, got any ideas?"

"Hm..." the hacker pondered. "I need to check in with Kaylee, first." He finished his last strip of bacon, and rubbed his hands on a sanitizer cloth. "She's looking over the hardware 'Morgan' got us."

"Alright, but do hurry up."

"Will do," Spooky took a couple of steps towards the computer room, but then stopped, remembering something. "Oh! 893 wanted me to tell you to meet him upstairs. Said something about bigger guns."

"I'll go see him, just as soon as I'm done with the dishes."

~[h+]~

Upstairs, near the bedroom, there was a small room Brea had, much to Jensen's surprise, turned into a small armoury. It wasn't the Durendal's weapons locker, but it still had a few weapons on the rack, and a very expensive looking Omni-Bench, at which Drebin seemed to be meditating. Three disassembled weapons were on it, their parts neatly organized.

"Smuggler?" asked Jensen as he crossed the doorway. "What are you doing?"

"Me? I'm trying to figure out how Brea built her gun."

"It looked pretty normal to me."

"You'd be wrong." Drebin picked up a shotgun's empty chassis and turned it in his hands. "Near as I can tell, she took a Scimitar's ammo shaver and capacitors, a Blizzard SMG's trigger assembly and cryogenic mod, and a Whitworth rifle's barrel and Tranq Ammo mod..." He showed Jensen a mold for a Talon Heavy Pistol "...then poured all that shit in there to create a three-shot burst scatter-pistol that fires freezing buckshot tranquilizer rounds at medium range. I am not even joking."

Adam whistled. "That's... wow."

"Yeah, exactly. Of course, she threw some perfectly serviceable guns in the bin as well. Wasteful. Just wasteful."

"Speaking of guns, 'Hank' tells me you wanted to see me about our firepower?"

"Yeah, Brea's little arsenal isn't too bad; it's all over-the-counter gear, perfect if you're dealing with crooks or maybe even SSC contractors, but after our encounter with the ZORG I'm thinking we should get our hands on some Black Market mech killers.

"You think the facility is protected by another ZORG?"

"Maybe, maybe not: Manticore is big on high-performance mechs... but it's the Armadyne Humanoids they've been buying lately that got me worried."

"Humanoids? Like the LOKI?"

"Nothing like that Hahne-Kedar garbage. For one thing, Armadyne GM-05 Copleys don't explode when you shoot them in the head. For another, their OVO cells and central processors are pretty small and safe behind an inch of armor. Their limbs are powered by redundant hydraulics, joint servomotors and strips of bucky gel. To take one down, you have to destroy just about everything, and I do mean everything."

"Otherwise?"

"Otherwise this." Drebin brought up a holo-vid on his Omni-Tool, a live news broadcast detailing the attack of a gang of pirates on an Armadyne VIP on Caleston and his two Copley bodyguards, about a year ago. The two Mechs moved like Special Forces soldiers, but with mechanical precision and brutal efficiency. Then, one of the gangsters, a batarian, got in a lucky shot in that destroyed the mech's SMG, and the machine switched from efficient soldier to brutal gorilla. It leaped on the Batarian and tore him apart in a mist of red censor grids. The rest of the gang desperately tried to wreck it with their machine guns, but most of the bullets simply ricocheted off its armor.

A Krogan with a 300M shotgun managed to blow the rampaging Mech's legs off, and while the gun cooled itself down the legless mech crawled towards the huge lizard by clawing at the dusty ground. Meanwhile, the other mech executed a Mozambique drill on the Krogan, stunning it long enough for the crawling mech to—

"Oh, god." Adam looked away.

"Whoever programmed these things is a psycho," continued the Omar. "Copleys won't stop coming until you're dead, or they are."

"...Okay, then. What do you recommend?"

"Well, I had the foresight to call in a favor with one of my contacts here in Middle Dosadi. I ordered up something special for you. A P90 PDW customized to fire custom-tooled 5.7x28mm airburst rounds packed with tungsten micro-flechettes. Shooting someone with that thing at any range is tantamount to firing an armor-piercing shotgun at point blank range. It'll shred those mechs completely."

Jensen got the feeling that Drebin was trying to sell him on the idea, and wasn't all that convinced. "Couldn't a regular SMG do the trick if you loaded it with a tungsten ammo block?"

Drebin shook his head. "Hmmm... you might be able to do quite a bit of damage to one before your gun overheats. Armadyne mechs are the primary reason thermal clips are becoming a popular gun cooling alternative to heat sinks. The way I see it, if you're going to use limited ammo anyways, might as well fire some really, really powerful bullets instead of BBs."

"Okay... so what do you need from me?"

"Well, thing is, my contact went silent a while back."

"Got caught by the cops, you think?"

"According to 'Morgan'? Nope. I'm thinking it was Manticore. I'd like us to head for his hideout, sneak in, find the goods, and get out before anyone is the wiser."

"I need to consider my other options, first."

"Whatever you need to do, Jensen, but do hurry up. This is a 'while supplies last' kind of deal."

"Right, but in the meantime, couldn't you cobble something together strong enough to take out a mech?"

"... I might, but it'll cost ya real money."

"Fine, fine. I'll think about it... hey, this contact of yours, is he another Omar?"

"Nah, Lunarian. You would think a skinny fella like him would be afraid of anything with recoil, but nope. Skinny man loooves the boom."

"Right. It's just that I heard that there was an Omar Collective here?"

"So did I, but before you ask, no, I don't know where they are." Drebin tapped the side of his head. "It's not like I'm advertising, you know?"

~[h+]~

---

"Whoa, it's like Christmas morning," said Spooky.

Whatever Christmas was, Tali thought it must have been an awesome holiday. She had unpacked a great deal of computer hardware, and one of these had been a Gibson m50 computer tower. A machine the size of a fridge once assembled, it had enough processing power to do a dextro protein folding simulation in one day.

I could send this back to the Flotilla right now, she thought. I could offer this up to Daro'Xen and she would accept me on the Moreh. But would father allow it? I have no idea.

She inspected the other computers. A Yamaha GX1. A Synton Fenix. A TR-707 modem. A Serge Modular router. All human brands, and Tali looked these up on the Extra-Net to see if they were any good. According to the reviews, they were.

"And then, you find out you got a sock full of coal," said Spooky, sighing in almost exaggerated disappointment.

"...I don't know what that means."

"I mean this is all crap."

"I can't say that I agree with you on that one. The hardware is solid according to my scans, and the reviews are glowing for each of these machines."

"I know what the reviews say. Yeah, it's great if you're running ICE, but this is all defensive shit. No self-respecting hacker would use this." Spooky rubbed his eyes. "I wish Lunchbox was here. He could slap together a fantastic portable deck from all this stock machinery."

"Hm... I wonder what he's doing right now?"

"Heh, probably stalking Manah to see if she'll shed her skin envelope and reveal herself as a spawn of Cthulhu or something."

"...I have no idea what that is either."

"I know, and that's a damn shame. Remind me to send you some e-books." Spooky looked at the hardware, and tried to come up with another solution, but...

"I could try and put something together up to your specs..." suggested Tali, interrupting the momentum of Spooky's thoughts.

"I know you would try, sweetheart, and you've got the brains for the software, but have you worked with these machines before? Can you make me a proper rig from all this that will fit in a van in just under three hours?"

"Yes," she winced. "...in maybe four to five hours."

"Right, looks like I'll need Jensen's help after all."

"Help with what?" said Jensen right behind him.

"Gah!" Spooky had been, well, spooked. "Jesus Christ, I didn't even hear you!"

"...Yeah, sorry, force of habit. Anyways, what do you need my help with?"

"Well, we've got some fantastic kit here, but the problem is most of it won't fit in a small car."

"...And this is a problem, how?"

"Jensen, let me explain something: when it comes to hacking in a WTO Arcology, if you don't stay on the move, you get fucked by the bloodhounds. If we don't want Manticore to come barging through this door, we'll have to keep switching through wireless nodes and that means staying on the move."

"Huh. So that's why your HQ was in a semi."

"Damn straight, that's why. But lucky for you, I brought the best computer there is."

"Okay, so what's the problem?"

"No, dammit! You're supposed to ask me what or where it is."

Adam sighed, and crossed his arms. "Okay, what or where is it."

Spooky tapped his forehead. "This, and it's in here. Of course, in order to make the best of it, I'm going to need a proper cyberdeck. I got a contact in Little Taipei, and he's willing to part with an Ono-Sendai Matrix III along with a headset for about three thousand platinum. But..."

"Let me guess, you lost contact with him?"

"What? Nah, I just don't trust the guy. He's knee deep in the local Taiwanese mafia. It's likely he'll try and and screw me over to pay some debts. Or maybe he filled the deck's casing full of M&Ms — I'll probably have no idea until I crack the sucker open. Point is, I need you to make sure he doesn't try anything, and maybe use your CASIE on him."

"Sounds simple enough. And you're certain the Ono-Sendai is worth it?"

"They haven't made a better Cyberdeck in years, mark my words."

"Tali, what do you think?"

"I don't know how good this 'Cyberdeck' is..." she made quote signs for emphasis. "But I've worked on a static setup before and I haven't been caught. Then again, it was under controlled conditions, so..."

"The Durendal is in orbit; couldn't Hein and Lunchbox help us from up there?"

Tali and Spooky were aghast, and both said, "Nooooooo nononono. Bad Idea."

"The Durendal would have to emit a very powerful signal to cut through space and the interference from Dosadi's wireless traffic," Tali explained.

"Couldn't we just encrypt the signal?"

"Doesn't matter, the Durendal transmits a signal that strong, and it will be locked on immediately."

"And if the installation is that important, I suspect EG will have Noveria's kill sats go live to keep it secure."

Adam had a lot to think about now, with what Kasumi, Drebin and the hackers had just told him. "Hm... I'll think about it."

"Yeah, well, don't take your sweet time," said Spooky, tapping his watch. "The clock's ticking."

~[h+]~

---

Jensen had decided to help Kasumi out, figuring that being able to infiltrate someone's dreams might be an asset... although he had to admit, the notion did make him a bit uncomfortable.

He rented an aircar, a gray SydMotors Strada that featured four seats and compatibility with the MagRoad system of Middle Dosadi. It had been remotely delivered about a hundred meters away from Brea's apartment building, for discretion's sake.

"Hold on," he said, before starting up the car. He Breached its navigation system, and ensured that the Strada would transmit inaccurate positional data back to the city's navigation system. He didn't want to be tracked, even if the Chip buried under his skin gave him a brand new identity.

"Welcome, mister Yasumoto," the car's VI cheerfully greeted. Jensen groaned.

"What?" said Kasumi.

"I think Spooky played a joke on me. Look at me. Do I look even remotely Japanese?"

"Well, not without a slight australian accent, you don't."

Jensen took the car in the air, flying it manually. "...You lost me," he said, a bit confused.

"Riiight, the big Neo Kobe cultural revolution was before your time..." Jensen didn't feel the need to correct her. "Well, there's plenty of blonde Caucasians with Japanese names around on Earth these days. Why do you think I can get away with calling myself Kasumi Goto?"

Jensen looked her over. She had changed into a different outfit: her hair was a shade of indigo, and she was wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather jacket. "Well, you kinda look... vaguely Asian..."

Goto snorted. "Yeah, if you squint and tilt your head, sure. Look, try and get used to it. If you keep getting all self-conscious whenever someone calls you by that name, people will catch on that it's not yours."

"Right, I'll try."

Jensen saw an opportunity to get onto the MagRoad system and took it, if only for the familiar feeling of driving on the ground. Of course, he was simply hovering on the ground, but that was close enough to remind him of the old days, when there has been no Mass Effect drives to speak of. Jensen took a deep breath, and relaxed. It was nice not to have to worry about mid-air collisions for a change.

Also, as a bonus, it conserved fuel and kept the core charge to a minimum.

"So... Power Girl?" he asked, referring to what Kasumi had called Brea.

"What?" Kasumi shrugged, then smiled. "She kinda looks like a Power Girl."

"Which artist?"

"I'm thinking..." Kasumi sent Jensen a challenging look. "...The Amanda Conner years."

"...Nah, Morgan's proportions are your basic comic book heroine. More Wonder Woman than anything."

"Hm... she does have the shoulders. And the attitude. Yeah, definitely more of a Wonder Woman. Also!" Kasumi slapped Jensen's shoulder. "Holy shit! You know what the hell I'm talking about. You nerd!"

"Hey, I was raised on DC comics. I'm more surprised you know anything about them. They're just a little before your time."

Kasumi looked embarrassed, and then a little sad. "Ah, well... my memory programmer was obsessed with pre-Collapse comics. Occasionally he'd implant a nerd girl personality in me and I'd keep him company for the day."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to dredge up bad memories."

"Bad memories? The short moments I had with Keiji were the best, really. So thanks."

"So the South-African... what was his deal? Why did he have you modified like that?"

"Hell if I know, but if I had to guess, he did it because having an agent capable of doing... well, everything was really useful. And there's money to be had in stealing memories, far more than art and jewels. Forget monetizing data, you can monetize skills."

"Such as?"

Kasumi started reciting a list: "Computers, Electronics, Environmental Training, Lockpicking, Medicine, Demolitions, Pistols, Rifles, Heavy Weapons—"

"What about swimming?"

"Meh, I never had much use for swimming. I prefer more useful skillsets. You know, like driving?" she said, almost accusingly.

"I'm sorry?"

"We just passed the horizontal MagRail that was supposed to take us to the ground."

"Shit, sorry... I actually have no idea how to get on those. I'm more used to the Citadel system."

"Here, let me do it."

Jensen had the wheel mounted on dashboard's rail slide over to the passenger seat, and Kasumi took over the controls. She slowed the car down next to a set of horizontal rails, and parked the vehicle right next to them. The MagRails electromagnetically connected to the Strada, and gently carried it down on another MagRoad that was headed towards of the ground level of Middle Dosadi... which, to Jensen's surprise, was upside down. The Strada's own MagWheels kept the car suspended instead of keeping it afloat.

"Here, you can take over."

"Thanks... I've been meaning to ask. When you steal memories, is that literal? Do you leave people amnesiac?"

"I 'steal memories' in the same sense that copying a music or a vid is stealing. But yeah, I can make people forget... for a while."

"For a while?"

"Erasing memories permanently involves killing neurons. What I do is... have you ever woken up, but you were still working under a weird logic, that the king of Belgium owed you twenty dollars even though you've never met the guy and they use euros over there?"

"Once or twice, yeah."

"Right, that's what I do, I can replace a memory with a waking delusion in place of the real event... but it never lasts. Sooner or later, and unless the brain is diseased, the real memories reassert themselves. The more believable and detailed the delusion, the more the victim accepts it, and it stays even longer."

"How can you even come up with an acceptable memory that's detailed enough? The painstaking detail alone should take you days to..."

"No, no, no, you're thinking in the terms of a 3d modeler, now... back to the sleep analogy: Have you ever taken a melatonin supplement? Or, more simply, have you ever struggled to stay awake, but closed your eyes for just a moment, and in the blink of an eye fully imagined a place you had never visited, or a person you had never met?"

"...Yeah, actually."

"Think about how crazy detailed a person's face is. It should have taken your mind hours to build one from scratch, but you came up with hair and eye color and height and width and who knows what else in an instant. My hardware allows me to tap into that ability to create an entire world in minutes!"

Jensen looked down, at the transparent floor of the Strada's interior. He could see a playground, suspended on top of a floating building. He wondered if the children playing in it were Chipped as well, if their every thoughts and memories were at someone's fingertips, collated to detect incoming trends in their preferences in cartoons, or music, or toys.

Or if they had any controls over what they liked at all anymore.

Red hologram. Jensen stopped the car, and a bus surrounded by advertising holograms passed by. The largest one was an Arcadia advert: a beautifully made up woman mouthed the slogan 'STEP INTO MY WORLD' as it streaked by in big white letters across her face.

Green hologram. Go.

"You make it sound wonderful, but... the technology kind of scares me. To rewrite a person like that, even temporarily... that's a power people are going to abuse. And if they can do that permanently, then... what kind of world are we going to live in when your very identity is at the mercy of the rich and powerful?"

"Scary, yeah. If it makes you feel any better, in order to make the memories stick, they'd need to physically alter your brain as well. That's hours of surgery followed by a cocktail of drugs, right there. It's too hard and way, way too expensive."

"Or maybe... all they need is a chip to do it." Jensen shook his head, trying not to dwell on the horror that Dosadi was shaping up to be. "Are we almost there?"

"Hm? Yeah, just take a left, here."

~[h+]~

---

As a Strada passed them by, the children kept playing, their parents watching over them. One of them starting to hum a tune, then another followed suit, then another, and another... until finally they all sang in unison:

"London bridge is falling down, falling down..."

~[h+]~

---

Ken Ruger's domicile had been built in a suburban neighborhood which itself had been built on top of a skyscraper. The Strada had been parked some distance away at the nearest parking area for the sake of discretion, and Adam and Kasumi still had to take an elevator to go up to their objective. They now only had to cross a three-story rotunda that served as a small, but well frequented shopping mall. It was Jensen's first up-close-and-personal look at the people of Middle Dosadi, and at some of the popular fashions in both Europe and the OCU.

There was a copper-haired albino dressed in a white suit with black stripes, with its left breast checkered. He had a plastic nose and plastic shoes that matched.

There were three women at a coffee table wearing skin-tight bodysuits, each of them with a different tessellated pattern, and sheets of plastic hovered above their hair, twisted into ringlets.

There was a middle aged gentleman with a curved metal harness over his head, wearing a khaki-colored closed lab coat with a lozenge-within-a-lozenge pattern centered over the middle of his chest, which had a lozenge-shaped opening, inside of which was a tuft of red silk meant to evoke an exposed, open heart.

And contrasting with the strange fashions were the relatively plain OCU salarymen who hurried past Adam, wearing plain black business suits with silver circuitry printed on the shoulders, their corporate tattoos visible on the back of their hands. These men would be working for Sony for the rest of their lives. Their families would be housed by Sony, they would eat Sony food and their funerals would be paid for by Sony.

Holograms hovered around their heads. Even when they were walking to work, they were working.

There was a blonde girl downstairs, wearing a pink, translucent dress with fluffy skirt and tassels that reminded Jensen instantly of a Jellyfish, with a similar hairstyle than the women at the coffee table. She was beating up on a young black haired woman in a black and white maid outfit, thwacking on her head over and over again with a fur purse... that yelped with every strike. Jensen zoomed in and, to his horror, saw that the purse was actually a tiny Welsh Corgi bio-engineered to become a living accessory.

A still living and still very conscious Welsh Corgi bio-engineered to become a living accessory.

The blonde was flanked by twins, and Jensen swore they resembled Kasumi to the point that anyone would have mistaken them for her younger sisters... and from the tattoos on their foreheads Jensen knew what they were: Entourage clones.

They were dressed in elegant yet humble white hanbok patterned with a minimalist art-nouveau flower pattern, designed to make the little rich girl's garish pink jellyfish of an outfit stand out all the more.

He wondered if the dress was alive, too, and when it twitched he wondered no more.

"You're late! This outfit is ten minutes too old!" The blonde teenage brat screeched, pointing indignantly at a torn package on the ground. "Do you WANT me to be the laughing stock of the school?! Get me another one!"

Kasumi's voice came out of the maid, droning, flat, subservient: "I am sorry, mistress. I could not afford anything else with the credit chit you gave—"

"You're calling me poor?! How dare you?!" She thwacked the maid again, and blood splattered on the ground. "How DARE YOU?!"

Bystanders all around either shook their heads in disapproval at the scene, or made a point not to look. Nobody really cared to call emergency services. To them this was just a spoiled teenage girl having a tantrum, taking out her anger on her toys. There was one exception: a round faced dark haired man with a goatee who simply stared at the clones, his expression completely unreadable... as unreadable as the clones.

Jensen thought that enough was enough, and decided to do something about that little brat, only for Kasumi to hug his arm and pull him away. He looked at her, his stare questing for her permission to be let loose, like an attack dog. She simply shook her head.

"You're only going to make things worse, and then the SSC is going to arrest us."

"But... that's... that's your sister."

"She's my clone; we're not one big happy family."

"I... I can't accept this kind of abuse. I can't. I won't."

"I know it looks bad, but do you hear her scream, Adam?"

Adam grit his teeth. "Just because she can't doesn't me she doesn't want to."

"Trust me, she doesn't. We're born to be slaves, Jensen. Right now the only person that Sun-Mi is angry at is herself for failing her mistress. Please, let's just go."

"Goto..."

"Please...?"

They got on an elevator, but not before an SSC patrol arrived and very politely asked the petulant brat to stop disturbing the peace.

Disturbing the peace. God, Adam hated this place.

~[h+]~

---

At the doorstep of a nice two-story house made out of concrete plated with wood, Jensen took a deep breath, trying to put the earlier display of callousness behind him. Get in, get the DC Mini, and with enough luck he'd have time to spare to get both the Ono-Sendai and the modified P90.

"So, how do you want to do this? I say we sneak in the back and—"

Kasumi walked up to the front door and knocked on it with her fist.

"Or, we could do... that."

"RUGER?! OPEN THE FUCK UP! I AM IN A BAD MOOD AND I AM THIS CLOSE TO BREAKING DOWN YOUR DOOR." She banged on the door again. "KEN! KEEEN!"

Eventually, the door came ajar, and a short, middle-aged white man with red hair and a wispy beard peeked out of the gap, the two chains now his only defense against unlawful entry and the wrath of Kasumi Goto.

"Um, c-c-can I, can I help you?" he stuttered, scared like a mouse.

"Yeah, you can help me, KEN."

"I'm s-sorry? M-my name i-i-is Ben, Benjamin Luger."

"Ken, you sent me on the most fucked up Dream Run ever, and before I knew it I had Manticore and the SSC on my ass. I got kicked in the HEAD. I was nearly taken by STRANGLERS. My brain nearly shorted out! But you know what really, REALLY pisses me off the most? I didn't even get PAID for my trouble. So you get back in your house, and get me that DC Mini, and we're calling it even."

"I...I'm sorry. I think you've got me confused with someone else."

Kasumi's jaw stiffened, and she gritted her teeth. "...No. No, don't you dare pull that shit on me."

"P-P-Please, Miss..." The man that wasn't quite Ken's voice was trembling. "...I-I h-have no idea what you're t-t-t-talk-talking about!"

"Ken," Kasumi put her palm on the door, pushing against it and keeping Ruger from closing it. "I'm gonna SHIT on your car, I swear to god!"

"Yes, w-w-well, have fun with that, miss, but I really need to get back to making my lunch. Okay? Okay, goodbye now..."

"Ken, don't you—" and then, with surprising strength, Ruger pushed against his door, and Kasumi could do nothing as the door was locked with a deadbolt. "...Oh, oh this means war now. Oh yes."

Jensen, suspected that Ken was now calling the cops, was proven right when he turned on his smart-Vision. He locked on to the phone's frequency and Breached it, and hijacked the communications.

"SSC Emergency services. Please state the nature of your emergency," he said sub-vocally. Ken made his statement, nervous like a mouse, saying there was a crazy woman at his door with a tall man behind her. Jensen played the part of a dispatch cop perfectly, and Ken would be waiting for help that would never come.

Jensen kinda felt bad, now. He felt worse when Kasumi took a few steps back, then took a running start before jumping and kicking the door down. Inside, Ken Ruger seemed to panic, but there was a certainty to his movements that Jensen noticed as he ran away, grabbing a spray can and reaching inside his pants. He ran towards the back door, and Jensen headed him off by going around the house.

Adam was just about to tackle the man on the patio, but Ruger had made himself a makeshift flamethrower with a lighter and a spray can of cleanser. The flames surged out at Adam's face, and he brought his arms up to shield himself in desperation instead of dodging out of the way. Tongues of fire licked the sleeves of his green hoodie.

Jensen, really, REALLY hated fire, and that had been enough for him to stop dead in his tracks, then back away. While Ruger was focused on keeping Adam at bay, Goto had no trouble tackling Ruger down on the grass. She tore his improvised weapon out of his grasp. Keeping him under control was more problematic than expected: The man was a scrapper... but he finally gave up after a while, and Kasumi had him pinned on the lawn.

"Please, please! Take whatever you want, just... just don't kill me! I have a family, they'll be visiting any time, now..."

"You don't have a family, you jerk!" Kasumi tied Ruger up with flash cuffs. "Hey, you okay, uh... Basch?"

"I'm okay..." Adam took a few deep breaths, trying to calm himself down. "Not a fan of fire, that's all." He looked at his sleeves, and he patted the flames away. "Damn, gonna need a change of clothes. Again."

~[h+]~

---

The inside of Ken Ruger's domicile was filled with replicas and replicas of a time gone by. There were magazines with Raygun Gothic art on the covers, collections of sci-fi short stories penned in a time when the dream of the Jet Age held so many wonderful possibilities, before real science debunked most of them. There were posters mounted on every wall of the living room: It Came From Outer Space, It Came from Beneath the Sea Cat Women from the Moon, A Nightmare On Elm Street All sorts of flicks were being silently advertised, all of them about monsters coming out of the unknown to kill us, to control us, to have sex with us.

There was a jukebox, and upon closer observation Jensen realized that the thing used actual vinyl records. That brought a smile to his face.

Ken Ruger was tied to his couch, a big comfy thing that looked nothing like the spartan modern day furniture in the Citadel or the Neo Art-Nouveau style of Dosadi. An awkward silence fell between the two men.

"So, um... sorry about... the whole home invasion thing," said Jensen.

"Oh, uh, no, no it's okay..." said Ken, but Jensen knew it was certainly not okay. "Sorry about the uh... improvised flamethrower."

"Oh... no harm done. You were just defending your home."

"Still..."

"...Yeah."

Downstairs in the basement, Kasumi screamed in frustration. "What the fuck?!" She ran up the stairs. "Where's the shit, Ken?!"

"W-w-what?" the short red-haired man stammered. "You m-mean my model kits? You saw them, they're d-d-down-downstairs! Please, they're worth a small fortune! Take them! Take them, just please go..."

"I'm talking about your DC bed, your computers, your decks! Where are they?!"

"I don't know what you're talking about! But I my son has got quite a few Silver Age DC comics! They're in his bedroom! Take them, they're all yours!"

Kasumi looked at Jensen meaningfully. "Well?"

"He's not lying." Jensen crossed his arms, having scanned Ken with the CASIE. "He honestly doesn't know what you're talking about... he's thinks he's married with kids, and he's terrified of you." He sighed. "Kasumi, are you sure you got the right place?"

"Don't you patronize me!" she snapped. She walked up to Ruger, leaned in, put her hands over his shoulders and stared into his eyes. "Damn it. He did himself."

"Excuse me?"

"He's induced a delusion in his brain. Probably to evade the cops. You can falsify any kind of evidence these days: DNA, video, audio... and until recently, the only reliable way to convict people was to put them under VK. The only way to fool that..."

"...Is to make yourself believe your own lies," Jensen muttered. How many innocents had he and Garrus put to jail due to faulty VK results? How many criminals had they let go?

"Right, so I'm thinking Ken here made himself think he was an honest salaryman and ditched all of his hardware so that the SSC wouldn't put him in jail," she pulled away from Ken, and bit the tip of her thumb. "Damn it."

"Didn't you say it takes a while for the real memories to come back?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, wouldn't he need to get the delusion refreshed to maintain it?"

Ken looked at the two intruders, confused, as Kasumi considered the idea.

"You're right. He wouldn't trust anyone but himself to do it, so he'd have to use the Mini!"

"Keep looking around the house, I'll keep an eye on him."

Kasumi proceeded upstairs, her logic as a thief telling her that valuables are usually stored in the upper levels, away from the easy routes of access and escape.

Twenty minutes, and she still hadn't found anything.

Jensen decided to chat with Ken, if only to make this terrible experience slightly less uncomfortable.

"So... I can't but notice you're a big fan of the mid-1900s"

Ken smiled nervously. "Um... yeah," he chuckled sheepishly. "I-I've been a fan ever since I saw some pictures in a history book. I followed that up on a few vids on Oz and uh... the fifties looked so compelling to me, you know? A better time, a simpler time, when people were much nicer to each other." He said 'nicer' somewhat pointedly and accusingly. That stung Jensen a bit.

Nevermind the racism, misogyny, and Cold War paranoia, Jensen thought. While Jensen understood where Ken was coming from, people were simply more polite back in the fifties. That didn't mean they were nicer than today.

"And the music..." Ken seemed to relax. "The music was wonderful, you had your Jazz, Bebop, your Blues... you had your R&B, your Swing... there was an energy to the music back then, not like today... Right now it's all synthesizer apps, and procedurally-generated pop idols with procedurally generated voices singing procedurally generated songs. There's no soul anymore..."

On that, Jensen couldn't help but agree.

"Well, there was Mi-Young Whyte, but she's dead now..."

"Mind if I put on something?"

"Um... sure, go ahead..."

Jensen checked the list printed inside the glass, under the carousel of discs. First on the list was Mr. Sandman by the Chordettes, All I have to do is Dream by the Everly Brothers, Dream Lover by Bobby Darin, Dream a little Dream of me by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong, A kiss to build a dream on by Louis Armstrong, Sinnerman by Nina Simone...

Wait. Something's off. Jensen read the rest of the playlist. All them, save for Sinnerman, had dreams as a central theme, which kinda fit Ken's supposed business but Sinnerman... well, that song applied more to thieves and criminals on the run, which kinda fit Kasumi's profession and status as a fugitive from the law.

Shrugging and figuring that there was no harm in trying, Jensen was about to press the button that was supposed to summon the haptics, but stopped himself when he saw the analogue controls. He realized that haptic switches were ubiquitous on any piece of modern electronic hardware, the first thing anyone from this era would look for, the perfect decoy. So, he decided to try pressing the analogue buttons first.

The song played, but instead of hearing the sultry voice of Nina Simone, Jensen heard a Muppet sing.

One of these things is not like the other!

Which one is different, do you know?

Tell me which thing is not like the others

And I'll tell you if it is so!

"Do you remember putting that song in there?" asked Jensen.

"Well..." Ken looked up, trying to recall the day he put the vynil disc in. "No, I don't."

"Is that right...?" Jensen immediately began to look for anything out of the ordinary. First, he looked at the posters, and realized that the Nightmare on Elm Street (the 2010 version, that is) poster was out of place next to its more retro neighbors. He took it off the wall, and on the back there was a QR code that, to the casual observer, would have looked like some kind of company logo or a purchase code.

Scanning the code revealed a message, laced in gibberish:

SEARCH THE HOUSE

"Hey!" Jensen called out. "I found something!"

"What?" replied Kasumi from upstairs.

"It's a hidden message! It says, 'search the house!'"

"...Well, at least I know I'm on the right track! I've been doing nothing but searching the shit out of this house!"

"Hm... have you found anything that isn't from the 1950's?"

"Um... let's see. There's an issue of Watchmen here..."

"Is there anything odd about it? A code printed in it?"

"Well, there's the letters A and the number 1 written on the back. You think that's important?"

Jensen pressed the matching keys on the Jukebox. The Chordettes started to sing.

Jensen decided to look for anything else that stood out, but could find nothing else that wasn't 1950's-themed.

He decided to visit the basement: The entire place had been pretty obviously re-purposed into a hobby workshop, complete with tools hanging on the wall. On a large table was a miniature neighborhood, an altar of wood and plastic and glue dedicated to Googie and Streamline Moderne architecture, complete with a diner, a soda shop, a bowling alley, a supermarket, and several houses.

"Search the house..." Jensen looked at every house, until his eyes came across a house built in the california bungalow style, which looked just a bit different from the Raygun Gothic of the rest of the miniature neighborhood. He used his Smart-Vision on it, and found a switch under the roof. He opened the tiny box of a home, and pushed the button.

The table opened up, cubing lumps of programmable matter exploding and imploding out of the way to reveal a small black box. It was mostly featureless save for six little holes, and a bit of Hangul written on the bottom:

노래해

The box was completely shielded, and Jensen's own Smart-Vision couldn't get past the thick shell. Jensen went upstairs, and showed it to Kasumi. She translated the hangul letters as 'sing' and instantly attempted to sing into the box. Nothing.

"Bah, let's just crack open the sucker. She readied her Omni-Fist App. "Put it on the floor."

"Yeah, I think I've got a better idea," said Jensen as he brought the black cube close to the juke box. He had 'Mr Sandman' replayed, and put the box's holes right next to the speaker.

"Nothing's happening..." said Kasumi.

"Be patient." said Jensen.

Eventually, the song came to its conclusion:

Mister Sandman bring us
Please, please, please
Mister Sandman bring us
a dreeeaaaaam!

And just like that, the box opened, revealing two curves of white plastic with small blue claws that glowed faintly blue.

"Jackpot," declared Jensen, a slight smile on his face.

"I could kiss you right now," said Kasumi.

"Later, let's get out of here, first."

"Right, but first..."

~[h+]~

---

[All I Have To Do Is Dream - Everly Brothers]

In a soda shop made of white walls, white tables, white seats and a white counter, Benny, in his soda jerk's uniform (complete with bow tie and hat) was scrubbing the counter, making sure it was spotless, and waited patiently for the first customers of this beautiful summer day.

Eventually, a young couple came through the door: the girl was a raven-haired pale woman in a dress the color of French Vanilla ice cream, with a blue silk scarf around her neck. The brown haired young man was dressed in a black shirt and black jeans, and wore a black and gold Basketball Letterman's jacket.

"Why, hello there, greeted Benny, "Welcome to the Poppa's Soda fountain! What can I—" Then, something clicked inside Benny, and then he was no longer Benny the soda jerk, but Ken Ruger, a psychologist who had turned down a promising career at a cybernetics company to become a janitor, of all things. He had made this choice to have enough time to pursue his passion for the Dream Hacker sub-culture. "Goto. You're late." He noticed the man accompanying her. "Who's he?"

"Who's who?" asked Kasumi.

"The man whose arm you're hugging."

Kasumi realized what she was doing, and pulled herself away from the man, a bit embarrassed. The man himself couldn't quite believe he was there, either, and examined his avatar's hand, as if skin was such an alien concept to him.

"Oh! That's uh... How did you follow me here?" she asked.

"I have no idea," said the young man. "I suppose I put the other DC Mini on."

Ken rolled his eyes. "Great, you brought a newbie into my Dream Site? Oh, never mind, just don't touch anything, alright?"

"...Alright," the young man said, still trying to process what was happening to him. "My name's... my name's Basch. Yeah, that's it."

"Ken Ruger, master of nightmares." said Ken. "Now, is there anything I can do for you?"

"I have the goods," said Kasumi. "Right here, they're yours if you want them."

"Well, that's awfully generous of you... what's the catch?"

"The catch is you tell me who the client on my last job was."

"...Alright, then, step into the back, we'll get the dream extracted."

~[h+]~

---

Dr Ken Ruger, in his white labcoat, his black latex gauntlets and his welding goggles, looked the part of a mad scientist. Jensen looked around, and saw that his laboratory (at the bottom of a huge, circular pit with a tiled floor with colored ships that depicted a giant squid) pretty much matched Ruger's outfit, with its dark Electropunk vibes. The walls were covered in glass cabinets; rows and rows of glass vials that glowed blue and teal and green. There were black iron girders everywhere, and a rail system for a mechanical chair (made of brass and cushioned with dark red velvet) spiraled from the bottom of the pit to the endless top. Lightning cracked from a dozen Tesla Coils.

Because you simply had to have Tesla Coils in a lab, for some reason.

Kasumi was strapped to a chair, straight out of the nightmares children had about their dentist. She didn't seem in distress.

"Man, I hate this part," she said, implying that she had done this before, and subtly telling Jensen to stay calm.

"This won't hurt a bit," said Ruger, deadpan, as he readied a huge syringe.

"Liar."

"What is this place?" asked Jensen.

"Well, Mister Basch..." replied Ruger, as he jabbed the needle inside Kasumi's forehead. "This is the Dream Extraction Room. It's meant to facilitate the sharing and distillation of dreams... at least, for me. Any good Dream Hacker has one, and everyone's got a different ritual. Some like to play the snake shaman, I prefer a more scientific method."

Ruger pulled the plunger, extracting a glowing red liquid from Kasumi's mind. "I love doing this to you, Goto. Your brain's setup allows for a perfect extraction, without bias contamination. It makes the dreams worth that much more..."

"Ngh! Quit being a creep."

"Ah, sorry."

Jensen examined some of the other vials nearby. He focused and stared into one, and heard horrible screams.

"What the hell are those?"

"Dreams, Mister Basch. Or more precisely, Nightmares." He produced an ampoule from the syringe, and beheld it, utterly fascinated. "My specialty." he smiled.

~[h+]~

---

Ken the Soda Jerk served Kasumi a Root beer float, a treat for being such a good sport for having a needle in her skull. She savored the sugary drink slowly, while Ken and 'Basch' spoke.

"So you buy and sell... nightmares?"

"Pretty much."

"There's a market for those?"

"You'd be surprised." Ruger waved towards the bottles of soda syrup. Jensen expected to see 'Mango' or 'Lavender' written on the bottles. Instead he saw 'Humiliation', 'Embarrassment', 'Murder Victim', 'Horrible Metamorphosis', 'Car Crash', and a whole bunch (and impossible infinity, in fact) of other creepy titles on stickers, with a lovely preview of the bottle's 'contents' drawn on them in Ligne Claire.

Ken extracted a spoonful of 'Horrible Metamorphosis' and mixed it with a glass of plain soda, and served it to Jensen. The young man strained his ears, and he could hear the sound of a man screaming in agony, wet cracking noises, and the buzzing of a fly.

"If I drink this..."

"You'll experience a transformation, then you'll wake up."

"Why? Why would anyone be interested in this?"

"You've seen the people outside: They may look awake, but they're asleep. They sleepwalk through life, their potential unfulfilled. Some people, however, suffer through a terrible event that wakes them up. It could be violence, or disease. Tragedies that make no sense... it doesn't matter. It galvanizes them, makes them stronger, more determined to succeed. That's what I sell. People come to me to wake up, Mister Basch, and they pay me top dollar to do it."

He looked around, conspiratorially. "Metamorphosis isn't even my best." He pulled out a wooden Chinese medicine box from under the counter, and opened it. Sitting in a bed of red velvet was a tiny bottle of black glass. "I've got a dream straight out of the mind of the Manticore Bomber himself. He came to me one night, and offered me this in exchange for a temporary reprieve from his torment."

"Who?"

"A serial arsonist that targeted Manticore assets here in Dosadi." said Kasumi, "He killed four of their top contractors using special homemade concussion bombs."

"What happened to him?"

Kasumi shrugged. "Nobody knows. He just stopped attacking, one day. That was... three years ago, maybe?"

"What made him attack Manticore?"

"The answer lies within this bottle. If you have the courage and the coin, then you can know. Or perhaps you have a nightmare you can give me in exchange?" Ruger smiled eagerly.

"...I'll pass, thanks."

Ruger shrugged, "Another time, then."

Kasumi finished her float. "Okay, I got a question, and you better give me an answer."

"Shoot," said Ken, putting the bottle away.

"Who was the client that sent me after that Nightmare you just extracted?"

"You know my clients value their anonymity, dear..."

"Yeah well, considering he might have had something to do with Kai Leng coming after me, I'm thinking this was a set up of some sort."

"It certainly might have been — why do you think I went into hiding in my own head? — but the money was good, and I..." Ken sighed. "I might have gotten a little stupid. There was something about the details of the job that was just... odd."

"Odd?" asked Jensen.

"At first, the way he presented it, I thought this client wanted me to do a typical corporate espionage job: give some big wig a wet dream to remove his resistance, then induce a memory flashback and glean valuable corporate secrets. He clarified that he wanted me to send Dream Hackers to fetch a specific Nightmare from... anyone that hummed a tune.

"Why is that so odd?"

Kasumi answered that one. "Usually when a client wants a custom Dream, all I have to do is meditate while he's connected, and build one from specs, or mix and match other Dreams from a repertoire until he's satisfied. On a Dream Heist, I attack someone specific, not a general group of people."

"Ah... and what was the tune?"

Ken produced a bakelite radio from under the counter, and tuned it to a station without plugging it in. A little girl sang an old nursery rhyme, her voice laced with static.

It was London Bridge. The song's tone was cheerful at first, but it slowly began to warp into something unsettling.

The young man's mouth is dripping with blood,

with an insane grin

and an even more insane gleam in his eye

"LET ME OUT"

Jensen gasped, startled by the vision.

"...My fair lady..." the song continued, and then Ken shut the radio down.

"Loriik hummed that tune the whole time I was with him..." said Kasumi.

"That's why I sent you after him," said Ken.

"You mentionned other Dream Hackers?" asked Jensen.

Ken looked somber. "Yes, I sent eleven other Dream Hackers. None of them came back from their jobs. Kasumi here is the only one that reported back, and when she kept babbling incoherently I went under complete lockdown. My guess? The folks at Arcadia were field testing a new type of ICE designed to target people like us."

"Can you tell me more about the client?" asked Kasumi. "Anything that would help me figure out his identity?"

"...His voice was definitely artificial. He spoke like a mechanical werewolf. There was a constant, tinny growl to his speech. I thought it was weird: I've heard disguised voices before, but that one didn't sound gender neutral. It was definitely male."

"Is that right?" said Jensen. "Got a sample?"

Ken replayed the transaction as best he could recall it, and imitated the client's voice through the radio. It was also laced with static, but Jensen recognized it immediately.

It was his AI stalker.

~[h+]~

---

[The Hacker - Village of the Damned]

"Don't drink anything, don't eat anything, and for the love of Christ, DO NOT get on the dance floor." That had been Spooky's warning to Tali.

There were night clubs, and day clubs, and then there were 24-hour clubs, the kind that were open all the time in some of the unlit areas of Middle Dosadi where night and day didn't matter. Modern Dosadi pharmaceuticals had come up with 'sleep substitute' drugs for humans that allowed them to do away with sleep for at least a week, as a way to compete with Salarian work hours. It was still in the beta phase of development, but quite a few young people between the ages of 16 and 29 had gotten their hands on the formula, and tweaked it to their own specs.

24-hour clubs (basically nightclubs that stayed open longer) came along to take advantage of this, giving kids with too much energy and enough money to buy their way out of school a place to get into perfectly acceptable hedonism.

Tali didn't have to wait long at the front door, since the day-crowd was only half as large as the night-crowd. Still, it had taken her twenty minutes to get close to the bouncer. The young man in front of her barked at the tall blonde woman in a black latex dress and matching gloves. Tali was no stranger to cigarettes, but she had never seen someone smoke it through a long lacquered tube before. Spooky smoked because he enjoyed it. This woman smoked because she knew she looked very good doing it.

"You fail. Go away," she said in a sultry voice.

"But you told me to bark!"

"And you failed at it. Go. Away."

"Aw..." and just like that, the man walked away.

"Next!" commanded the bouncer.

It was Tali's turn now, and she realized the folly of going through the front door. She was a Quarian, after all, and places like this tended to have some strict policies about 'dog legs', or 'suit rats', or any other imaginative slur she hadn't heard yet.

She hid her nervousness under some snark. "Do I have to bark, too?"

"Hm..." the woman looked at Tali from top to bottom, and the young Quarian could feel the human woman's intense stare scan her from behind her silvery mirrored shades. "Look at you, Quarian... a lovely creature of curves and leather, all wrapped up in pink like a gift. The things I could do with those hips..."

"Um...what?"

The bouncer breathed out a cloud of smoke. It gathered around her like a silver aura. Then, she lifted her shades, licking her upper lip. Her very luscious, very red upper lip. "I order you to stand there and be my eye candy. I want you to be still while I undress you with my eyes and treat you like a sex object. Do you have some kind of objection to that, darling?"

Tali had no idea how to react to that one, and she simply let the woman stare at her with what humans liked to call 'bedroom eyes'. She had no idea what that had meant until she was being stared at by a pair of silvery ones. The bouncer had the same presence as Brea — imperious, authoritative, dominating — but she was far more mature, like a House matron. Tali found herself withering under her stare, wringing her hands in front of her crotch as if trying to shield her private regions from unwanted eyes which she realized was completely silly because she was still wearing her suit and Oh Keelah did she have Smart-Vision she must have Smart-Vision just like Jensen Oh no does Jensen have Smart-Vision on all the time does he see me naked all the time I must look so sweaty and dirty and I poop in this thing oh ancestors kill me now—

"Oh, and she blushes..." said the Bouncer as she put her silver mirror shades back down, her examination done. Tali must have looked more coquettish than intended, because she had a hard time believing what she heard next. "You can go in, free of charge."

"...Really?"

"Yes, really. Do hurry up darling? Hesitation is not an attractive character trait."

Tali moved to go on in, but the woman barred her way with her arm. "Oh and uh... if you ever need to work, the name's Molly." She handed Tali a card — apparently, Molly was in charge of hiring dancers for the club... amongst other things. With another smile and a wink, Tali was let through.

"Hey, how come the dog-legs gets to go in for free?!" shouted a large asian man behind her, his muscles the result of gene mods, electro-stims and zero effort.

"Because she's pretty and I like her. For you? It's five-thousand Nuyen to get in, Fridge Largemeat."

"Hey, fuck you, lady! If some job-stealing suit rat gets in for free, then I get in for free, too!"

"Aw, now that's just mean..." she said, feigning sorrow. "Ten thousand, now," she added, deadpan.

"Don't you now who I am?"

"I'm sure you're the son of someone very important. Not impressed. Pay up." Molly put out her cigarette: she knew the man wasn't going to pay.

"...Fuck it, I'm going in, and some bimbo like you isn't gonna stop me."

Molly said nothing as her razor claws came out of her fingertips and she grabbed the man's crotch. "Let's see how well you squeal like a pig. Go on, piggy..."

The large man squealed indeed, and Tali got away from the scene before the SSC showed up.

The inside of the club was dark, its ambients blue and purple. The only contrast came from the OLED strips of indigo and fuchsia and pink that surrounded the dance floor. Saucers hovered above, being shot at by holographic beams of green and blue and orange.

The strobe lights gave Tali a headache. It didn't seem to bother the hundred or so teenagers that were swaying and grinding, bathing in the sonic waves generated by the fingers of the two musicians in front — Alpha Blade and Beta Razor — who kept them on a constant high of dopamine, adrenaline and endorphins.

The two Lunarian DJs were famous (and infamous) for being masters at inducing altered states of consciousness through soundwaves. It was, of course, technically legal, but psychological addiction was common, and only the WTO's laissez-faire attitude towards recreational narcotics allowed them to operate here. They were, according to Spooky, also the best App makers in the electronic demimonde. Omni-Tool apps, Cyberdeck Apps, Laptop Apps... if it was made for shady business, they had an app for it. If it was made to give you a buzz, they had an app for it, and if it could make you come, they had an app for that too.

From where she stood, Tali found the two Lunarians eerily beautiful, they were much, much taller than Jensen was, and they were so skinny and pale. One wore an elegant blue silk shirt, the other a red one. One was fair of hair, the other black. They seemed to float with every step they took.

The crowd was an eclectic bunch, a petri dish in which all sorts of species and subcultures mingled and mixed to create whole new ones. You had those with an obsession with latex sitting next to the ones with a fondness for leather, you had grown women dressed up as little girls drinking with grown men dressed up as super-heroes, you had the stylish dancing with the disheveled. Nobody was judging anyone, least of all a lone Quarian.

Or maybe they think I'm a human dressed up as a Quarian, she thought. Wouldn't that be ironic?

There were even some Asari, no doubt looking for an experience that didn't involve melding. So far, they were getting their money's worth.

Remembering Spooky's warning, and with an understanding as to why, she circled around the dance floor, intent on meeting with the musical duo. She had the tag Spooky gave her in her left pocket, ready to be shown to them upon a challenge.

She got close to the bar, which served a white liquid called Soma Milk. Several young men and women dressed in white with huge fake eyelashes black round hats glared at her, canes in hand. They frightened her, and she didn't have her shotgun handy.

They grinned menacingly.

She backed away, not thinking, and found herself on the dance floor.

That's when the soundwaves started to lick her pleasure centers. That's when she started to forget about Pilgrimages, and Flotillas and artificial blonde bimbos and shadow-haired clone cyborgs...

Oh no, she thought, oh no no no I have to get away I have a job to do they're counting on me and if I screw up again...

A pretty, slender brown-haired girl, her figure nearly a match for Tali's, approached her and grabbed her by the wrists, mistaking her attempts at getting away as simple bashfulness. She was with the gang at the bar; she wore little else but white lingerie, complete with garterbelts and stockings, a detached white shirt's collar with a long black tie around her slender neck, and bandages covered her left arm. Fake eyelashes decorated her round, heart-shaped face, and a round black hat with a rim adorned her golden brown hair.

She pulled her into the center of the dance floor, and while Tali tried to protest, the sub-sonics were already hard at work and changing her perception of the universe: the world slowed down, yet the music maintained its tempo. The beats resonated in Tali's abdomen, and she found herself swaying to the beat.

The girl jumped, and her brown locks hung in the air, suspended in time. Her smile was a mischievous heart, a promise of a sweet delight, but if and only if Tali would come closer...

Tali found the girl to be graceful, and beautiful, which was odd, because she wasn't really into girls. No, really! Father had told her he would not tolerate it, after all... And as such, she could never, ever admit to being even remotely attracted to the same sex, not like Zev, who seemed to be so... free, and unbound, despite being respectful of Hein's authority as captain.

They were dancing now, and the girl was moving closer and closer...

It occurred to her then that Zev and Lelia had never told her their clan names. How weird was that?

The girl pulled her into an embrace, and she felt the pressure of her fingers on her back, as if she was wearing nothing at all.

Tali responded by grabbing the dancing girl by the hips.

They swayed and twisted together.

Tali hated her suit so much. Even in a heightened state of awareness, she felt like she wasn't really touching the world around her, not truly seeing the air, not truly smelling the light, not truly hearing the perfume that came off of the girl's skin. It was a prison, a fucking cage, and she wanted to be let out of it for just a minute, and forget everything.

She unlocked her face mask, not caring one bit that she smelled of sweat, stank of anti-biotics and herbal supplements.

The girl's lips tasted like the red of strawberries she had once stolen as a child.

Another member of the girl's gang grabbed Tali from behind, and put his hands on her small breasts, then moved one hand to her abdomen while the other caressed her throat. She knew it was a man: she could feel his erection on her buttocks.

She didn't mind. In fact she enjoyed it. It felt so wonderful to be desired, for once, and not scorned. It felt so good to be wanted and to be touched so unconditionally.

It felt so good simply let go, and submit.

"Oh..." she moaned. "Adam..."

Wait

Adam?

No

Inside her head a figure with Jensen's face and the presence of her father looked at her in disgust and disappointment, and she realized how she was making a fool of herself. She tried to pull away, and succeeded, though the girl pouted at her longingly, like a siren begging a sailor not to leave for the shore, where she could never follow. Tali managed to stumble her way towards the DJs, reminding herself that she had business with them— important business!— and that Adam was counting on her, and that he was disappointed in her already and she didn't want to bring shame on her house—

She fainted.

~[h+]~

---

"The Panacea Dextro ought to stick for twenty hours," Tali heard Molly say from a million miles away. Her head hurt, but her back was supported by something comfy and someone was stroking her arm.

She tried to get up.

Bleargh, her mouth felt like sanitizer foam. At least her mask was back on, perfectly sealed.

She tried opening her eyes, and the harsh light charged at her retina with the fury of a million hungry Vorcha. Eventually her irises closed far enough to let her see without being blinded: she was in some kind of attic, made of wood — materials that felt so utterly alien to her — decorated with silks patterned after maps, or electronic schematics, or tigers, or dragons, or maybe all of the above. She wasn't sure. What she was sure is that there was a lot of hardware and wires here, and speakers. So many speakers...

The gang of bowl hats (with all seven members) was there, staring at her, sitting casually on cushions, sacks, and couches. The girl was laying besides her on a huge cushion that to Tali looked like an awful, frilly pastry.

"Are you okay?" asked the girl.

"You did not keep a panacea applicator on you," said one of the men. "Unwise."

"Most unwise," said another.

"You could have died," said one of the boys.

Their tone, save for the girl's, was so flat and even that she had no idea if they were genuinely concerned about her or were accusing her of something, and then there was that glare.

"I'm... sorry?"

They all smiled at once and said, "don't be."

"Just be careful," said the man.

"Wonderland is full of terrors, little girl," said a boy.

"And if you get lost..." said another boy.

"The monsters will catch you."

"Alright bitchesss~!" said the Lunarian in blue, with a slight lisp in his voice. "She's fine, so you can leave, now."

"We need to be alone..." said the Lunarian in red, with a slight lilt in his voice.

"...with the Quarian girl," finished the other DJ. "It's business time..."

"And it's not for your virgin ears! Bzzt!" the red DJ waved the gang away, and they left. The brown-haired girl blew Tali a kiss as she walked away, and she was thankful that she had her mask on to hide her blush.

She wondered which of the boys had grabbed her from behind, though. She hoped it was the tall one.

No, stop it! It was the music's fault!

And so, she was now finally meeting Alpha and Beta, both of whom loomed over her as she lay down, the Panacea isolating levo allergens and bacteria and keeping her from going into anaphylactic shock from that unforgettable kiss.

"Who... were those people?" she asked.

The blonde Lunarian rolled his eyes. "Oh pshaw. The Kubricks? They saw this movie poster one time and they've been dressing like the guy on it ever since."

"They never even saw the movie! Can you believe that?" asked the black-haired one, indignant.

"Nevermind the novel..."

"The novel would give them nightmares, honey."

"Of course, dear. Now, where were we?"

"Hmm... oh! Introductions!"

"My name is Alpha Blade..." said the blonde, blue shirted one.

"And my name is Beta Razor..." said the dark haired, red shirted one.

"We're Elerium-115!" they said in unison, and took a graceful bow.

Oh Keelah, they're so... feminine.

"We're curious as to why..." said Alpha.

"...You had this on you," said Beta, producing the Spookies' logo sticker, a grinning ghost with cool shades on.

"There's only one reason you could have this..." said Alpha.

"...but we need to be sure!" exclaimed Beta.

"What's the password?" they asked in unison, with mock severity.

Tali's eyes fluttered, trying to recall how it went.

"Muthafucka?" she muttered. What kind of password was that, she wondered? Pass-phrases were more effective.

"Muthafucka?" they challenged.

"M-muthatfucka," she countered.

"Muthafuckaaaaaaaaa~!" they laughed together, and threw their long slender hands in the air.

"Hallelujah! Spooky is out of that shithole of a planet..."

"And back into the corporate hacking biz!"

"Sticking it to the Man?"

"We can only hope! Tee-hee!"

"Hip hip?"

"Hm... Hur~ray!"

"Hurray!"

Tali vomited in her helmet, and the suction system immediately made sure she didn't choke on the liquid.

"Wow!" said Alpha. "Those suits really CAN do everything. I want one!"

"Oh dear," muttered Beta, clutching his pearls. "She's probably reacting to the sub-sonics leaking in the room."

"Well, put out a counter wave, then!"

Beta typed commands on a nearby console, and the speakers emitted pure silence, and for a moment Tali thought she had died.

The worst thing a Quarian could possibly hear was silence: it meant that the power was out, or that the engines were dead, or that the carbon scrubbers were clogged. If a Quarian didn't react to silence immediately, he or she was inviting catastrophe and death on the ship.

The silence sobered Tali up immediately.

"We'd just like to apologize..." said Beta, his voice ringing loud and clear for Tali's translators to make perfect sense of his speech.

"...But we haven't had Quarian customers in, like, years!" continued Alpha.

"Still, how was it?" asked Beta.

"We'd love to hear your feedback!" said Alpha, eagerly.

Those two were an eerily odd pair, Tali decided. "I'm uh, I'm actually here on an errand for Spooky. He sent you an email under the moniker RedFox?"

"Wait, what?! He sent us email?!" Beta glared at Alpha accusingly.

"Hey, don't look at me, I didn't... oh wait."

"What?"

"I think I sent those to the Spam folder."

Beta gasped. "You lying slut! You always wanted him all to yourself!"

"Hey! I told you we're just friends! You're the one who had to push him away by molesting him in his sleep!"

"Slanderer!"

"Slut!"

"Bitch!"

"Creep!"

"Excuse me?" whispered Tali.

"WHAT?"

"I need software packages for an Ono-Sendai Matrix III cyberdeck, and a Gibson m50."

Beta gasped. "An Ono-Sendai..."

"...for a Matrix III Cyberdeck?!" whispered Alpha in shock.

"He's back."

"He's really, really back."

"He's more than back. He's the new pink..."

"...which is the new black..."

"...which is the new thursday!"

"Oh, this is a momentous occasion..."

"Truly, it is!"

"And we owe him a favor..."

"...So let's give him our best and latest."

~[h+]~

---

"Alright sweetheart, there you go." Alpha handed Tali a data cube. "Inside you'll find Pulser v7.1, Drill v3.5, Traesto v1.2 (waaaaaay better than Recall), Decoy v2.1, Homunculus v0.8b (be careful with that one). Oh, and you've got Shield v4, Duplicator v8, Compressor v8, BACK-UPPER v2, Enemy Scan v2.5, Automapper v2.0, and of course, the inimitable, and totally awesome CRASH v1.0... made by yours truly. When you absolutely, positively want to say, 'fuck you, salaryman'."

"...Oh my! How much do I owe you?" asked Tali. She hoped she had enough platinum in her pocket. She had been told making a transaction at the Elerium-115 club would be more than a little suspect, fake chip ID or no.

She stared at her wrist: it was still implanted in her suit.

"Oh, no no no, like we said..." said Beta.

"...We owe Spooky a favor," finished Alpha.

"But we will, however, take 50 platinum for that Drone upgrade."

"Oh, of course," Tali reached for her pouch, but then realized she hadn't asked for any upgrades to her drones. "Hey! What did you do to Chikktika?!"

"Oh, nothing." said Beta coyly.

"Except clear enough memory to give him like, five sisters..." continued Alpha non-nonchalantly.

"...And replace his Beholder form with the Hua Po form."

"...What the bosh?!" Tali was outraged, and she activated her Omni-Tool. They had even changed the desktop theme to the blacks and oranges over a solid white background that was ubiquitous in Dosadi.

Alpha and Beta rolled their eyes. "Oh honey, you had your drone specced to distract and sting people. That stuff wouldn't have cut it against an SSC legionnaire."

"Or worse, a Manticore Mech."

"The Hua Po is much better for dealing with those."

"And if you're still mad, well, the original Beholder files are still in your main drive."

"So, Kaylee, was it?" asked Beta, leaning forward against the seat of his chair with an eager smile on his face like a child about to be told a story. "Are you new to the whole cyberspace game?"

Tali mumbled something angrily as she handed the 50 platinum over. Then, she answered the question: "I've seen the concept before in a couple of bad vids. I always thought it was an unrealistic depiction of what actual hackers did... what is it, exactly? Some kind of VR simulation system?"

"Not quite, sweetie." said Beta. "Alpha, take it away!"

"Cyberspace is basically a consensual hallucination between the operator (that would be you) and the machine. You enter an altered state of awareness through drugs, then electrodes stuck close to the Occipital and Temporal lobes input information from the computer (that is, your cyberdeck). Your mind interprets the data and builds a virtual world as an interface to interact with the deck's OS and whatever network it is connected to, legally or otherwise."

"The main advantage of this," continued Beta, "in lieu of using a VI with macros, is that the brain's perception of time is altered so that the operator can match the speed of any ICE that gets sent his way and with ZERO delay from any other kind of input device, like a haptic keyboard."

"It sounds like a Dream Catcher," said Tali.

"Dream Catcher's based on Cyberspace tech, actually," said Beta. "Only it's designed for dreams, and you can't interact with any system other than the bed."

"And Arcadia is as close as we've gotten to a Matrix: a shared consensual hallucination. You know, like in the movies?"

"Wait, how come cyberspace tech isn't more common?" asked Tali.

"A few reasons," said Beta.

"One: a cyberdeck operator is a nightmare on any security system, so there's plenty of motives to legislate against them."

"Second: Every operator's interpretation of cyberspace is different, especially when drugs are involved. It makes creating a common environment in which operators can communicate nearly impossible.

"Three: not everyone's brains are compatible with the tech. Some folks see nothing. Others go nuts. They won't know until they try."

"...Wait." Tali was a bit confused. "Shouldn't the second problem apply to Arcadia as well?"

Both Alpha and Beta scratched their heads. "Well, yes, actually." said Beta.

"We've been trying to figure out how Arcadia does it for years." said Alpha. "All we got are theories."

"We think they've got some kind of central regulating system keeping all of the Dreams compatible with each other... but we've been trying to hack into it for years. Haven't succeeded."

"Mostly because we can't find it."

Tali thought that was very interesting, and that she should probably share this with the rest of the group. She checked her clock: she had been here about... forty-five minutes.

"Uh oh," muttered Tali. "I should go, Spooky is waiting for me."

"Oh! Before we forget!" Alpha produced a Blue pill, a solid, opaque octagon. "Spooky will need this to get into the proper state of mind to surf cyberspace. Make sure he eats it."

"And if he needs to wake up in a hurry," Beta produced a red pill, a transparent soft gel shell containing a liquid, make sure he drinks this, otherwise he'll be blitzed for hours."

"And no alcohol!" they warned in unison.

They put the pills in Tali's hands, and she pocketed them immediately. Beta handed her another pill, a purple one. "And that's for you, darling. If you ever want to try riding cowgirl on the Ono-Sendai, that dextro mixture will send you there express."

"Um... thanks?" said Tali, unsure if she wanted to try it or not.

"Wait! I know exactly what your outfit needs!" shouted Beta out of nowhere. He ran — no, floated — his way towards a box of spare parts, and produced a pair of huge headphones. He put it on Tali's head, right on top of her helmet and her pink cloth hood. Beta squee'd, like a mother seeing her young daughter in a dress for the first time.

"eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee it's PERFECT! oh em gee oh em gee just look at her!"

"Settle down, honey, the girl needs to be on her way!"

"Aw..." Beta pouted. "You never let me have any fun..."

"And uh... before you go, can you do us a favor?" asked Alpha, his huge black almond-shaped eyes hiding an expression of sorrow.

"I suppose," said Tali.

"...Tell him that it wasn't his fault."

~[h+]~

---

"This is all your fault, you know that?" shouted Jensen.

"Hey, how was I supposed to know he was a cop?!" Spooky shouted right back.

Spooky and Jensen had leapt behind the counter of Phong's Tasty Noodles as the two mechs flanking Baofu fired at them. Thankfully, the mech's Renaud-Kerbrat SMGs were using beanbag rounds, and the thick mahogany barrier kept the two agents from being hammered down into submission at 1500 rounds per minute.

The bursts of fire caused the rest of the customers to panic and disperse, much to Jensen's relief. Hopefully, no innocent bystanders would get caught in the crossfire. Of course, the panic meant that the SSC would be coming soon, guns blazing.

One week, Jensen thought to himself. Just one week I'd like to go without someone shooting at me. Just. One. Week.

~[h+]~

---

Author's Notes: So yeah, big chapters are coming back. Hurray! No Codex Entries this time around: every new bit of tech got a fair amount of exposition in the chapter already. Unless I missed something? Hm...

Liathach is the name of one of the Torridon Hills that surround the village of Torridon, Scotland.

Yamaha GX1, Synton Fenix, Roland TR-707, and Serge Modular are actually music synthesizers used by Aphex Twin, not computers.

Spellcheck by WarpObscura (of Spacebattles) and Vandenbz