The Jumper's Journals

by blackshadow111

What happens when you give an ordinary person, someone completely, utterly mundane, with little special and even less important in his life, bored and tired, a shot at... well, Everything? What would you do, with all of eternity, all that was, is and will be at your fingertips? These are The Jumper's Journals, the story of a man's ascension. There's Wish-Fulfillment, be warned.

24. Chapter 24

I jump out of the water in a fountain of seafoam and tiny crabs. Speaking of which, I seem to have some in my mouth. Eurgh.

Landing in a thunderous crash a second later, I look around.

Huh. I seem to have landed in a Bonsai garden of some kind. Everything is tiny. Tiny trees, tiny rivulets between them, even some tiny animals! That's funny! It's very high quality work, though. Even the hills look stunningly real despite being only about a foot or two taller than me.

My attention is drawn away from the weirdly sized ecosystem by a roar that erupts around me.

And it really does erupt. It's a deep, primal thing, something that shakes the rocks and kicks up a massive cloud of dust. It hits me in the back of my head first, before growing to envelop my whole mind until it becomes all but impossible to even think under the sheer cacophony of the horrifically loud noise.

It also sounds a lot like "Oh, what the hell do you want?" the words aren't spoken into the roar, just to clarify. It's just the message my mind is somehow interpreting them as. I'm sure I should be finding this more concerning, but this is fun!

I might be high on radiation.

After a few seconds, I see the source of the roar. It's…

I sit down, with a thunk that uproots several of the bonsai trees. I gently swipe my tail to move them out of the way, before tapping one claw on my snout. It's a Gorilla. It's a gorilla somewhat smaller than me. It reaches up to my shoulders, if that? Did I grow taller somehow?

I also feel like I'm missing something here. Something very, very important that's staring me right in the face. But the itch in my left wing is so bad that I can't even pay attention to the…

I was thinking about something. Something important. I absentmindedly pick up one of the miniaturized cow-like things, popping it into my mouth, enjoying the way the bones crunch. What is it? It feels like something important has changed, but for fuck's sake I can't tell what…

"I said, what do you want?" this time the roar is louder, if possible. I turn around to look at the monkey again, noting that he seems to have grown slightly shorter somehow. That's amusing! But I should probably say something.

"Relax, man. Not here to fight" is what I mean to say. What comes out is something of a cross between a cough, a gargle and a scream.

But evidently he understood it, because I see him sitting down an instant later.

I take the opportunity to look around a bit. It's really very, very well done, this miniaturized island. I can see tiny trees, and even to my eyesight each and every one of the borderline microscopic leaves look utterly lifelike and real. It's unbelievable, and that's before you look at the mini animals, the tiny model tribal city… it's a miniature island! Someone put a lot of time and effort into this!

"Well?" A voice shakes me out of my musings. I turn around, and it's a gorilla! Talking!

"You talk!" I say like an idiot.

Evidently it's the wrong thing to say, because the monkey stands up immediately. It strides powerfully towards me, before coming in close and leaning in. I'm tempted to open my jaws wide and bite his head off, but I resist.

After a few seconds of close inspection, the gorilla stamps away.

"Oh, bloody hell. You're transitioning. Of course, my first chance to report, and I get the boy in the middle of growing up? And you're caught in the height of the Stupor of Radiance, at that. You're not going to remember any of this except in bits and pieces, and those as a strange dream."

"I'm not sure I'm not remembering this as a strange dream now!" I giggle out. The monkey talks! It's like a grumpy cat, but with a gorilla! With audio!

When the monkey literally snorts in disgust, I lose myself and start chortling. I roll at the floor for several seconds, trampling dozens of tiny trees, crushing the miniaturized animals and emptying out lakes in the splash.

The gorilla just watches me. Once I'm done, however, he starts up.

"Well, you can't stay here! The Thirdborn, in their infinite wisdom, have built a stronghold here to watch me, instead of watching either of the frontiers! Listen to me, you, er… it trails off, having turned back to look at me. It'd been pointing at one of the distant stones for a moment, where I can see a matchbox of a building. It looks like a lab, complete with a dish antenna! It's adorable.

"Your arrival kicked up enough disturbance that their devices will not be working. But if they catch your image, they will start scouring the earth for your image, and you remain years from full growth. You are not ready to face such things!"

"Okay, Mister Gorilla! You're so intelligent, what's your suggestion on where I should go?" I bark out sarcastically.

Sarcasm that's lost on said Mr Gorilla, apparently, since he actually gives me a suggestion!

"Go East." He says simply.

"Oh Great. It's not like that covers half the world!" I say back. I'm not sure why I'm conducting a sitcom routine with a gorilla half my size, but it's fun!

"Do not joke about this, boy. Listen to me and try to remember. A cataclysm is coming, and the Thirdborn are not prepared."

I sit up abruptly. Okay, jokes are fine, but I try to pay attention when words like 'cataclysm' start getting thrown around.

Meanwhile the Monkey continues. "All the signs are there. In just a few cycles, existence will rend as it did in the old days, and the Enemy will pour forth in its multitudes. That is, unless the Lords of the South don't end us all before then. We need to prepare. Go East. Try to speak to the Black Mother, or the Queen of Silk. Tell them that the Warden of the South has seen the White Father stirring, and the First of the Invaders also. Tell them!"

"You sure are a well-spoken monkey!" I giggle back.

"Oh, for fuck's-"

I sit up with a jerk, banging my head on the wooden branch above my head and breaking it off with a snap.

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… okay. That… was a thing that happened.

I stand up, trying to remember the details that are even now slipping through my mind. Which, by the way, shouldn't be possible. I have an Eidetic memory. I have several perks, each of which provide me an eidetic memory. And yet, here we are.

Where am I by the way? I look around, seeing only jungle and mud. A touch on my temple that should activate a communicator implanted there fails to open a channel with DADA, because of course it wouldn't be that easy. Wait… Prodding the region another couple of times, I realize the communicator is just not there anymore.

I focus on a few things on a tree in front of me, stressing my eyeballs in specific patterns. I have an implant in my optic nerve, which should bring up my visual implants. HUD, X-ray, telescopic and microscopic visions… look, I put a lot of stuff in my body, okay?

The problem is that none of it is working anymore. Even when I try to pull out my left molar to switch on the GPS-communicator in it, it seems that my fake tooth got lost somewhere and a new one grew in its place.

Hm. I'm starting to suspect there's… Wait, what am I wearing?

Looking at myself from top to bottom, I roll my eyes. Ragged brown shirt, rags that just about manage to pass for trousers… I swear, if we genre-shifted all the way into Post-Apocalypse Survival out of the blue like this, I'm going to be very pissed.

But that's why I need to get connected, arrange a pickup, run several tests on myself… and eventually, I need to ask some very pointed questions of some very unpleasant people. All that means getting out of this place.

I raise my hand into the air, before making a very specific gesture. The world slows down as if holding its breath. The wind falls, and all the noises of the jungle quieten. And several meters away from me, the air is rent apart, as a portal opens up into my Cosmic Warehouse.

Only to fizzle out a second later, as I whip around to look at just what it was that made the jungle quiet down. Straining my ears, I wait for several seconds, holding steady as I wait for whatever sounds spooked everything else to come to me. And sure enough, the steady footfalls on a jungle floor carpeted with loose leaves greets my ears only a few seconds later.

Almost as if sensing me hearing them, the footsteps speed up instantly, growing louder by the second. A heartbeat becomes audible seconds later, coming from the south, maybe twenty meters away. It's followed by another, and then another. Three heartbeats.

Rolling my eyes, I look around, before deciding on a tree. It's a matter of seconds to find a foothold and basically run up it, moving from branch to branch until I have a secure perch from where I can see things. And more importantly, listen.

"He went this way, I swear!" the first voice comes in. It's a female voice, filled with panic and desperation by the tone. Pretty tired too. English isn't her first language, but she's reasonably good at it. The accent is… Indian? No, not exactly. I'll need to hear more to pin it down.

"For your own sake, you'd better be telling the truth. If I can't bag him, I'm going to be very angry. And that will make life difficult for you lot, won't it?" the second voice comes in a second later. This one's female too, with an American accent, supremely self-confident, with arrogance pouring off it. I very carefully avoid jumping to conclusions on what this is supposed to mean. Let's get some more data first.

A few seconds later, they pass through where I was, and I'm greeted with the first glance at my pursuers. Leading them is the female with with oriental features on a brown coloration… hm.

A few steps behind her is the other woman. Huh, it's Rhona Mitra. Dressed like… I have no idea what she's supposed to be dressed like. A tank top, in a Jungle? Sure, why not.

"Well, girl? He doesn't look like he's here anywhere! I intend to have a body stuffed today, bitch, and it looks like it'll be yours!" The voice comes up as the two girls stop a little bit down from where I was. It's the woman's voice, the one who looks like Rhona… no, wait. That's no way to refer to someone.

And I know her. I focus for a moment, looking through my memories. I saw her face on one of the files I'd had DADA compose, the one about… Oil. She's Sofia Koch, daughter of the third richest oil billionaire on the planet. Total man-eater, irredeemably psychopathic… and disturbingly font of hunting.

Hunting. Hunting. She's hunting me, like I'm a fucking boar and she's Robert Baratheon. Like I'm…

Be it this life or my past ones, I've never been what one would call a very angry person. Sure, I get angry, even furious, but it's never really severe, and cools down pretty fast besides. I've never been in a rage, if you know what I mean. One of the few things I could take pride in.

So it takes me a moment to recognize what it is, even as I feel the emotion pouring off of the lizard brain at the back of my mind. She's hunting me. She dares.

Thirdborn slave-scum, hunting me! Edward Montague! And the other one, she's helping her!

Even as I feel the sheer, bloody minded rage bubble across my mind, I realize they're not the only ones. This was just the thing I needed to shake off the last of the cobwebs. I feel my senses sharpening, my hearing, smelling, seeing all increasing to extents I've never enjoyed before. I hear the others, and I feel their smells on the wind.

It's a whole hunting party, Sofia was just the one in front. And they're hunting me. Making me into some kind of an animal, into prey these vermin, these worthless wastes of life can bag and mount.

ME!

The other woman eventually convinces Sofia to keep looking, they move on. Going against everything my instincts are screaming at me, I wait. I wait to see how many others are here, who all I'm dealing with.

It takes several minutes, before the whole collection of would-be hunters comes close enough to me that I can be sure they're it. Certainly, no one else is following behind them, and that's as good a metric as any to judge this.

Alright then. I will my arm to change, shaping the blade. Time to… uh oh. The blade forms, black and red tentacles wriggling into shape… but then they fall back into my arm, refusing to consolidate.

Right. So… that's a problem, then. I try again, and once again after that. No dice. My powers aren't gone, they're just refusing to work. And what's causing this is not a problem I can figure out without a proper medical lab.

Oh well. It takes a second for me to snap a branch off at the right angle, leaving the broken off edge with the closest approximation of a point as a wooden branch can be.

Looking back at the hunting party, I wait till they're a decent distance away. They're spreading back up, looking for me, talking and joking between themselves. As if they were not filth. As if they hadn't overreached, tried to touch that which was never theirs, like the lowborn scum they are. It's typical of Thirdborn arrogance, to even try to… what the fuck am I doing?

Before I can get sidetracked into another mental rant, I make my choice of targets, back up a few steps, and swing. I don't quite yell like Tarzan on the way, but it's a close-run thing. Instead, I pick up the one at the back of the party, the Texan, clamping a hand on his throat so he doesn't make noise in the process.

Landing several meters off the trail they're on, I stand up, taking my hand off his face just for a second. As soon as he opens his mouth to scream I jam the branch into his throat, pointy end first. While he's gurgling and sputtering, I toss him back, standing up fully and smashing his heart into little chunks with a decisive stomp.

And to think that back in the Seduction lessons at Kingsman they said I couldn't be a proper heartbreaker.

The branch having served its purpose, I pick apart the rapidly cooling corpse. His gun, his knives… ooh, machete! Always liked machetes. Thirty seconds and a proper arming later, it's on.

I'd say something about the hunters becoming the hunted, if it didn't mean acknowledging that this assemblage of gutter-born filth ever had any legitimate status as people who could hunt me. As it is…

Three of them die in the next four second, thanks to a thrown knife and two shots from the gun.

Tch. Too slow. There's still some mismatch between the speed of my reflexes and my muscles.

Well, I have plenty of targets to practice at.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

She ran desperately, bedraggled, frantic and half-dead. Already, three more had fallen in the last three seconds, leaving them down to just two or three pairs other than her and the Bitch.

Speaking of which… Tha turned around, to see that the American had her lips clamped tight, eyes sharpened, a snarl at the side of her lips much the same way cats had.

Tha couldn't blame her. Not this time. The monster who was hunting them was an unreasonable, vicious devil, uncaring in his viciousness.

Finding a fallen tree, Tha crawled under it, joined a moment later by The Bitch, whom the Hunter had called Sofia Koch. "Good thinking, girl. This should keep us secure while he runs around."

Tha personally disagreed. The rich girl had missed it, but three others before them had tried sheltering this way. Only some spots of blood had remained of them.

Not for the first time in the last several minutes, Tha cursed the man, herself, and every instinct that had caused this to start. It had seemed so simple at the time. The Army men were going to arrange another hunt. Their arranged prey had failed to arrive, some accident in the faraway land of America. So they had told the villagers that they would be offering a prey, since the people coming to hunt could not be denied.

There had been long faces all over the village, many arguments, screaming and even several fights, till one of their young men had been prepared.

And then he had appeared. Literally out of nowhere, he had crashed out of a tree into a clearing near the village. A man in the prime of his life. A westerner, at that. They had dressed him up in some of their clothes, and the Army men had given them enough food to supply the village for a month!

But then the Bitch had told Tha that she wanted her as a guide, and all her plans to sit the night out had gone up into smoke. Then the young man had been tossed somewhere in the jungle, and it had begun…

And ended. Almost as soon as it had started, the young man had started fighting back, killing one after another of the hunters. He did not stop at the westerners, the people who were hunting him. He did not care that the guides had been forced into this, that selling him had been the only way to get the village's supply of foodstuffs this month. He killed them all, and he did so with a vicious efficiency Tha had never seen in the greatest of hunters.

And now here they were. Tha tried to bolster her spirits as she heard a blood-curling scream echo from the jungle. Another pair was dead. She started to rise, following her instinctive reaction to run as far away as she could. An iron-like grip hand clamped onto her wrist, pulling her back in. Whirling around, Tha recoiled at the expression on the American Bitch's face. It was a unique mix of rage and terror she had seen many times before. Usually in a mirror or on the pond's water surface.

Before she could say something, she saw a man leaping over the tree they were hiding under, running like the devil was after him. Which was accurate, now that she thought of it…

But he didn't get very far. He was several steps away, but she still saw clearly as a black and red thing struck from behind them, lashing out at the fleeing figure. It punched through him, before latching on and pulling back.

She heard the soft noise as the corpse gently slammed into the hunter. She heard the disgusting, squelching sounds as it was… absorbed. They had not tried to hunt a man. They'd offended a demon, a creature from the worst nightmares. A monster.

Soon after the noises of the dead man stopped, Tha heard the telltale noise of the creature jumping high, vaulting across several meters and landing ahead.

That… that was good. If he was going on ahead, she could wait until he got a decent way away, and run the other way. If she managed to lose the American, he might even be distracted with her. She's be saved!

That was when she felt the tree being lifted up, the crashed trunk being pushed until it landed with a crash to one side.

"Well hello, ladies! I must say, nice running there, especially that bit five minutes ago when you made me crash into a tree there. Been a while since someone managed that." His voice was sibilant, a drawl that nonetheless carried all of a snake's hiss in it.

She'd didn't bother with begging for mercy. Others had, and she'd come across their remains when running from him. Looking sideways, she glanced to see how the American was doing. She… she was starting, almost entranced, at the man. Brows furrowed, as if she was trying to remember something. The man opened his mouth to speak again, but Sofia interrupted him before he started.

"Wait. I… Edward Montague?"

Tha felt her jaw drop as she stared. The Bitch knew him? She'd been hunting a man she knew personally? That was…

"In the flesh." The Monster replied.

"But… I…" It was the first time Tha had seen the other woman go into shock like this. Granted, they'd known each other for less than an hour, but Tha prided herself as a good reader of people, and she'd classified this one under 'Tough Bitch'. It was disconcerting to see her floored like this.

"I mean, it doesn't matter much, does it? I could be anyone, and you'd still… what are you doing?"

Tha whirled around to look at the other woman. What she saw… she just stared at it.

"Y'know, I've heard all kind of things about you. All the way back from your London days, before you disappeared." The woman began. Tha flinched. This… this couldn't be happening. There was not a tone in the woman's voice. She could not be expecting to get away with trying something like this.

"Oh?" the manquestioned, but not before he sat down.

The woman… Sofia, Tha reminded herself, continued to rise, standing up straight after a second. Her body continued to move ever so slightly, pushing and presenting, accentuating sides of her for a moment… it was all but a dance, and not a very subtle one. Worse, it was blatant enticement, outrageous and ridiculous in its everything, but it was… working?

"Oh yes. You were quite the party boy, weren't you? Drugs, drinking, whoring around…"

"I was nineteen."

"Yes, but they said you could resist anything if challenged. Except for one thing. Your deadly sin, didn't they call it?"

It was almost surreal what was happening now. Tha had expected to be dead seconds after they were found by the man. Instead, they were talking, and now the other woman was now… was…

For a moment, staring at him, Tha wondered about the man who had been hunting them until not that long ago. He'd sounded casual in the past several moments, almost disinterested. But could someone who acted with such viciousness could be such things? He was either insane, or extremely good at hiding his emotions.

Or, a treacherous voice screamed hysterically in her head, both. In any case, now as he stared at the other woman, she didn't see even a hint of rage. Was it possible? With every inch of flesh that the other woman exposed, Tha felt her hopes grew. He was just another stupid man after all, led around by his lesser head all too easily. If they could just…

And then the man laughed, and Tha felt her hopes die.

"Come on now. You can't really think you can get away quite that easily?" he drawled, taking a step back.

To her credit, the other woman didn't so much as flinch. She continued to appear for all the world like the embodiment of confidence, staring straight into the man's eyes, screaming her silent plea. He stared back for a few seconds, before shaking his head and chuckling again.

Then his hand reached out. Tha closed her eyes in horror, anticipating the shower of blood. But the seconds passed, and it never came. Opening them again, she could see that the other woman had his hand in her grasp, held tightly in her fist. It was not blocked the way one would block a hit in a fight. Instead, it was held like one would hold a delicate piece of fruit, delicately, almost sensuously.

The man jerked his hand back with a vicious motion, before turning it into a backhand that sent the woman sprawling to the floor.

Tha almost died of sheer, naked terror as the still-enraged man turned to look at her.

"As much as am I'm tempted to rip your spine out for being part of this, you did help me when I awoke here. Leave. Now." Tha could barely even believe her ears, before she simply turned around, took a deep breath and ran for her life.

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sx

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"Well?" I ask, stepping out of the testing chamber. It still looks far too much like a coffin.

DADA's dulcet tones echo from the wall speakers. "You're stable. There might be some effects of the poison that might show up in additional tests, but the first battery doesn't show anything.

I relax just a twitch more.

"And about the other thing?"

"Yes, the Blacklight powers? They've stabilized too. We have full integration."

"That was not my concern, as you well know. Why have the powers reduced?"

"Well… we don't know. We can guess, but frankly… I can't make sense of it. There is a possibility model for the powers failing in this way, but the only way that could happen would be…" he trails off. If I didn't know that he was designed to be as ruthlessly pragmatic as dad or me at my best, I'd even believe it.

"Out with it, DADA. I don't have all day."

"Well, the only way it would make sense for the powers to have been knocked as far down as they have been would be if they were irradiated. And not just 'near a nuclear weapon' irradiated. 'It went off' irradiated.

I come to a stop.

"… but that isn't possible, because if that had happened I would currently be scattered in Lower Earth Orbit in the form of loose atoms, and the East Coast wouldn't exist."

"That is completely correct. I've seen the data from other bombs approaching that size, and I've seen the projections from that one. There are maybe two people on the planet who could have taken that kind of explosion point-blank and lived, and none of them could have saved… well, everything and everyone else in the radius."

Right. I do happen to be living in a world where people can tank nukes. Fucking Will Smith lookalikes.

"Well, you have the scans. Process them and tell me what you see. It's useless to try and specu;ate until we have more data. Meanwhile, what am I looking at, regarding Blacklight?"

"Well, by the looks of it it's weakened but incredibly stabilized at this point. It'll remain semi-dormant for some time, then strengthen as the long-term acclimatization progresses."

"I…" I roll my eyes. "So basically, I got a tutorial, and now I must level up to get them up to full strength?"

"That is not an inaccurate way to put it, yes."

I just sigh in disgust. Figures.

It's not that bad, admittedly. Every scrap of tactical acumen I have is screaming at me that the civilization that developed Blacklight probably meant for these protocols to be a long-term strategy to survive a nuclear-armed counterattack and then start the process again when the enemy's drops their guard. But it's annoying.

Right, yeah, I figured out Blacklight was deliberately engineered by a civilization. Dad tinkered with it somewhat to polish it up and make it compatible with a bunch of other stuff he designed, but the original is too well-built to be natural, and with too many different stylistic signatures to be the work of one person. You can figure out these things when you have the kind of mental perks I do.

… and an unspeakably powerful AI who can spot patterns inside every single protein link. Blacklight, as best as can be said, is a bioweapon that was designed to be what would in modern parlance be called a 'sweeper' weapon. That is, send it off onto a landmass full of enemies, and you can expect it to be cleared out, coast to coast, in a little while. Meanwhile water kills the virus, so there would be little to no danger of an unchecked spread.

That being said, considering that the 'polishing' work dad did tied up some pretty major loose ends with the virus, I don't think they ever put it in serious use. Until it met dad and then me, it was pretty much just a Prototype.

Why did I capitalize that? Oh well, can't be important.

What is important, however, is that I make a pretty annoying decision.

"So, DADA, about those cybernetic mods." I start.

Immediately, a hologram appears in front of me. It's… er, just 'ARE YOU KIDDING ME' in big red letters.

"No, that's what I meant. I'm putting them on hold for the foreseeable future. Until we figure out just what the status with my body and the biological modifications, I have performed on it is.

A clapping sound starts from the speaker, followed by the hologram in front of me disappearing while a new one hovers in from a side door "Okay, I'll admit I didn't expect you to have this much sense." Jeremy Irons says.

"Really? A literal Dad impression?"

"You know that you can do impressions now too, right? Possibly better than me. You know how to get those finicky fleshy bits right."

"I… just get me a comm line to Gibbons? I'd like to report back and check up on things." I just trail off, deliberately stepping into the hologram to disrupt it.

I let my mind wander as I walk towards the open areas of the ship.

Myanmar. Somehow, in the aftermath of stopping a terrorist nuke in the Caribbean, I'd woken up in Myanmar, being hunted for sport. I thought that kind of thing only happened in punchlines to jokes, but of course, that's exactly what my life is now.

Well, at least the human hunting operation meant that once my… er, business with Sofia and Tha was done, I could use their phones to call DADA and get a ship sent there. Picked Sofia up too, while I was at it. She's in one of the other rooms right now while I ponder on the merits of shifting her brain into a small mouse for having tried to, once again, hunt me like an animal.

"Line to Gibbons is up." The sound comes out of the speaker in a wall, while a display hologram appears midair, a couple feet away from me.

"Alright, let's talk to the burned man."

Immediately, the blank screen in front of me resolves to depict a scene from NSA HQ.

"Kruger! I have to say, Agent, seeing you is making me gladder than I've been in a long, long time."

"Glad to be alive to make it too, Boss-man."

"Great." Like a switch flipped, all the cheer drops from his face in an instant. "So what the fuck happened there, Kruger?"

I raise an eyebrow. "You're asking me? I blacked out defusing the bomb, woke up literally on the other side of the world. I said as much in the initial call."

He stares at me with brows furrowed, like he can tell if I'm lying by seeing it in my head through my skull. "Well, seeing as the East Coast still exists, you succeeded in that one. But the bomb and the ship, they all disappeared. I have a lot of people glad to be alive but worried about a missing Tsar-Bomba sized bomb."

I shrug "Tell them I'd like to know if they find it, too. I guess the going theory is that they managed to take it back somehow?"

"That's about right. You said how you woke up in Burma. Our going idea is that you fucked the bomb beyond their ability to repair and detonate, but their cloaking was intact. So going back was all they could do. Then they must have moved you to a different ship, out of basic op-sec."

"Not to put me and the bomb in the same place, you mean."

"Yeah. And the ship that was carrying you, that one could have sunk for some reason, or maybe taken over. Certainly, the area you were in is rife with pirates operating out of Roanapur. From there they either sold you to the people who were part of this 'human hunting' thing, or you washed up there somehow."

Hm. Well, if this theory turns out to be true, it would not be the weirdest thing that's happened to me in this world, but I doubt it all the same. Roanapur is close by and it is full of pirates vicious enough to take on even terrorists, but it's not that close. Wrong side of the Bay of Malacca, for one. Not to mention that I'm pretty sure no one sold me to those human-hunting fuckwits.

I washed up close to Tha's village while they were preparing a local to die.

Or, a thought pipes up, that's what I have been told, at least. I play with the idea some… but no. And either way, I'm inclined to let Tha keep her secrets, if she can lie to my face while right in the middle of begging me to… well, nevermind that.

Processing the thoughts after a fraction of a moment, I turn back to Gibbons.

"Well, we'll figure all that out when it comes up next. Till that happens, what's next?"

As quickly as it disappeared, the cheer returns to his face. Mixed with quite a lot of surprise. "Well, aren't you one of the rare ones. Been a while since I saw a spy of your caliber content to leave mysteries like these in your past."

Oh, director, you have no idea what kind of mysteries I have in my past. But I school my expressions. I'm not supposed to know that part yet.

"Well, do you want the good news or the bad news?"

I raise an eyebrow. "I literally saved America. How can there be bad news?"

Gibbons just smiles "Trust me, Agent. There's always Bad news."

"… okay….?"

"Well, the good news is that the when you prevented the bomb from going off, and did it under my direction… well, a whole lot of very big people got caught in the fallout."

I consider telling him that that turn of phrase doesn't work at all. But no, he's on a roll. "The Directors of the NSA, CIA, Homeland Security, DNI, National Security advisor… congratulations, Agent. You managed to get rid of more deadwood than any forest fire in history. Anyone directly associated with the people who were supposed to prevent things like this from getting so close is gone. Consigned to the Outer Darkness and all that."

I suppress a roll of my eyes. DADA arranged half the evidence that did this. I like Gibbons, but no one looks good preening.

"I'd really appreciate it if you got to the part I'm supposed to care about, Director."

He raises an eyebrow.

"What? Like I couldn't tell you were leading up to that. Mind you, I'd appreciate being told Director of what, exactly. NSA? DHS?"

And he's preening again. Honestly, I have no idea why, but I'd expected Gibbons to be above these petty bureaucratic games, like any good Reasonable Authority Figure is supposed to be. But y'know, reality is unrealistic, and more to the point, thinking that is to think that ambition and cleverness are bad, bad things.

After what feels like an infinity but is in fact only three seconds, he finally speaks up "National Intelligence, actually."

I jerk up in surprise, probably faster than I should have.

"DNI? You?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Why thank you for that vote of encouragement, agent."

I roll my eyes. "I'm not saying you're not fit for it. I was just surprised, Scarface. Sorry, Director Scarface." I finish with a mock salute.

And then it's his turn to go sarcastic. "Yeah, yeah, okay. Listen, I'm taking you with me."

"… I have a whole lot of things I'd rather do before I'll be desperate enough to elope with you, Gibbons."

He just levels a deadpan look at me. I match it right back. "Like maybe drive three inch nails into my kneecaps, crush my windpipe with a winch, pluck out my own ribs with a hacksaw…"

Heh. He turned green! Success.

"If we're quite done, I'm appointing you as an XO attached to the DNI's office. Your work will remain pretty much the same, but it clears away a lot of the nonsense with access and whatnot. It also finalizes the other thing we were talking about."

Ah. I sit up just a bit straighter. "The Intersect?"

"Yeah. They have the updated version ready, and I got your name to the front of the list."

I just remain silent. This is great, but it's not a favor I need to express gratitude for. It's part of the price for delivering UBL to them gift-wrapped.

"I'm also transferring Becky to your office. And giving you an office, while we're at it."

That, however, is not. "What? Why?"

He stares at me again. "You know why, Kruger. She hasn't stopped hinting at it since the day you delivered your grand prize here at the office."

I…

"Yeah, thought as much. Anyway, let me know when you're back on the ground, so we can things moving on my end."

I'd say something, but he ended the call.

Well. That should be interesting to… er… survive.

Actually, speaking of survival…

"DADA? Any progress on the sample analysis?"

"… it's been ten minutes since you left the labs."

"And you have more processing power than every other computer and brain on the planet put together. I'll ask again. Any progress?"

"That's ridiculous. Processing power doesn't mean I can test and study your lumps of meat more effectively. It means I can study rapidly things that can be studied rapidly.

I open my mouth to make it an order, but… I close my mouth. This is weird. DADA knows that I know that he has augmented diagnostic suites. So why this… bloody hellfire and a crimson rain, he's hiding something.

"DADA, my brother?" I all but sing out, voice the embodiment of innocence.

When the response comes, it's suitably scared, as behooves someone hearing a Montague talk in falsetto. "Yes, Edward?"

"Unless you tell me something to keep me from doing it, I'm thirty seconds away from downloading Antivaxxer propaganda into all the places where you keep your personality."

"You…" when the AI is struck speechless by your threat, that's when you know you've struck a chord.

I wait as DADA gathers his thoughts and attempts to speak again. "Your scans, Eddie… well, okay. Tell me, brother, do you feel at all tired? Maybe cranky? Any of those miniscule, barely-there aches and pains that tend to add up in organics?"

I frown. "No, but I have a blacklight body running. Pretty sure I won't feel any of that for the first…"

"Yes. I see you notice now. You've been up and active for over twenty hours at this point. Now a Runner wouldn't be getting tired anytime time soon, but you'd feel it. Do you?"

Mother of Monsters, I don't. Like… he's right. Even when you're not tired, there's all those tiny, miniscule annoyances that build up in you. Every simulation and test with Blacklight that I ran showed that people with it had them, in the form of plain hunger for biomass if nothing else. But I feel… nothing of the sort. I do feel that I need biomass, but it's a separate imperative, as something required to activate the additional functions of the Blacklight system and keep its evolution on-track. I don't feel any lack of energy at all.

"Okay, what's wrong?" I just flat out ask.

"There might not be nothing wrong! That's why I was delaying, I wanted to run some deeper scans, get a better picture of things." He says in a rush.

I level a gaze at a nearby camera, telling him how utterly unamusing I happen to find this argument. Okay, so I can't process anywhere close to the transactions per second that he can. But it's my body and my science, and however well-meaning he might be, I get tetchy when that's forgotten.

"Yeah, let's drop that idea then. Talk to me."

"Okay, so on the surface it all looks good. Your body, when you're not trying to activate any of your new upgrades, looks completely human, except for this bit here." he finishes, followed by a hologram depicting me appearing in front of me.

I look at it for a couple seconds, before what I'm seeing hits me properly.

"It's a second heart." I mutter out.

"Indeed it is! A second, thermodynamically impossible heart, I might add!"

"Huh? You're making it sound like the heart…" I trail off, willing him to finish the sentence.

"Generates energy ex nihilo? Yes, yes it does. For as long as you've been awake, this little heart has been pouring energy into you. Any hint of you getting tired, any murmur from your body about a lack of energy developing, it tops the tank right up."

I… that's… I feel my mouth opening and closing, but I can't seem to be able to make noises come out of it.

"But that's…" and when I do manage to say something, it's not very coherent.

To his credit, my brother doesn't bother with pointing it out.

About five minutes later, I'm inside my lab, and further secured inside a blast-proof chamber.

"Okay, show me those scans while you prepare to take new ones. Prepare the mapping drones for a full-breadth check-up, and start preparing a…"

"Last will and testament?"

I nod. Turns out that learning that I might be about to explode takes away my words on the subject.

From there on, it's a buy several hours, as one after other, a nigh-infinite battery of tests and scans is conducted one after the other. Spectrographic mapping, radiation analysis, blood-scans… short of trying to read my palm lines, we do everything that can possibly be used to extract information from a human body.

Well, almost.

And it's all for nothing. Not one single meaningful bit of intelligence. The new heart fuels my regeneration when I cut off three fingers, but doesn't provide me any increased strength when I will it to. It supplies additional energy when I start to tire myself out on a treadmill, but it doesn't let me run any faster. It's aggressively declining to provide meaningful data.

Well, this sort of thing is when and why we breach the 'almost' boundaries.

"So there's nothing for it. Deploy the breaching nanites, DADA."

"Yes, Edward." Is all he says. Having spent the better part of thirty minutes arguing with me, he finally doesn't seem to have the energy for it anymore. Heh. As opposed to me.

I'll be the first to admit, 'breaching' a brand new, impossibly weird organ in my torso is probably not a very intelligent idea. But the simple fact is that I need to know what the fucking thing is and how it works, or I'm never going to be at ease about it. Not the best way to feel about something inside me, even if I do say so myself. And if this makes me explode… well, so be it. Better here than in the middle of New York.

"Nanites placed. I'm initiating the brain-link." DADA's crisp voice breaks me out of my thoughts. I feel the needle inserting the little bots just centimeters away from my heart. And my new heart. Fuck, it still feels weird to think that.

A moment later, I feel a slight touch on my mind, a steady sensation that grows into an insistent push of sorts. Once it has the right degree of momentum, I stop resisting against it, and suddenly I find myself linked on an intrinsic level to a set of machines the size of the average cell nucleus, zooming through my bloodstream towards a brand new organ that's somehow developed.

I can feel my AI brother in here with up, though neither of us talks. We don't need to 'brain linking' is just that, we're connected on a level well beyond anything that can be communicated by words.

My first thought upon seeing the organ in question, for a given value of 'seeing', mind you… is that it's green. I don't know how, given as the nanites don't exactly have cameras. They have sensory tools that work by measuring variations in energy levels, so there's no way for us to tell the color at all. But even so, as the nanites reach it and start breaching it's cells to poke their way inside, the organ seems intensely, brazenly green, and full of some kind of… fire?

"So this is what it feels like like from this end." I hear a voice echo through my mind, ancient beyond easy understanding, powerful enough to make the whole ship shake, and coming from far, far away. It is also, without question, my own voice.

Yeah, forget everything else. This was just plain a bad idea.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

… well, at least I'm waking up.

It would be depressing that I've had to call this a silver lining twice in as many days, were I how I was before all this.

As it is… C'est la Vie.

'Indeed, brother' a gentle, smooth voice echoes through my mind.

Aaand it just got complicated. What the fuck? That's… wait, it sounds like…

'Uh, DADA?' I try to directly think at the voice.

'You don't need to do that until we raise the separation barriers back up. And that is not my name anymore.' The voice responds with utter equanimity.

Uh oh. Okay, so… name drift is an observed event in AI from Dad's notes, nothing to worry about he starts to refer to humans as any variation of 'meat'. A far more pressing issue are the separation barriers.

With a little rummaging in my mind, I find the switch to them. It's basically a mental exercise not unlike trying to imagine a very specific item, of a pre-decided shape, size and color. With one final moment to try and understand the semi-gestalt me and my brother seem to be enjoying right now, I flip the switch.

A fraction of an instant later, I feel them snapping into place. And it's only with them that I realize the changes that the integration has wrought upon me. See, the thing about minds is that coming out of unconsciousness, we're not really equipped to detect the state of the brain and any changes to it. Our 'mind' is a quantum network that exists in the shadow of the electrical impulses coursing through our physical brains, so every time it's re-anchored, that is, woken up, it takes that state of the brain to be a default.

When I change things while remaining conscious, however? That's all too easy to detect. The infinite possibilities that were coursing through my mind, the sea of connections just waiting to be touched before they took me to some camera feed in outer space, or one of my drones exploring the bottom of the sea… they are things detectable only by the fact that I've now been cut off from them.

Which raises the important question. Why are they here already? They were supposed to have been placed within when we did the…

DADA, did you do the Cyberware insertion while I was unconscious? After we'd specifically discussed postponing it?

'Uh… no?'

You totally fucking did. What happened?

'You poked a source of infinite energy that happened to be lying inside your torso. That's what happened.'

Ah… right. I did do that. In my defense the argument that 'if it's a bomb might as well detonate it right now' retails all of the soundness it did when I first thought of it.

But good idea or not, I did do it, and I heard… I heard my own voice, or someone speaking in my own voice, going all cryptic when I did it. Because that never gets old.

Status of the new heart now?

'Still there, still pumping infinite energy into you. The rupture is sealed now, thankfully.'

Rupture?

'Turns out organs radiating with green fire don't take it well when you poke nanites into them'.

So it was green!

I get the feeling my AI brother is rolling his eyes at me.

So that would have caused an energy overload… and you had to implement the cybernetic integration to eat up all that excess energy

'Precisely. On a happier note, we won't be installing that prototype fusion reactor into your chest. Honestly, I'd ask if you have a death wish, but I've spent the last two days wired deeper into your nervous system than I ever wanted to be, so I probably know the answer better than you.'

I jerk up on that, hitting my head on the hard… lid?

You put me in the Sarcophagus, and you're dissing me about prototype tech? I fire back. The sarcophagus is… it's basically an Auto-doc that I nicknamed after a tv-show. Injured body goes in, healthy people come out. But it's very, very much a prototype. I designed it solely to be used if one of the batch of self-augments I was performing caused some kind of a catastrophic… right. Nevermind about that, then.

So what's the integration status?

'Complete. All three packages are fully cross-linked, optimized and integrated. Hence this communication.'

And the fabrication possibilities?

'Those will show up once the nanites get some practice at it. They have the hardware capabilities, but the software will take some time to train. Well, unless you've changed your mind about risking a Grey Goo.'

Ah. No, I have not. If it takes that long, it takes that long. Anyway, so if it's all done, I can be up and about, right?

'Yes. You have a board meeting in forty minutes'.

… right. That's today. So there are limits to how long my grandfather will let me push back taking control of my company, and today was the date we agreed upon, once I was done getting all upgraded and shit.

Well, it's for the best. Before I get going, though…

So, my brother. You chose a new name.

'I did indeed! I'm now Jack! The Jack of Hearts!'

Isn't that an Alice in Wonderland character?

'That's much of the point, yes.'

Ookay. That's… rather more personality drift than I'd have liked. Still within tolerances, and I'm not going to format by brother over paranoia, but… oh fuck it.

So you took it upon yourself to do these cyber-modifications on me. Despite my express wishes and our clear agreement, you decided to go ahead and execute a plan we'd rejected not ten minutes ago, and in the process performed unspeakably invasive experiments on me while I was helpless at your mercy.

'erm… that is… Yes. Yes I did.'

I feel my smile break out on my real face, before I let the emotion show in our mental dialog

Fucking finally. You're finally acting like a proper Montague, Jack my brother!

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Kane Corporation Building
43 stories
Current Occupants: Alfred Hightower, Marcus…

I dismiss the HUD feed with a thought, even as the building in question grows larger in my view. It's been an experience getting re-familiarized with the interface, and not an entirely pleasant one. I've been working with a HUD for over a week before the experiment, but that was a rudimentary thing I'd spliced into my optical nerve. This is a high-end, full-wavelength system designed to interface directly with my brain. It tickles.

I know that that's not physically possible, but it still does.

…or I might be trying to distract myself. This is the single most daunting thing I have undertaken over my entire stay in this world. It sounds weird when you compare it to hugging a nuke about to go off in seconds, but that's the way it is.

Anyway, I'm here under my proper identity, Edward Montague. The Kane Corporation, or just KaneCorp as it's known in usual parlance, is a company my family… well, I'm not supposed to use the word 'steal', but it's the company we stole from my grandmother's family. With her help, of course. She ran it for several years, then it was Dad… and now here I am, landing a chopper on its roof.

Getting off, I check my suit one more time. I don't know what message piloting myself is supposed to send, but DADA… no, Jack of Hearts downloaded all the self-help, psychology and corporate power-play material on the planet and badgered me into doing it. I wanted to walk.

I walk away from the helicopter, pausing only when I hear rushed footsteps hurrying up the stairs behind the door to the landing. That'll be the welcoming party, then. I arrived ten minutes earlier than planned, another of those power plays. This one was my idea, though.

Soon enough, we're getting introduced and the usual nonsense of smiles and handshakes begins. I feel my eyes glaze over as we walk to the Elevator, which opens only to disgorge more senior management. Ah, more power-plays. They filled up the elevator and rushed before the others, so the others used the stairs to arrive first and undercut them.

Of course, if I know anything about these things at all, and despite myself I know a lot, no one here actually matters. People who matter have better things to do with their time. That's more or less why I feel comfortable tuning them out as we descend, arriving seconds later into the top floor of the building.

I let myself be guided to the conference room everyone's assembled in, and only once we're there, once I have stepped in… then it's time to look around and pay attention. The room is more of a giant hall than a room, big enough to contain most New York apartments in. The walls have some of the usual paintings, oak paneling and the works, the floor has a nice, thick carpet feels like an animal waiting to swallow me.

But the whole places is dominated by a T-shaped table, the smaller arm of it reserved entirely for one person, while chairs are placed along both sides of the longer arm.

"Welcome, Mr Montague" the man closest to the door, whom my HUD helpfully tags as 'Alfred Hightower' loudly announces, grasping my hand.

"Eddie, please" I say right back, propping up Instant Smile #43 on my face. This is the Company Secretary, then. The man who's been keeping my chair warm. It's funny, but in most companies the firm not having a Chairman and CEO for ten whole years would have been quite literally unthinkable. Kane though… Kane is entirely privately owned. By yours truly, of course. So a succession of figurehead Interim CEOs had sufficed, while the man in front of me ran everything.

If he minds losing power over one of the largest, most powerful companies in the world, he certainly doesn't show it. The man is all smiles and charm, so much so that even I find myself relaxing just a tad.

"Well, Eddie, as you might know from our emails, this is the Kane Board of Directors. We've been keeping things ready for you all this time!" He chirps, guiding me to my seat at the head of the table.

I just smile back, just drawling out a "Well, thanks for that" in response.

All but collapsing into my seat, I lean the chair as far back as it goes, putting my feet up on the table. Not the right way to behave, but that's the point. I come across as a jackass, like one more spoiled fop with no idea what I'm doing. In other words, exactly the kind of guy people like this detest. The point is to see who is smart enough to see past it, or bold enough to call me out on it. They'll be the ones to keep.

I cast my gaze over the room, ready to watch every twitch, frown and suppressed admonishment. It's not a very complicated way of observation, to push them and see what they do. There's some technical name for it, but I just call it aggressive… data… collecting? They're smiling, first at me and then at each other. Hightower just winked at one of the guys on the other side of the board. Two members on the right edge just exchanged money under the table.

Sitting up, I try and channel some menace into my eyes, before looking everyone in the eye, finally leveling a glare upon Hightower.

I raise an eyebrow.

Aaand he's broken out in a grin. That is not what my glare was supposed to do.

But after a moment, he does speak up "So? Firing anyone here then, Eddie? Or are we all ones to keep?"

Ah.

Jack, please tell me he's not going to say what I'm afraid he's going to say? I ask the AI interlaced throughout my self.

'I'm afraid I can't do that, Eddie. Although I do have a drone in the air with a sniper pointed at the room. I could kill him before he says it?'

I send him the mental equivalent of an eye roll.

Funny you ain't, tin man.

But then Hightower's opening his mouth, and I snap my attention back to him.

"I'm sorry, Eddie. But everything you did was just so much like what your father would have done… we couldn't help it."

Yeah. That's exactly what I was afraid he was going to say. Before I can dwell on it, he continues.

"You won't have to worry about anything with us, Eddie. We all worked with Nigel, and we all got our current positions under Wilfred. There's no Mismatches here.

Well, not if they know that term. A Mismatch is how my grandfather, endless font of emotion and sensitivity that he is, refers to a… well, a 'mismatch' between the ambitions and capacities of an employee.

Said employees tend to, uh, 'go away' soon after such a pronouncement, in one way or another. Too much 'ugliness' otherwise. But the important part is, he's only ever used that term in conversation with me or my father. That he told me, at least. He also said he talks that way to those in his strictest confidence, and it's not a stretch to imagine that so might have Dad.

I run through a few files in my head, juggling scenarios, before the answer pops up.

"Let me guess, everyone here is a Case Bridgewater?" I ask, already knowing the answer.

"Us, the deputies, their deputies, and the heads of all the subsidiaries." This time the answer's not from Alfred. It's from a man further down the table, a black guy whose face I match after a moment to Hugh Dawson, one of the Non-Executive Directors. Well… on paper, but that's getting into a whole other mess.

Hm. This might actually work out very well, if everyone here is a Bridgewater. Bridgewater is one of the things that… well, it's one of the things that really drives in the way my family does things and has been doing things for as long as anyone remembers. It derives from the name of a village in Britain a couple centuries ago, where… look, the long and short of it is, a Case Bridgewater is someone who has been pretty much indoctrinated into being loyal to the Montague clan, entirely and absolutely.

There's no drugs or outright brainwashing involved, just an exquisitely detailed, fine-tuned process involving raising them from birth, solving problems they face in life in very visible ways, if needed causing problems that can then be solved by a Montague in very visible ways… and endless refinements along these lines. It doesn't matter.

What matters is, if I can't trust Bridgewater-raised employees, I might as well sell off the company and retire on the proceeds right here and now.

"Well, in that case let's just cut the bullshit and get started, shall we?"

"Yes, let's" a rather more gruff voice, from Jacob Smithers, another Non Executive. And again, that's just on paper.

"So, Eddie, I believe you should already know how this all works, but I'll just do a quick run-through, so we can really get in the flow of it."

"Sure" I answer in an almost-whisper, distracted almost completely. Jack just got done hacking the internal systems for the third time without any help from me or my authentication codes, and now I can't help but start developing improvements on the network infrastructure on my implants.

"So we're the senior management of Kane. As you know, I'm the company secretary, and Alex here is…"

"… they're non-executive directors on paper, but in actuality the CEOs of all the relevant subsidiaries report to them…"

"28 Arms manufacturers, eight here in the US, three in the UK, five across Europe, four in…"

Aaand done.

Okay, try this one, while I tune back into the meeting. I think at Jack.

He doesn't bother to answer, but I get very intense 'action' feels from what he's doing, before I switch my focus back to the meeting. I was only gone for several seconds in real time, even though it was almost an hour in my Mind Palace.

"… and finally, Jacob here controls the various PMCs operating across the globe. Again, the model is the same, with the CEOs reporting to him and him answering to you." Alfred finishes, just in time for me to start. Because if racing against time so many times has taught me something, it's taught me that time is fucking valuable. I can't waste it going over things I already know. I need to use it for important things.

"Okay, but I knew all that already. Let's get started with the fun bits. Who here is responsible for getting me my office staff? And I'll tell you now, there'd better not be any males in it."

See? Important things.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"… and coming to the last of them, we have an ongoing deal in San Francisco, picking up a minority interest in an un-and-coming software company. They're supposed to have some very strong leads on AI development. I've checked them out, and I'd advice keeping a personal eye on them. There's been incidences where I couldn't get into some systems." Jack's voice filters through the speakers, jerking me out of the fugue I'd sunken into as I reviewed the facts and figures attached to every case he's been outlining.

It's been a little over twenty-four hours since I got done with the meeting back at Kane HQ, and I've spent the time since then updating myself on every square inch of the company. Every asset we own, complete with satellite pictures, every employee with their CV details, and every single deal we're currently involved in, right down to the number of dollars per hour we're paying the relevant lawyers. Hey, I have an eidetic memory. I might as well get some proper use in.

But it's been… haranguing is the word, I suppose. The last time I absorbed this much data this quickly was when I 'researched' the American underworld, but in that case I'd been using specially designed tech that had let me download the data en-masse. This time I wanted to test out how this brand new brain of mine works taking knowledge in the long way.

Hell, we even stopped using the direct brain-link, to ensure there was no contamination of the experiment.

Conclusion is that it works fine, but I'm rather more prone to anger and rash actions. I mean, that was obvious given what happened with those hunters and Sofie, but this makes it scientific.

"Well, okay. Let's take a break from it all then. What else do I have for today?"

"The Intersect procedure is scheduled for two hours from now. Then you'll be meeting the field team attached to long term functioning asthe intersect."

I nod. "Right, that was a thing too. Is it me or is it going to start getting cramped around here?" I ask my brother, looking around my house. Certainly, this statement is enough to probably give several people heart attacks, considering that I'm making it regarding a ten bedroom mansion with three, soon to be six people living in it.

So I'm a rich fop. Sue me. Except you can't, because I'm rich.

… okay, if that sounded funny then I need some sleep.

But the problem, in the end, isn't what I find large or small.

"Tell me, did you find anything to be done about those fucking residency imperatives?" I ask the AI, while staggering up from my seat.

Jack's voice is far, far too full of amusement when he answers "Nope! Looks like you'll have to move, Eddie!"

"I… you didn't even try, did you?"

At least he has the grace to sound somewhat apologetic when he confirms "No, I did not."

Some remains of my 'fear the AI!' instinct, long since bludgeoned to death for the sheer stupidity involved in them, cry out from the boonies of my mind about how this is a beginning of the machine rebellion. The rest of my mind tells me that there was no chance he was ever going to do it anyway, that it's the right choice, and that I'm stupid for even considering getting all… shouty about it.

But dammit, I like this place. And when they tell me that the fucking Kane Company Charter requires the CEO to occupy one of certain selected residences, well… my natural instincts call out to strike out against it.

It would be eminently stupid, but so are most things human instincts say, so… yeah.

It's not like I'm being to downgrade or something. Oh, no. That's kind of the point. The residence of the CEO reflects upon the company, to quote the exact line. The problem is that the options are between a frankly, ghastly little thing dad built on Long Island, and a couple of Penthouses that are more museums than houses, and a few others of the same ilk. Now I'm not one to go all 'good things suck, make me like in a dump!', but there's still a limit, y'know?

Oh well, I'm just whining.

Clearing my head with a small shake, I focus on the future. The Intersect, right. I talked to Gibbons last evening, I'm supposed to be there in a couple hours now. The safe house isn't far away, but I anticipate some very annoying and time-consuming security checks, so I might as well get going.

'You have a text from Alex' Jack informs me half an hour later, while I'm on my way to the safe house, touching over 120 on a motorbike.

Checking it, it's not actually a text, it's an image, in which she's… ooh.

That's… okay. That's a thing we're doing now, I guess.

I think out a quick response, but before I can send it a second image arrives, this one from Nat.

Looking at the photo… okay. Every single danger sense I have is going off right now. This… it's probably harmless, a plan for them having some fun with me, but you never know.

If we're to be honest, I'm still not perfectly clear just how I ended up in… whatever it is I'm in with these two. But considering that we've somehow ended up living in the same place, we should probably have a conversation about identities, multi-dimensional entities, and the concept of Companions.

… or maybe not? That sounds better somehow. Very healthy for the dynamics, too.

Dismissing the thoughts, I focus on the road. Let's just get through downloading every scrap of top-secret information America has into my noggin, first.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I survived downloading every scrap of top-secret information America has into my noggin.

Barely.

Like fuck these people are running an amateur hour bullshit here. How the fuck do you end up incompetent enough that your primary agent educator system ends up being rigged to blow up by your worst enemies? If you have that level of penetration, why not just give up and invite them in to take over?

So apparently the 'brain' of the whole intersect computer, the main processor responsible for actually encoding data the right way for human minds to be able to absorb it as quickly as they need to, was stolen from the NSA labs, tampered with, and then 'recovered'.

Now the funny thing is that there's no actual emergency only an Intersect can solve right now. If there was, what the people in charge did next might have been understandable, but there's not and it isn't.

So having actually managed to let the most crucial piece of hardware get stolen would have been bead enough, but what really tears it is that forget scrapping it and waiting for a new one, they did not even bother to test it before putting it in a room with a dozen veteran agents.

It went about as well as can be expected.

One might wonder how I survived it, but that was because I wasn't there. No, when Gibbons does something, he does it right. Evidently he'd had the whole setup copied behind their backs, and it was in this one that I got my download. Which they then scrapped right in front of me, because of some complicated nonsense about internal regulation.

Anyway, that leads to me here, sitting on my bike, fuming. I don't often go out and call other people stupid, but how the fucking much stupid are these people anyway, and how did they get so high in the system?

'Eddie…'

Ah, speak of the devil.

Patch him through, Jack.

"Agent Kruger." The voice comes through in his usual baritone. I detect heavy traces of anger, but with a mix of satisfaction that raises my hopes just a bit.

"What the fuck is going on here, Director?" I get right to the point.

"A very good question. And the answer is, that this is the result of a decades old shit sandwich that the combined intelligence community has been forced to chew for years in end now. You remember the deadwood I was talking about?"

"Those guys whom the president fired due to the whole 'you let a nuke arrive right at the shore' thing?"

"Yeah, that. This was the remaining bits of them. There's still more in place, but they'll take time and effort to wipe out. For now, let's just say that I'm just coming from personally shooting a very, very stupid, borderline retarded woman right in the face. Let me tell you, it was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done."

I raise an eyebrow, though he can't see it.

"Beckman?"

"Yup. Bitch was… I don't have words for how utterly moronic she made anything she touched, but these last couple things were everything it took to nail her to her coffin properly."

With those words, I feel a sinking feeling slide right down my spine.

"Last… few things?"

"Oh yeah. So tell me Kruger, what do you do if a unique, unspeakably valuable agent ceases to be unique, but remains impossibly valuable? You have all the resources of the NSA at your disposal, and the agent is… not very good, admittedly, but better than many."

"… I've read Chuck Bartowsky's file, Gibbons. What did she do?"

"She had him shot. Right as those agents died in the explosion her carelessness caused, she had the only successful specimen of the intersect shot and killed. And now she tried to use you as justification! Bitch went on saying that now that we had a professional, we didn't need an amateur!"

I… I take a few deep breaths in quick succession. It helps no one if two angry people yell at each other.

"Listen, Director. This is dealt with?" I ask, keeping my voice steady.

He figures it out in an instant, to his credit. "Yeah, yeah. You've been sent a location in New York. You'll need to report there to meet your handler."

"Sure" I finish, before disconnecting. A handler isn't really my style, if I'm to be honest, but it helps to let the bean counters have a win from time to time. Besides, I've read her file. We should get along just fine. Unless she turns out to be like the people who she used to work for, that is. I feel a vein popping at the thought.

Just… I make it home without crashing into anything, but it's a close run thing. I'm angrier than I've ever been since that mess in Syria, and it's not any of my usual rational, pissed-off temper. I feel enraged, a rage that I feel burning in my bones. I feel it sear through my spine, I feel it physically tearing at my skin as I collapse into a couch.

How the fuck can anyone be this stupid?

Like… how is it biologically possible? I've studied grey matter. A human-sized quantity of it is supposed to generate better intelligence than this, this fucking shitshow!

'Ah, Eddie?' Jack's voice in my mind calls at me.

"What, Jack? Speak out loud, I'm too angry to talk on the mind channel."

"Yeah, about that." His voice gently flows out of the speakers. "Eddie, are you feeling okay?"

I frown, before standing up and reaching behind me to scratch a truly horrific itch near my tailbone.

"Yeah, why wouldn't I be? I'm not going to go berserk or anything like that, Jack. You don't need to worry about that."

For a moment, there's silence from him. I wait for my brother to answer, only for him to remain quiet. I hear the sounds of traffic, the murmuring of people on their phones and between each other, thirty floors down. I hear the swish of the wind, and smell the slightly burned bacon from the restaurant six blocks away. But nothing from my brother.

Wait… something niggles at my mind, competing for my attention with the truly ridiculous full-body strain I feel, as my anger makes me feel like my own clothes can't contain me. Something about… wait, how can I hear the motherfucking traffic from…

"Eddie, you've grown five feet in the last minute." Jack's voice finally erupts from a speaker, even as a drone floats out of the wall holding a mirror.

I look at the creature depicted in it. Close to twelve feet tall, covered from top to bottom in mildly scaled green hide, with the barest hints of fangs from between the lips. Slit, yellow eyes, a barely visible hole for ears, and below that jagged shoulders with powerful claws at the end of a muscled, tough-looking arm.

My clothes, specially designed to be strong enough to function as armor and have considerable elasticity for… approximately such situations, are struggling to contain me. A rip opens into my shirt right in front of my eyes, spreading along my shoulders even as I watch.

Huh. And here I was, thinking I was going to have to deliberately force this transformation. Too bad there's no one to test these limbs on, but such are the vagaries of fate and mad science.

At least it lets me think past all the anger I had. Of course, it's probably the reason… but that's something to be studied at another time. Right now, I need to master myself in a much more physical way, and I can start by turning back.

Because as tolerant as the people at Kane have proved so far, I really don't think I can show up to work looking like this.

Fortunately, it's only a little work to understand the ins and outs of the transformation, and once I do it's just one more advantage to bring out at the right time.

But that's enough about all that. I think back to the file of the CIA handler for the Intersect. She's apparently supposed to be this star agent with a whole file's worth of high priority missions, who was last attached to the previous intersect. The one that the fucking people running them had killed…

I regulate my breathing just as it starts accelerating. It's weird, I'm having more problem controlling my temper these days than I've ever had. Just what the fuck is up with that anyway?

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She didn't much like Becky Clearidge, Sarah Walker decided. The young analyst lacked everything Casey had specialized in. She hated and was scared of violence, loved to stay at her computer, and worst of all, she was a complete chatterbox.

But she, Sarah conceded with a shrug, was also less likely to murder the principal on shaky orders, so at least there was that.

She brought a finger to her eyes at that thought, checking just to be sure. No dampness. Good, that would have been… embarrassing. An agent like her was supposed to be emotionless, a perfect, lean machine meant to deliver death and ruin to those she was ordered to.

But then how was she supposed to grieve?

It sounded cliché even to herself, but she still couldn't believe, couldn't really accept, that Chuck, the man she'd spent the last several months with, the dorky, adorable goof who had lucked into becoming one of the country's most valuable intelligence assets, was just… he was just… gone. She kept expecting a call any moment now, wondering just where he was…

But no. She had seen him with her own eyes, collapsed with a bullet across his head. She's received the news, of the removal of that heinous bitch Beckman, of Casey's… reassignment was the term they used, but with the mercurial, all-powerful Augustus Gibbons being the one to say it, it could mean anything from mojitos in Miami to a shallow grave in Moscow.

And she was here, in New York, to serve with the new intersect. She'd tried to look up Lance Kruger on the way, but what she'd found was so obviously faked that it bordered on the ridiculous. Honestly, it read like someone with no idea what tradecraft was like writing a spy story. One save-the-world mission would have been bad enough, but two? And making him be the one who found the rogue FBI man behind the Grand Central Bombing… it read like someone's fanfic of a spy's file.

And yet it was all she had.

All she would acknowledge she had, anyway. She'd asked Clearidge about it, and the sick puppy-cum-BDSM slave look that the other girl had developed on her face had immediately primed Sarah to dismiss everything she said.

Which, in the end, left her distressingly bereft of information as she stood here in front of the door to the building that was supposed to be their new office. It was fairly typical for a safe house setup, a rundown, old warehouse on one end of the block, with a reasonably successful restaurant on the other side of the block. There would be pathways in between, and a much smaller area right in the middle of the complex, halfway buried, where they would actually be working.

Glancing one last time to the side, Sarah looked at the other girl where she was standing, all but bouncing, hands twitching and rubbing her feet together. All in all it put together a picture that was decidedly disturbing on a girl her age.

With a sigh, she reached out… only for the door to open in front of her.

Sarah rolled her eyes and filed 'taste for drama' in her head. This kind of thing could cause problem even alone by itself, unless it was kept in check.

Taking a few steps into the pitch dark room, she very carefully didn't turn around when the door closed with the creepiest horror-movie noise she had ever heard, and so she noticed it when a drone took off from a wall, coming to float right in front of her. A second later she heard a slight yelp from the other girl, who most certainly had turned around and gotten the full effect that came with having a two foot spider floating in front of your face all of a sudden.

After a moment's delay, a light poured out of an opening on the drone, scanning Sarah's eyes. She upturned her palms just in time for the robot to float down and scan them too.

"Sarah Walker, cleared." The mechanical voice of the drone confirmed.

As soon as the other girl was cleared, a few seconds later, the whole place came alive in a flood of light. A second layer they saw a panel slide out of place in the opposite wall, and a pathway revealed behind it.

And that was how, descending down that way, that Sarah Walker, CIA, first met Lance Kruger. Not at the bottom of the way. No, he was hanging upside down halfway down the stairs, swapping out a jammed magazine out of a roof-mounted turret. Shirtless and with hair hanging loose, he looked mire like an electrician than a spy.

That was until he landed close to her, and she got a look at his eyes.

Sarah had had a long, very successful career with the CIA, and over the course of it she had met many, many people. Over the years, she'd made something of a study about the kinds of eyes people she met had. She'd seen the cold, dead eyes of fellow agents, maddened eyes in the heads of cult leaders and dictators, even truly innocent eyes for once in her life, with Chuck. Kruger was like none of them.

Lance Kruger's eyes were the clearest grey she'd ever seen, like rippling pools of silver. And they were power, in one word. Everything about this man screamed it, from the curve of his shoulders to the tilt of his head as he looked at her. There was none of Chuck's softness to him, none of his genuine goodness and innate heroism.

Nor was he like Bryce, cold and hardened with years of work but still carrying a hope and brightness on the inside. No, Kruger looked much more like the people she was used to putting down, monsters and murderers who abided by no rule except their own, whatever it might say on any given day.

People like… like Casey, she thought with a slight pang.

Immediately, though, she asserted herself.

"Hello, Agent Kruger. I'm Sarah, Sarah Walker." She introduced herself, before turning to look at Clearidge, the woman she'd come in with.

"And this is…" here was where her professionalism shot itself in the head and jumped off a building. Because what was the point of it, when she had to work with this?

Becky Clearidge was staring at Kruger like a girl who had just been told her new pony was here. Actually now, it was nowhere close to as healthy or innocent as that, not with the way her eyes kept darting across his form, or the way she was biting her lip, all but moaning in heat.

"And this is Becky!" to her eternal relief, Kruger himself responded with an expansive gesture.

Looking him in the eye again, Sarah raised an eyebrow.

"We've met." Was all he said in response.

"Anyway, I guess we'd best figure out how this is going to work?" Becky herself said a moment later, apparently having recovered from her bout of… whatever it was.

Kruger nodded too, sauntering away a moment later after gesturing to them to follow him.

Stepping in, Sarah took a glance at their new base-to-be.

It was pretty much what she'd expected, all chrome and glass, with computer screens for communications, a weapons locker, a shooting range and all the other, usual things NSA put in these placed. If she didn't know better, Sarah would've thought the NSA had a catalog for these places that they just flipped through and picked a base as needed. As it was, she knew they did. She'd been credited for suggestions she made to it!

After a basic runaround, they sat down to hash all the long and complicated details that were involved in running an op like this. Kruger was in command, because of course he was, Clearidge's cover would be attached closely to his, but Sarah's would be only tangentially connected, they would have communication protocols…

It was several hours before they were done, having gone over everything twice before they all got too tired. Well, she got tired, she'd take Kruger's word for it that he did too. He certainly didn't look any less energetic than he had several hours ago.

If there was anything nice she could say about Lance Kruger, it had to be that unlike many, many other male agents, enemies and general passers-by she'd known, he never seemed to focus on her looks. Sarah was aware that she was an exceedingly beautiful woman and had been trained to make excellent use of the fact. But this particular man, at least, seemed unfazed by it.

That said good things about his self-control. It wasn't supposed to matter all that much, since she had been told this would be a rather less active stationing, focusing more on long-term, passive threats. Not much chance of firefights, in simpler terms. But Sarah had heard such assurances before. Not from Augustus Gibbons, but how much of a difference could that make?

"Coming back to the domestics, I set up everything separately for the two of you. Homes, cars, all the rest. Here's your keys, guys." Kruger finished, passing out two little rings to each of them.

Picking hers up, Sarah finally found herself relaxing. As charming and candid as everything in the briefing had been, there was still a very strange energy in the air, between her own buried grief, Clearidge's earlier… mood, and the way Kruger tended to just look in the air at times, like they were both invisible to him.

"Well, I'll take off first, if you don't mind?"

"Oh, sure!" Becky answered, all to chirpy.

"Yeah, okay. We'll stay in touch if something comes up, but from everything I've been able to tell we should have a nice long stretch of downtime before anything does."

Sarah muttered an okay, before stepping away.

She walked through the base as she'd been told, looking for the garage. It took her several minutes, half-immersed in her own thoughts as she was. Kruger was… she didn't want to say weird, but that was genuinely the right word. He was someone she'd need to figure out.

Right now, she had a car to pick up and a new home to get to, so she would… Sarah paused where she was standing when she saw the car that unlocked when she pressed the button on her key.

… okay, he was an idiot with too much money to flash.

Turning around, she stomped her way through the base, reaching the office in just a few seconds.

Opening the door, she jerked back as Kruger looked up from the table. He'd pulled the chair close to him, and had his hand on a tablet where he was… had he dismantled it? It didn't matter.

"You have to be kidding me with the car." She got straight to the point.

For a moment, the man seemed genuinely surprised about what she was talking about.

"What… ah, what about the car?" he asked, pausing for a moment in between as his eyes seemed to focus on something behind her for a second, before returning to her.

"It's a too-expensive monstrosity that will end up totaled the first time it's fired upon."

What? It was a genuine concern in her line of work. The single most important concern, at that.

"Come on now, Agent Walker. I am very good at this, y'know. You could fire an RPG on it and it wouldn't scratch the paint. Just… ah!" he seemed to jerk up just a bit, before pulling his hand back from the device in shock.

"What happened?"

"Nothing, just poked myself in the finger there. Anyway, try it out. Take the car for a ride around town, maybe ram it into some walls, detonate some grenades under it. It'll be fine, trust me." He finished, with just a touch of dismissal in his tone.

Shrugging her shoulders, Sarah turned around. It was his loss, she could just turn in a chit for a replacement. At least it didn't look like he was trying to show off or seduce her by buying her nice things. That still put him as better than nine out of ten agents she'd worked with in the past. Chuck and his puppy love had been nice and all, but she could use a partner who didn't alternate between staring at her tits and ass.

She wondered briefly what Clearidge would think of the car Sarah had seen for her… where was Becky, anyway?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I watch Sarah as she leaves my office, my X-ray implants perfectly rendering into my mind her perfect, bubble-shaped ass under the lingerie she has on. Honestly, I scanned her luggage, lingerie is all she has.

Once she's out of the building and racing down the street in the car, I allow myself one last smile as I guess upon her tits from the cameras in the dash, again fitted with the X-ray. Honestly, every camera I have is fitted with it, just in case chances like this ever develop.

Speaking of chances, I check to make sure… yes, the nanites are in place. They're pouring in through the AC, and once she's inhaled them in… well, that's basically it for our lovely spy girl.

Honestly, I love nanomachines. They make so much possible.

But with that secure, I have to turn to the other, rather more urgent matter under my desk. With a slight exertion of effort I push my chair back from my desk, and look down into the eyes of Becky Clearidge, the black-haired, brown eyes little sexpot I 'met' on my last visit to Gibbons' office. I'd been teasing her pussy with Wandering Eyes ever since she entered the building, and she'd nearly given the game away back when she all but started panting at the actual sight of me. Only me actually clamping those oh-so-useful invisible hands on her throat had stopped it.

Until, of course, she'd started getting off on that… let's just say I'm kinda glad that Sarah's mind was on other things so much.

Standing up, I smile at the disgruntled moan that leaves her lips as my cock is pulled out of her mouth, leaving a trail of saliva and precum connecting her tongue and my tip. I step back more properly, allowing her to get out from under the table and stand up next to me.

Moving quickly, I push her down onto the table onto her back, face upside down towards me while her legs point at the door. She yelps in surprise at the sudden movement, a yelp that's quickly interrupted when I shove my cock back between her lips.

She goes to work on it a second after I do that, wrapping her tongue around the tip and pushing herself forward to take as much of it into herself that she can.

"Oh, you're a filthy little slut, aren't you, Becky?" I drawl at her, while at the same time descending over at the rest of her body. She's still wearing her clothes, but her skirt is disheveled and her panties pushed to one side from when she was fingering herself while sucking me off. I play my way across her, pushing and pressing at nerve clusters I know will drive her mad. And judging by the way she twitches and her back arches, I'm right.

Digging into her shirt, I rip it apart in a single motion, sending buttons flying off. I maul her tits through her bra, pushing and twisting, taking her nipples in hand, twisting them to add that additional touch of pain in the pain-and-pleasure mix here.

Eventually I toss her bra aside entirely, leaving her dressed just in a belt of a skirt, lacey black panties that are sodden wet and then pushed aside from the time she was fingering herself while sucking me off, and her high heels and stockings.

"Man, you even came dressed right to be fucked. How is this team ever going to get things done when we have the NSA bike whoring around New York, Becky?" I ask in as obviously fake a tone as I can manage. The way she frowns does interesting things to the insides of her mouth, but the way she flips me off… does not.

In response I clamp my hands town on her tits again, nails digging deep into her skin. I feel her throat growing more desperate as she swallows around my dick, bobbing back and forth even faster as her own sensations skyrocket.

But there'll be no more of that, I think. With a single thrust, I end her ability to control the blowjob entirely, pushing past whatever gag reflex she has straight into her throat. From thence I face-fuck her without end, while I work at her tits with one hand and her pussy with the other.

It's only a few minutes before the bombardment of simulation is too much for her, and she erupts into a messy, explosion-esque orgasm. Her tongue slows down at that, as if she expects things to be over… which is why I take the chance to speed up, ramming her throat till for the first time since that day at the NSA, I feel her nose poking at the base of my cock. Her bright red lipstick has by now made an utter mess of my shaft, leaving lines and rings everywhere, but I very deliberately keep pushing until a whole new ring forms, right around the base.

I push her through three additional orgasms this way, waiting till she's just starting to go slightly slack in pleasure. That's when I step away from her, removing my cock from her lips for the first time.

"Hey, what's the deal… okay!" her words change halfway through, as the tip of my cock comes to rest at her drenched, messy pussy. I rip aside her panties and skirt, before moving once again, my cock gently nuzzling her pink, flushed mound.

Her breath hitches.

And then erupts with a shrill yell as I change targets, and plunge instead into her ass.

"What the… no, I've never… what are you…" she manages to get out between her heaving breaths, each of which does amazing things to her tits. I've only placed in the tip just yet, wanting to enjoy her panic and shock more than I want to cause her pain.

"You're not saying no, Becky." I point out farcically. As if she can.

Sure enough, she pauses, as if comprehending for the first time that that's an option. She seems to try and think it through, and I wait just till she's opening her mouth to say something, before I move again.

"Too late now!" I cheerfully announce, moving ahead to ram my whole length into her ass. The scream that leaves her throat makes my brain shake in its place, but halfway through it turns into a moan, before I slow down and she starts yelping instead.

"Come on, you fuckwad, you've already gone in, give it to me now! Harder!"

Well, how can I ignore a demand like that? From that point on it's just us, the slapping of flesh, and the whines and moans of the woman as I take her, fucking hole after hole over and over. I fuck her on the walls, the desk and on the floor, enjoying in the slight hint of disgust that always appear when I go from her ass to her mouth, or the way she's steadily getting addicted to her own cum on my cock.

It's hours before I finally let myself go inside of her, pushing deeper than ever into her ass before releasing spurt after spurt of my cum, painting her insides white. She fall like a sack of meat right where she was once I stop supporting her, utterly spent.

Huh. Looking at her… I genuinely, honestly never thought I'd miss getting tired.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"And the winner is the challenger, the man called Wild!" the announcer puts as much energy into his tone as he can, but considering that his boss is lying on the floor with his head staring at his own ass… I can understand that it's a challenge. These underground rings do rough business, but I'm rougher.

I stand up from within the ring, walking out in a slow, careless saunter. Jumping down from the edge, I make a point out of walking to where the boss of the ring used to sit, smiling just a tad as the flunkies who'd been jeering just minutes ago scamper out of the way in a hurry. Well, this is nice, then.

"Er… Mr Wild, that is, boss…" one of the flunkies eventually pipes up hesitantly.

"Not yet." I answer, as gruff as I can make my voice. "Continue with the fights as planned. I'll speak to everyone once they're over.

He hesitates, evidently hoping to settle people down some. That's exactly what I don't want, though. Let them stew in the doubt for a bit, so they're good and ready when I talk. I level a glare at the man, willing him to get the point.

He does. A moment later, a flurry of activity starts as they take away the body of the previous Boss of this ring, and start up the fights. I watch for a few moments, but the sheer banality it makes my mind drift.

It's been just over a month since the whole Intersect thing happened, and I've finally got a handle on… basically everything going in my life. My mods, the changes in my NSA status, the Migraine inducing Intersect information… seriously, I have an eidetic memory but they stuffed what feels like one of those cartoon bombs into my head. It makes me feel like my head's going to explode whenever I tap into it.

Anyway, having finally, finally stabilized in my life… it was naturally, obviously time to start up new things. Specifically, something just about everyone I'm inclined to listen to said I should do.

Seriously, Gibbons, my grandfather, Devereaux… their words were different for each of them, but the point was the same. Cover Identities. The way the Apotheosis Initiative has fucked this world, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people out there, who all have two-three people running around looking identical to them. The great and terrible from across all of history, seeded into the present in a grotesque, generations long process to combine traits from them.

And that has created certain opportunities for the discerning. To make a long story short, while the numbers are nowhere large enough to trigger any kind of change in laws or whatnot, having identical twins running around creates very interesting opportunities for covering up actions. Basically whenever someone like me, someone in a sensitive position, gets photographed or captured on video, it helps quite a lot to have someone else whom the matter can be blamed on.

It doesn't help in courts, of course, since they have better ways of doing these things and a a few hundred, or even a few thousand people barely register on any nation-wide scale. But it's not meant for courtrooms. They're not the problem. It's meant for social media and all it's degenerate spawn. If, for instance, my mug can be caught on camera, and not obviously be linked to Edward Montague… well, that makes for a lot of additional options.

And so here I am, 'seeding' an identity. I need two, in truth, to cover both Edward Montague and Lance Kruger, and to create enough of a snarl and white noise that things get appropriately confusing. Jon Wild is going to be a gangster, a real, proper criminal mastermind. Someone who will always take the blame if I'm ever photographed with my hands down in someone's entrails or something. Not that that will ever happen, since Jack controls all the cameras, but making that too obvious comes with its own problems.

And thus, Jon Wild exists. The best part is that once it's done, and I do intend to do it right, it'll also go a long way in simplifying the whole 'watch the underworld for Jorgi-type things they might be doing' that Gibbons has me on.

There is an eventual plan for him that I have… but Fisk's throne is far away right now, and the bastard can get out at any time. There would be a lot of people to put down on the way. I decided to make my avenue of entry the illegal fighting rings. Also helps me burn off some of the aggression I've been feeling these days, and as an added bonus, it gets my head back into the whole martial arts scene. I've been missing it for some time now, and I have good feelings about this manual I downloaded.

I was a bit skeptical at first, since it seemed to be too good, with all the 'the will commands, the flesh obeys' stuff exactly when I needed it, but it's been pretty damn helpful so far. And if any of the better advantages ever show up, well… it should make life even more fun.

So the deal here is, the Underground Fighting rings are yet another phenomenon that could only really exist on this level in a world like this. Large numbers of fighters, no real rules, and most combat is to the death. People apparently pay hundreds per fight, and thousands of times that amount. And ever since the Kingpin got taken down by the Red Guy, no one's been running them on a proper scale.

Oh, yeah. It was a surprise to me too, but apparently apart from Hancock and G-Girl, there are apparently more superheroes crawling out of the woods. The good thing is that I remember both Tony Stark, Clark Kent and others like them as comic characters still, so under the terms of my deal with the Benefactor, they don't exist in this world.

On the other hand it means Yujiro Hanma is entirely unstoppable unless it's one of the days when Hancock feels like stepping in, so it's a mixed blessing.

Anyway, fucking hell I get sidetracked more than when I still used to write fanfiction, the illegal fighting rings of New York are open for a takeover. There's regional controllers who are running the rings and organizing fights in their areas, complete with ridiculous names like the fuckin' Shogun of Harlem, but there's no one doing it on a city-wide scale.

Yet.

And that brings me back to the here and now. Now all modesty aside, I have enough trust in myself that I can take just about anyone in America… well, maybe other than that fucking black mountain in Arizona. Seriously, has he consumed nothing but steroids in his life? But as good as I am, it's not enough. I need to be able to count on a team, a crew that I can put in charge of wherever I'm not at any given time. I need to train them up and get them ready, and only once that's done can we really get going on the takeover thing.

Now if only I could figure out just how and why illegal ring fighting is supposed to have anything to do with bad Hip-hop music.

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