It was early in the morning when Phoebe opened the front door of the apartment block she lived in and stepped out onto the snow covered sidewalk. She pulled up the zipper of her winter coat all the way and put the hood over her head, the air was biting cold and a strong wind was blowing through the streets.

With fast steps she walked down the sidewalk to the next tram station. Phoebe never had to wait for the tram if it was on time, she had been taking this route for years and she had the exact timing down. The doors slid open and she stepped on in, on the inside of the tram it was no less cold than on the outside, but at least there was no wind. After sitting down near the door Phoebe relaxed and closed her eyes, she hadn't gotten nearly as much sleep that night as she had wanted to.

When the announcer said the name of Phoebe's destination she opened her eyes again and stood up, a minute later she was walking on the snowy sidewalk again.

She said to herself: "Can't even keep the sidewalks snow free… Mayor Scrooge strikes again."

She was now in the city's office district where skyscrapers were the dominant type of building. Phoebe was walking towards such a skyscraper, this one in particular wasn't tall enough to stand out but not short enough to be remarkable for that either. After walking in through the front door the keen eye would notice that this inconspicuous skyscraper had less than inconspicuous security.

Phoebe walked up to a door that had a whole array of biometric scanners and two armed guards beside it. She routinely entered her codes and let the devices scan her hands and her eyes. After her identity had been confirmed, one of the guards gave her a friendly nod and opened the door for her.

She rode up an elevator to about the middle of the skyscraper. As the doors opened, Phoebe's workplace came into vision. The entire floor was one big room and didn't have a single window. There were huge servers standing out in the open, dominating most of the room. There were a few desks scattered through the room, some were empty and some had people sitting at them.

No, Phoebe's workplace wasn't ordinary in any way. In fact, it wasn't even officially a workplace. Phoebe worked for a private, that part was important, intelligence agency, it didn't have a name because it was an intelligence agency that was still truly secret and thus had no outward appearances to make.

Phoebe hung her coat onto a rack on the wall. Below her coat she was wearing plain black clothes that looked very practical but also had a casual look to them. Phoebe was averagely tall, had brown hair with occasional blue and red strands in between, her eyes were green.

Just those green eyes were now scanning the room for a specific man, Gerald, also known as Big G. He was the one who did most of the IT related things, not because he was the only one who could do it but because he was the one who could do it best. And he made sure to make it known to everyone that he was in fact the best. Phoebe had found him to be an insufferable genius type of person, fortunately the genius part took priority most of the time.

A few moments later she spotted him, which was quite easy, seeing that he was wearing a shirt that had "Big G" written on it in neon letters. Contrasting the expectations set by his nickname, Gerald was a tall and very skinny man, not unlike a stick figure. His hair was short and blonde, his eyes were blue. Usually Gerald was quite cheery but today something seemed to deeply trouble him. When he saw Phoebe walking towards him he got up from his chair to meet her half way.

With a hand on the back of his neck he said: "Something very bad happened."

Phoebe just raised an eyebrow, signaling him to keep talking.

"Someone somehow got into our database and was searching for… something." He quickly explained.

Phoebe froze in place.

Gerald continued: "I don't even know how that is possible, on multiple levels. Our database servers are on an internal network without connection to the internet. None of the computers in here have ever had any sort of connection to the outside. But you know what worries me the most? Whoever that was, they got through our encryption in four point two seconds. In other words, I have never seen this kind of attack before. Anywhere. Ever."

Phoebe asked: "What now?"

Suddenly Gerald grinned. "I have no idea why but they did nothing to mask their location, Hannah and Josh left to their address just half an hour ago. I still can't shake the feeling that they did that on purpose though, it seems like too easy of a mistake to make."

Phoebe nodded: "Yeah, I'm with you there G. Let's hope Hannah and Josh will be fine. If everything goes to hell, I'll go there myself with some of the guards, using brute force if needed."

Phoebe went to her desk and just sat there, she reasoned that doing anything with the computers would be risky since they had a potential security leak somewhere.

Everyone was relieved as they saw Hannah and Josh come in with three other people, a man in a wheelchair and two women. One of the women had short black hair and brown eyes. She was wearing blue jeans and a plain green shirt. The other woman had long red hair and blue eyes. Her clothes consisted of blue jeans and a black leather jacket. The man in the wheelchair had short brown hair and brown eyes. He was wearing yet another pair of blue jeans and a white shirt.

Hannah, a short woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, announced: "This is them." She paused, then spotted Phoebe. "Oh, hello Phoebe. We should interrogate them, pick one."

Phoebe smiled at the fact that, as usual, Hannah kept everything as short as possible, even in this very unusual situation. When you work in a truly secret intelligence agency being hacked wasn't the norm, that was reserved for the non-secret ones.

The interrogation rooms were simply office rooms one floor higher, which had been outfitted with microphones and cameras. Phoebe had decided to interrogate the black haired woman with the green shirt.

Phoebe began: "Name?"

The woman answered: "Sarah."

Needless to say, this wasn't a standard interrogation, it was more of an informal questioning, the agency wasn't big on formality.

Phoebe continued: "So, Sarah… who of you three launched that attack?"

Sarah folded her hands in her lap and answered: "That would be me."

"Why?"

"We hoped that we would find information about some people we are looking for in your database. We didn't."

Phoebe was somewhat surprised by her directness and asked: "We'll come back to those people later, now tell me about who you three are. From what Josh told me you had some sort of research setup in that warehouse of yours."

Sarah replied: "Yes, we were researching there. Before you ask, we are researching brain-computer interfaces."

"Interesting."

With a smile Sarah added: "And we were actually successful."

Phoebe raised an eyebrow: "How successful?"

"So successful that we aren't merely researching anymore, we are testing. We can freely transfer data between the human brain and any computer. All that is needed is the translation software we developed."

Phoebe was honestly taken by surprise by this. Reading brain patterns using sensors and interpreting them was one thing, free data transfer was another one. She didn't have to think long to see the potential applications for this technology, both good and bad. A cold shiver ran down her spine.

Sarah continued: "That was also how I managed to get into your database, it was only a matter of using the electricity lines for data transfer, it's been done before. Once I was inside, the encryption wasn't a problem either. The human brain has fascinating calculative capabilities."

Phoebe tried her best not to sound absolutely unprofessional: "Okay… so you hacked our database… with your brain?"

Sarah lifted up her hands, she had been hiding them under the table up until that moment. On her fingertips, no, inside her fingertips were black, metallic objects.

She explained: "Those are interface devices with the software on them, I've had them grafted onto my bones and connected to my nerves. They allow me to interact with any electronic device I touch. They also allow me to connect to other people's brains."

Phoebe wasn't sure if she should recoil in horror or lean forward in fascination so she just remained in her current position. This interrogation was going in an entirely different direction than she had intended.

She asked: "Alright. Just… just tell me the story of this invention from the very beginning, maybe I'll understand your motivations then."

Sarah began: "From the start? Alright. So, we met each other about nine years ago, back then we were six people. Harald, Anna and I are here today. Then there were Louis, David and his girlfriend Daniela. We all had just finished studying at our university, our dream was to create a brain-computer interface, much like the one we have now. But as there are only three of us here you might be able to tell that not everything went as smoothly as we had wished." She sighed. "We built up on research that had already been done, the professors from the university were a great help back then. They supplied us with all the information we needed. In the first two years we made some progress formulating theories, we had everything figured out, then the money started running low. We knew that we needed to get some kind of prototype to get some funding or else we would have to abandon the project. Let's just say that this prototype was by no means as elegant as the devices in fingertips. It needed to be implanted directly into the brain, David had volunteered to be the one getting the implant. We used up the rest of our money to pay the surgeon."

Phoebe interrupted: "The surgery went wrong, didn't it?"

Sarah bitterly replied: "Cliché isn't it? So now we were sitting there with no money and with one of our team dead, we were on the brink of giving up." Her face brightened again. "That was when Peter came in."

"Who's that?"

"We didn't know that either in the beginning, he said that he had heard about the accident from a professor and wished to support our project. He seemed to have a lot of money at his disposal, he became the sole funder the project. We bought an abandoned warehouse, the one you found us in, and proper equipment, an MRI system for instance. Despite having lost David to our research we kept going, we had already come too far to give up, especially now that money wasn't a problem anymore. We decided that an implant was the wrong way to go if we ever hoped our technology to be available to the general population."

Phoebe said: "Reasonable. So that is how you came up with the contact thing?"

"Yes, after half a year of research we found that we could use the way our computers work to connect brain to machine only using special software that exploited a very interesting phenomenon that we still don't quite understand. Making the software was a different story, it's the human brain we are talking about here, one of the most complex calculation systems in the known universe. The whole process took another two years, then we were finally able to connect. But yeah, as you see there are still two people to many in our group so something must have gone wrong, right?"

"So, what happened?" Phoebe wasn't sure if she really wanted to know.

Sarah continued: "The first test was a success, we were able to pull a live feed from Daniela's eyes onto our monitor and Harald managed to create an abstract painting with just his thoughts. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun. Over the course of the next months we refined our software and discovered new ways to interface with our brains. In the end we were able to have complete control in both directions. We knew that we could outsource the control over certain things in our body to a computer, like vital functions. The thought was that while the 'weaker' computer took care of keeping us alive the 'stronger' brain could be used to make calculations at insane speeds. We performed some experiments and everything went according to plan. Now we needed to get some hard scientific data we could present to the outside. So Louis got into the MRI system and we connected him up. Halfway through the experiment the power went out, in the few seconds that it took the backup generators to come live we lost the connection. It was horrifying to see how Louis' brain reacted, it didn't have control over his vitals and desperately tried to regain it… then we had to watch how his brain activity slowly stopped from the lack of oxygen. Daniela left our team that day, she said that she couldn't take watching more of us die."

Phoebe said: "I think I would have done the same."

Sarah replied: "I don't blame her. Anyways, the rest of us kept going, we had to, we knew that we were close. Over the remainder of the year we discovered that the software still had its bugs. I noticed that when I woke up one morning and every time something touched the back of my hand I got a strong taste of mustard in my mouth. It took us some time to track down those bugs and I'm sure over the duration all of us suffered their fair share of brain damage. It was Harald's that was permanent. You probably saw him earlier, almost his entire body is paralyzed, everything except his head and right arm. He also lost the ability to speak, he communicates with everyone else in text."

Phoebe asked: "So, in the end you succeeded in making the interface, why keep it secret?"

Sarah explained: "We knew that the software was free of dangerous bugs as far as we had tested but there could always be something that slipped through, we needed to be absolutely sure. It was our sponsor Peter who suggested a way of testing our software. We should use the software to simulate an environment and let people from all over the world access it, the software was safe enough at that point, with another layer of abstraction any critical errors would only lead to disconnects instead of deaths. In the end we came to the conclusion that the video game Minecraft would be best suited. We went around the internet and started recruiting people, they were told exactly what they were in for. Peter was one of the first people to join. Now, he also wanted to see how much anatomical differences the human brain could tolerate and still be able to control a body. Peter volunteered for this and in short, we changed his body in the simulated world into a tall, scaled superhuman with red eyes and claws."

"Interesting…" Phoebe remarked.

Sarah said: "We had also known that Peter had dealt with an emotional trauma a long time ago and was still suffering from it. Usually he didn't let anything show but fairly recently he requested that we would 'fix' this trauma permanently, we managed to do it but we had to make a sacrifice. The fix was to remove most of his more complex emotions or at least weaken them. Apart from that it went quite well."

Phoebe replied: "Wow, that's actually quite creepy, just being able to cut emotions from somebody."

Sarah said: "Anyways, the thing with the server went nicely, a lot of data was being collected and the people on the server enjoyed themselves. That was until a group of very skilled hackers seized control of it. Now the extensive security mechanisms in our software are working against us and we have no way of retaking it. We can't take it offline either because that would mean that everyone logged into the server would lose connection and… I told you already what happens then."

"So that is who you were looking for in our database?" Phoebe asked.

"Yes but it looks like they are really as good as they seem. We tried to identify them ourselves but weren't able to. In the end we were forced to look into your database. Just so you know, we only found your agency because of our software so you should still be completely invisible. Now, just today the hackers tried to blackmail us by keeping people captive in the server, which is why we were driven to attacking your database." Sarah sighed and continued: "They want the software to do who knows what. And they are not getting it. At least for as long as Peter is alive… his presence on the server stops them from taking over. He only has a few days before he dies of dehydration. We would try to help him directly but his whereabouts are unknown."

Phoebe said: "Now that you told me all of that I'm quite sure that all of us will be in big trouble if this Peter dies. I know, I only just met you but I'll try my best to help you. We simply can't afford not listening to you, we saw what your software is capable of."

Sarah seemed relieved: "Thank you, I really appreciate it."

Phoebe left the interrogation room and told Sarah that she would be back soon. She had to talk to the others, this was a very serious threat. Phoebe sighed, she had expected her day to be stressful in a lot of ways but this clearly wasn't one she would have ever thought of.