Istanbul

2064

"Belligerent assembly."

A fearsome grey manila folder landed on the desk with a clap, and Eren Durmaz dragged his head from his folded arms with an exhausted blink. His eyes were bloodshot. He had been in custody for twenty-two hours.

The man at the better side of the interrogation table looked important. He had a very fine shirt, a very fine hat, and very dark shadows under his eyes. They were also bloodshot, though he suspected for different reasons than his. Despite this, he projected a kind of quiet authority that suggested he had better places to be, and it was in your best interest not to delay him for long.

"Belligerent assembly," the man said, and let the leaden weight of the accusation settle. "Conspiracy to commit sabotage. Unauthorised access to a restricted communication channel, and," he glanced down at the file, "loitering." He whistled. It came out low and lifeless. "Dead to rights. Now tell me something I don't know, or your prospects here ain't looking too good."

Durmaz studied the dark-haired man. "I really don't have to talk to you without a lawyer. As I have said to everyone else who's been in this room. Multiple times."

The man took out a cigarette and began to smoke, never mind that they were indoors and the only ash tray in range was the mug of indigestible vending machine coffee Durmaz had been brought as the first passive-aggressive interrogation technique. At first he mistook the smoking for intimidation, but then he noticed the subtle tremor in the man's fingers. The waft of alcohol on his breath, subtler still behind the nicotine and the tangy, expensive cologne. Well, let it never be said that the upper middle rungs of the K&O food chain came without a cost.

"And as has been explained to you, multiple times," the man said eventually, staring at a spot somewhere a kilometer behind Durmaz's eyes and blinking at it slowly, "we're not the police. You run afoul of private security, your public rights are forfeit. That's how this works. That's how this has worked for a while now."

Six years, Durmaz almost added, unnecessarily. The man looked younger than him, but he was probably not so young that he didn't remember a time before the San Francisco Accord. Before human rights became forfeit in the name of profit. Before organising trade union meetings came to be called 'belligerent assembly'.

He stayed quiet.

"What I want to know," his interrogator kept on, "is where you got the address node for the emails in the first place. They ain't exactly in the phone book."

"Emails aren't in the phone book in general," Durmaz said neutrally. He had too little energy to inject the words with the necessary snark.

The man glared at him anyway.

"You'll talk," he said quietly, as if to himself, with a detached certainty that was nothing short of blood-curdling and even a tiny bit rueful.

Durmaz was not about to give up the name of his contact. Not when she was liable to prove so damn useful to his people. Whether she already realised that or not.

The man looked him in the eye, sharp and proper, for what felt like the first time since he'd walked in. "That thing right there," he said, pointing with the cigarette at Durmaz's nose ridge, "whatever you just thought, we'll get it out of you. Eventually."

"You're going to read my mind?" Durmaz asked flippantly, then gave a tired, humourless smile. "Technology really has come a long way."

The man nodded to himself, looking distant. "That it has. That it has."

"Didn't know you still did fieldwork," the regional head of security said to Decker, when he left the interrogation room two hours later. Aisha was in her late thirties, but had the sniffling disdain for the smell of nicotine of a woman thrice her age.

He handed the file back to her. She took it like it was slathered with infectious spores and tried to stay out of his airborne particle zone.

"This isn't fieldwork. It's busywork, if we're being generous." He glanced at his watch. "The twenty-four hours are up?"

"As of ten minutes ago. I'll send someone to collect him."

Decker nodded, suddenly itching for his third cigarette in as many hours. "Deprogramming." It wasn't really a question. He knew the drill. "Well. He's had his chance."

She nodded anyway. "We'll let him stew off-site for another day, then put him through processing. See what he knows. I'll send you the report once we know more."

Decker nodded back. He patted his pockets. He'd need to refresh the cig stash on the way to the airport. "Well. I'd better get on my way. Been a fun week, Aisha. Don't let me keep you."

She winced slightly and it was then he realised she'd been hovering around looking like she owed him some bad news. He sighed. "Yeah?"

"I got a call while you were in there. They've rescheduled your flight — you've got another job here. Local tech mogul has a gala coming up. He's had issues with break-ins last year, so you'll be taking over security."

Decker scoffed. Supervising a single event was below his pay grade, but whoever assigned him the job already knew that.

Aisha was still speaking. "I've already notified your hotel. You're flying back to LA in three days."

Decker frowned. "In three days? When's the event?"

Something like pity flickered in her eyes. "Tomorrow night."

Decker swore. By the look on her face, he guessed this one would be going into the 'appropriate workplace language' section of his by this point inevitable letter of termination.

A high-profile event. A high-profile K&O client. And less than twenty-four hours to prepare for it. Not enough time to meaningfully correct any serious lapses in security, but enough time that it would still be his head on the chopping block if or when — surely when — something went wrong.

Someone was setting him up. Someone who wanted his job, or maybe a superior looking for the tidiest, neatest way to fire him in a way that didn't involve severance packages. Or maybe someone he'd plain just pissed off.

It was probably not a good sign that he couldn't even bring himself to care about who that might be.

"Right. Send me the details," he told Aisha, walking away from her to collect his coat. He shrank into it like it was the only thing standing between him and the world.

Back to the hotel, then. A fresh shirt, maybe a stim and a shot of liquid courage to keep him on his feet. And then off to deal with this new bullshit while the evening was young.

The door to the interrogation room swung open and Durmaz was dragged out, hands cuffed behind his back. Decker felt the man's glare on his shoulder blades but didn't turn to watch as they hauled him off — deeper into the facility, on a trajectory directly opposed to the light of day, ever again.

Decker stepped out into a springtime evening chill that had no right to feel this pleasant.

All in a day's work, and all that.

Decker didn't get to enjoy the fresh air for long. His driver took him to the Congress Center where the gala would be held, an opulent steel-and-glass construction that dominated the skyscape through its postmodern geometry and had, through the miracle of optical physics, liquefied at least three unfortunately-parked plastic cars since it arose from the ground in 2058.

He met and thoroughly vetted the Congress Center's security manager, Paul Ramirez, set up shop in the CCTV feed room and worked into the night sifting through files, familiarising himself with the staff, the invitées, and what security measures had been installed where and when.

"You outsource the network security?" he'd said to Ramirez, pausing over a file.

"Only the supplementary measures for big events like these. We still have our core systems in place, and those are the industry standard."

"Fair enough." He took a second look at the file, just in case.

Just before dawn, he did a thorough perimeter check, then took one of Ramirez's men on a thorough patrol of the premises. Get to know the lay of the land, and how the floors feel under his feet, late at night.

He drank a withering black coffee from a vending machine, read some more files, then spent three hours in a collapsible cot intermittently napping and wishing he hadn't had that coffee. By the time he gave up, it was 8:05.

He entered a small private bathroom for security personnel to shower and shave.

When he raised his head from the sink to look into the mirror, Eren Durmaz's bloodshot eyes stared back at him, and he nicked himself. Then he blinked, and shook his head.

Between the coffee, the stims, the nicotine, the booze, the sleep debt and the collector's set in bad augmentation decisions wrapping down his spine, it was a miracle most days if he could approach 'high-functioning'. His work performance, though, had never taken the brunt of it. The suits at K&O didn't care how far behind he'd fallen in filling out his divorce paperwork, or taking out the trash before it started to stink, they only had eyes for the bottom line. Seeing things was practically part of the job description if you did it well enough, long enough. Skeletons in the closet were just another way of tallying up the enemies you'd outlived.

His was starting to get pretty crowded, though.

It was the deprogramming, he told himself. Messing with people's brains was spooky in a way old-fashioned stuff didn't come close to. Not many who went into a deprogramming center came back out right. Or came out at all, for that matter, but Decker was trying not to think about that. He was coming to spend an increasing amount of time not thinking about things, really. The booze helped.

And to think he'd been offered a job as Chief Deprogramming Supervisor once. No thanks.

"You're an idiot" — Jeffrey, his best pal at the time and second in line for that transfer, had scoffed. "That gig is the definition of job security. The market for it is only gonna grow." He'd taken the job. He'd had to move cities for it. Decker told himself that was the reason they'd fallen out of touch.

He'd always been good at lying to himself like that.

And so he'd ended up here. Ostensibly better, on a good day. This here, doing security for private events? Technically below his paygrade, but inoffensive. Boring, on a good day.

Of course, he was just a cog in a machine. Part of a system. If he stopped — if he caught a bullet in the neck, or resigned, or got disappeared into a black site never to be seen again — the whole thing wouldn't even flinch as it spat him out, would barely even stumble in its monstrous gait. Someone new would take his place. Someone worse. He'd read the reports. Abuse of power — cases where it went really wrong. Sometimes for years. He wasn't like that. He wasn't the bad guy. He was just a man doing his job.

And what was one more?

What was one more?

He left the bathroom at 8:45. The gala wasn't until the evening, but the day's philanthropy event was about to start.

He had work to do.