"Just what are you playing at, David?"

They were out in the hallway, David glancing up from the boxes and machinery detritus at his feet. There was a steri-box nearby, whirring faintly. Presumably he was jacked into the prostheses via wireless, going through testing protocol. There were a couple other techs nearby, similarly distracted.

He got up, dusted off the knees of his trousers absently. "What's up, Vera?"

"The Typhoon. What exactly is the Typhoon?"

She was watching his face as his mouth tightened.

"The Typhoon? Oh, that. Prototype from a DARPA project. We're not using all of it," lied David, "just the central hub. Power source and the controller. Never could get the smart munitions to work properly, so it's more or less scrap now." He looked back down at the machinery he was working on in what Vera supposed was evasion/dismissal, textbook negotiation tactics from whatever management programs David had downloaded. For all she knew, he even had a CASIE aug. "Figure it may as well go to a good cause-"

"Stop bullshitting me!"

The shout practically echoed back and forth in the narrow corridor. David looked back up. The two techs looked up, and quickly back down. They scurried out of earshot.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Vera," said David, poker-faced.

Vera drew in a breath, let it back out again. "This would all be much easier for both of us if you just told me what was going on, David. I have known you long enough to be owed that."

David coughed out synthetic laughter. "I've got too much to deal with tonight, Vera. Look. Just trust me on this one, okay? Give me, I dunno, a week to sort out Jensen and what's happened to my company, and then we can talk this out."

Vera opened her mouth to say something else, then thought better of it. David, guiltily, picked up one of the arm prostheses and interfaced into it, working silently. After a moment, she sat down beside him.

"High grade tech," she commented, burlesquing his accent as she eyed the armpiece.

"Had it printed out a half hour ago," said David. "Still warm, too."

Vera reached out for it, and after a moment's thought David sighed to himself and handed it over. She ran her fingers over the edges and contours of it. "Elegant," said Vera, "very elegant. Your work?"

"Yeah," said David. "Nobody else could have got it out the door fast enough."

"You've always led from the front, haven't you."

"I'm out of practice," said David. "These days I just build this stuff to relax from my real job."

David sat there motionless, like a stalled program. Vera didn't prod him. She just waited. Eventually, more bubbled to the surface. David hunched up and put his chin on his knees, rubbing his eyes.

"I wish that was still my real job."

"You have done great things, David. You've saved many, many lives. And you've improved many more." Vera felt more than let a fraction of her anger scrape through her calm. "This is not you."

David stared at nothing for a while. "All that work we do, Vera. In Poland. Japan. Here. You do good, you get paid, you become successful. You know what happens?"

"Tell me, David."

"You get noticed. By the people in charge. All the men and women of power. See, truth is, there's always been stability and there's always been control over that stability. You bring in change, you become a disruptive force. So suddenly, you're a threat to these people. And these guys have been shaping the rules for decades. They play by them when they can, they don't when they need to. More you want to change, the more desperate they get. You remember what I said, back in Poland? That one night? You asked me what the hell a start-up CEO with DoD contracts was doing out in a plague-ridden hell hole. You remember what I said, right?"

Vera's mouth quirked. "No, actually."

David turned to look at her. "Come on, really?"

"Not all of us are savants like you, David. And at the time some of us were getting by using stimulants day and night that make adrenaline look like a cup of tea."

David waved away the unlooked-for compliment. "It's for them. It's all for them. It's for all of them. I'm not a doctor, I'm not giving them back their bodies. I want to give them something new. Something that doesn't fail, that isn't fallible in the way biology is. Something utterly comprehensible to them, that's upgradable, that's an extension of their own consciousness, that's theirs in a way even their own bodies aren't. I want to give them the culmination of what they want to be. I want self-determination at a level that hasn't been physically possible until human augmentation showed up."

"I remember following that dream, certainly, after I found it in Poland. To Fukushima. And Detroit."

"I want to change what it means to be human, Vera. I want to give people a choice. That's the biggest change I can think of. And I want the technology to belong to the people who use it, not some faceless corporation."

"David, Sarif industries only escapes the definition of 'faceless corporation' because your face is plastered on every surface it owns."

"Yeah. You fight against it, you live it, you become it." David rested his chin on one of his knees. "Maybe I'm in too deep, I dunno. All I know is, tonight the game I play against these guys changed. They changed the rules on me, Vera, and I didn't see it coming. They brought a war into my home. Between you and me, I'm gonna bring that war back to theirs."

Vera drew in a breath, let it back out.

So.

"David, that isn't a machine you're building in there. It's a person. Adam Jensen is a living human being, so much more than a weapon."

"Yeah. He is better than a weapon. He's a soldier, and the best one I've got." David breathed out, and shook his head as if underwater. She saw in his eyes the exhilarated shock of gambling while having nothing left to lose. "You haven't seen what he can do, Vera. He's ex-SWAT, got a detective's mind and a martial arts expert's body. Even got the discipline to keep himself in peak condition and training when he could just laze back into a desk job. I don't know what he could do in an amped-up military chassis, but I'm betting my company that he'll make violence look like an art form."

"Do not do this to him, David. You made this technology to augment people, not to condemn them to a life that is not their own choice. This should be his decision, not yours. When he wakes up-"

"When he wakes up," said David, with sudden force, "he's gonna want a piece of those bastards. He's gonna want to shred them like sacks of meat in a grinder. And he'll have needed augments today, now, if he has time to chase them down before the trail gets cold."

"Do not try to make me think of this as his war. He your employee, not your blood relation. He has no vested interest in this corporate conflict."

"They killed his girlfriend, right in front of him," said David, and Vera went silent. She bit her lip and looked away from him.

"Ex-girlfriend, possibly," said David. He rubbed his chin meditatively. "Him and Megan started avoiding each other, when her research really got moving. Maybe she got too focused, lost contact with him. I could see her doing that, the way she'd throw herself into projects. But, yeah. He watched her die."

There was a sudden, violent rage in her like a heart palpitation. She clamped down on it, waited it out.

"And you will use that, David? I admit I've never seen you manipulate someone like that before."

"I need your help, Vera. I can't trust anyone else to do this job. Some of these augments, they're prototypes, the software/bioware wrappers aren't fully tested. With something this high-spec, it'll take someone really good to interface the machinery to the man, see the mistakes before they cost us."

She rounded on him again. "You would put untested hardware into a patient? Have you lost your-"

"I don't have a choice!"

David Sarif shut his eyes. A few slow, steady, controlled breaths, fists clenching into palms rhythmically, then he turned back to face her. There was something desperate and tired behind his eyes, something she hadn't even seen in Poland.

"Vera, I need your help. Okay? This is how it's got to go. Or you can sit back and watch the bad guys win this one."

Vera said nothing at all. She watched David for a time, and then got up to head back into the OR. The doors slid shut behind her as a distinct sense of finality, of a decision taken, trickled down through the organic and mechanical interfaces of her mind.