December 9th 2012

Daniel jogged on the spot as calmly as he could manage, waiting for the other runner to pass so that he could cross the narrow bridge across the river in Fairmount Park. The cold air was biting at the exposed skin of his face, but not as harshly as the lack of space was biting at his temper. The corrective which encouraged healthier eating in the population had the unfortunate side effect of giving many people the urge to get off their asses and do some daily exercise. Which had been fine, until they started encroaching on Daniel's territory.

'Thanks, buddy,' the tubby, middle-aged man huffed cheerfully on his way past.

'Oh no, thank you,' Daniel sniped back sarcastically, baring his teeth in an unconvincing grin.

He was undeniably on edge - had been ever since he'd escaped (that was the version of events he'd relayed to Rikkin, anyway) from the sorry clutches of Desmond Miles and his team. Returning with the two Pieces of Eden had redeemed him somewhat for his earlier mistakes in the eyes of the other Templars, but Daniel knew that if it hadn't been for the rescue team and Miles' decision to free him, he would probably have died a captive of the Assassin Order.

Crossing the bridge and going off-path to avoid any more run-ins, Daniel reflected on yesterday's psych session with Doctor Sung.

'I'm doing fine, Doc. No problems.'

'Daniel, you've been my patient for over ten years now. I know when you're not being completely open. I promise you that whatever you want to talk about will stay between these four walls...'

'Yeah, sure.'

'My job is to treat you, Daniel, not to spy on you. You were kidnapped, off your meds for days on end, kept in deplorable conditions...'

'"Deplorable conditions"? Come on, Doc, we've talked enough about my so-called childhood for you to know that I can handle a few days tied up in a basement.'

'I also know that you only talk about your childhood as a last resort, when you're trying to throw me off track.'

'I'm trying to save you time. There's nothing to talk about.'

'Actually, Daniel, one of the key ideas behind therapy is that there's always something to talk about.'

By the end of the session they'd both been exhausted by the verbal parrying, and Daniel had felt even more on edge than when he'd arrived. In the evening he'd tried to go out and pick someone up for a one-night stand, but the only woman who'd taken an interest had refused sex on the grounds that she'd only just started on birth control pills and (though she didn't know it) the corrective that Daniel had helped agree upon prevented her from consenting to sex with just a condom. He'd jerked off instead and had a restless night, oversleeping enough that his usual exercise regime was thrown off-timetable.

Discipline, discipline, Daniel repeated to himself, and wondered if Rikkin would mind if he committed a murder or two. It wasn't as though they'd have any trouble covering that sort of thing up.

He'd been reunited with Bill Miles, Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane on November 23rd. They had walked right into the Philadelphia base along with a few dozen other Assassins, all of whom had been "instructed" to report for processing. Daniel had watched them passively line up to be placed inside the Animi with little more than a detached curiosity.

Then, a couple of weeks later, he'd been reunited with Clay Kaczmarek. Local police reports of gunfire had caught their intelligence teams' attention, since according to the correctives there shouldn't have been any unauthorised shootings going on, and Daniel had been sent along to oversee the investigation. Kneeling over Kaczmarek's wrecked and staring corpse, he had felt a growing sense of unease that he knew could only be satiated by his debrief with Rikkin today.

The meeting was in an hour. Daniel wasn't going to have enough time to lift weights. He pushed himself hard whilst running back to his apartment and pulled a muscle in his calf.

'Ah, Daniel,' Rikkin said, not looking up from the papers in his desk as Daniel entered the office, limping slightly. 'Good to see you again. How was your session with Dr. Sung?'

Daniel didn't so much as blink. Of course Rikkin would know about his therapy sessions - hell, he probably got the notes e-mailed directly over to him within minutes of them ending. 'Fine, Alan. I'm feeling much better now.'

'Good, good,' Rikkin said absent-mindedly. He probably would have given the same response if Daniel had said, actually I told Dr. Sung a bunch of lies and right now I'm so wound up that I feel like ramming my hidden blade into your eye. Finally setting the paperwork aside, Rikkin stood up from his desk and sauntered over to Daniel, who was still standing stiffly just inside the doorway. Rikkin put his hands into the pockets of his trousers and affected a paternal air. 'I hope there are no hard feelings about what happened when the Assassins contacted me,' he said in a tone of utterly false regret. 'You know our policies, Daniel. We never give in to terrorists, no matter how painful the...'

'No harm done,' Daniel interrupted shortly.

Rikkin smiled broadly. 'That's why I like you. You've always been able to see the big picture.' Apparently deciding that Daniel's kidnapping was just another piece of history to be shelved, he turned on his heel and walked back to his desk. 'So,' he said, beckoning at Daniel to approach him, 'I wanted to thank you for dealing with the Kaczmarek shooting. I understand you got everything cleaned up.'

Daniel nodded. 'The father's been taken in for questioning, and I had Clay Kaczmarek's body brought in for an autopsy. He's in the morgue right now...'

'Oh, not any more,' Rikkin revealed mildly. 'I had the body incinerated this morning.'

For a moment Daniel said nothing at all. He breathed in slowly through his nose and counted to five. Then he said, as reasonably as he could manage, 'I'd barely started the investigation. Kaczmarek's body could have been extremely useful. I wanted to have our science team do an MRI of his brain, try to find out why he didn't respond to the corrective...'

'I can save you some time there,' Rikkin said with a smile. 'Kaczmarek was a hybrid - he had a high enough concentration of First Civilisation DNA to be unaffected by the Piece of Eden. I suspected as much, but I had it confirmed when he didn't report here for processing.'

Daniel realised that his mouth was hanging open slightly and hurriedly recovered his composure. 'If Kaczmarek was a hybrid,' he said slowly, trying not to sound like he thought he was talking to an idiot, 'Then it would have been immensely useful to have his brain dissected. If we're going to round up the rest of the hybrids then...'

But Rikkin interrupted him again. 'Round them up?' he repeated, with a pitying expression. 'Why would we do that?'

'We can't just have them wandering around!'

'I agree completely. Why do you think I had Kaczmarek killed?'

'Kaczmarek was killed by his father.'

'Yes, under my instruction.' Rikkin looked puzzled for a moment, and then realisation bloomed on his face and he laughed. 'Oh, of course, you don't know about this yet. When Kaczmarek and Miles failed to show up, I realised that they must be hybrids and so I implanted a kill-on-sight corrective in the population. Much more efficient than wanted posters.'

Damn, Rikkin was a cold bastard. Usually Daniel had a certain level of admiration for that quality, but in Rikkin's case it was clear that he got a kick out of being such a bastard - there was a self-indulgent glee to him that was profoundly irritating. Right now, however, Daniel had a specific grievance to raise. 'You implanted a new corrective? We never discussed that.'

A storminess ghosted its way into Rikkin's expression. 'We discussed the fact that I would make amendments if I considered them necessary.'

'It was my understanding that you would at least let the rest of the Inner Sanctum know. Does Warren-?'

'It was a minor decision,' Rikkin interrupted in clipped tones. 'I didn't want to waste your time with it, not when you're so ... busy.' He dripped a small dose of sarcasm into the pause.

Abruptly, he crossed the room to the bank of screens and buttons that had been installed within the past few months. They covered an entire wall, some of them monitors showing feeds from all over the world, others controls to make minor adjustments to the satellite remotely. But there was only one control that really mattered: a perfectly circular, near-transparent orb the same size and shape as the Apple of Eden. The clear Apple was a proxy built upon First Civilisation technology and programmed to resonate with its twin on the satellite - information relayed directly through the skin of whoever touched it and sent to the Apple of Eden to subsequently be transmitted to the mind of every person on the planet.

Rikkin plucked the Apple from its holder and held it delicately in his hand as he crossed the room, back to Daniel, his thumb caressing the surface of it lovingly.

'Do you think I am cruel, Daniel?' he asked quietly, still looking down at the Apple.

The question took him off-guard. 'What do you mean, cruel?'

'Come along now. I know that you were an Assassin once-'

'A long time ago,' Daniel corrected softly.

'Even so. You once thought of the Templars as a threat. Why?'

'Because I was programmed to. The act wouldn't have been convincing otherwise.' Daniel was not interested in continuing this particular conversation.

'What do the Assassins believe in, Daniel?' Rikkin persisted.

Fighting down the urge to roll his eyes, Daniel replied shortly: 'Nothing. Freedom, I suppose, but since they don't think anything is true...'

'Exactly,' Rikkin cut in, rolling the Apple around between his fingers. 'Liberty. It's a noble concept, of course, but I think that the human race has had quite enough liberty to be going on with. They had their chance, Daniel. It's not as though the rules were difficult to follow. Do not lie, do not murder, do not cheat, do not steal, do not rape … these things should have been self-evident, yet somehow these people still struggled with them. They had thousands of years of opportunity to learn - to improve themselves - and they wasted every last one of them. They showed themselves to be incapable of making the right decisions, and so now we will make the decisions for them.'

'You mean that you will make the decisions for them.'

Daniel hadn't meant to say it. His leg was aching and his blood was high with frustration and god damn it he had better things to do than stand still and let Alan Rikkin make smug little speeches at him, but still he regretted saying it immediately. He reluctantly met Rikkin's eyes, which were gleaming suspiciously, but was careful not to apologise for speaking out of turn. The only way he could now make this situation worse would be to show weakness. His best bet was to act as though he wasn't aware of the insubordinance of his statement.

'Yes,' Rikkin said at last, quietly. 'I will make the decisions. In my authority as Grand Master.'

Daniel cleared his throat awkwardly and nodded. 'I should go,' he said. 'I need to question Kaczmarek's father, arrange an insanity plea for the murder to get him locked up. We don't want him talking-'

'Oh, there won't be any need for that,' Rikkin assured him in a light-hearted tone. 'I'll take care of the details. By the end of the day, Harold Kaczmarek won't be aware that he ever had a son.'

'But the neighbours, Kaczmarek's friends...'

Rikkin laughed patronisingly. 'Oh, Daniel, you're still stuck in the old way of thinking. I know, it's going to be a difficult adjustment, but you have to accept that we don't have to arrange elaborate cover-ups any more. We don't have to pull a hundred different strings to tidy away a single murder. The physical evidence will be thrown away with the rest of the garbage, I'll instruct the relevant people to destroy Kaczmarek's health, social security, education and employment records, and as for his friends and family ... well, those are easily taken care of. All I need to do is issue a general global corrective so that anyone who has ever come into contact with Kaczmarek will forget they ever met him.'

'You can do that?' Daniel asked incredulously.

'Of course. Similar to the way I've arranged for Desmond Miles and any other hybrids we discover to be dealt with. I create a corrective consisting of an image of the person's face, and an instruction. With Miles, the instruction is "kill". With Kaczmarek, the instruction is "forget". Quite simple, really. In fact...' His expression went distant for a moment, and an odd kind of energy seemed to build up around the Apple in his hand. '... I've just done it,' he finished, releasing a long breath and smiling proudly.

'You didn't just kill Kaczmarek,' Daniel said slowly, breaking down what Rikkin had said and working out the implications. 'You deleted him.'

'Yes,' Rikkin confirmed. 'Isn't that kinder? No one will grieve him. No parents weeping at his graveside, no friends looking mournfully at his photographs, no memorial services or weepy tribute poems. I have simply adjusted history so that Clay Kaczmarek never existed.' He smiled. 'Marvellous, isn't it?'

'And you'll do this for every hybrid? You don't want to, I don't know, learn about them ... try to figure out what makes them tick?'

'Why would I?' Rikkin countered dismissively. 'I don't care about them. They're bugs, glitches in the system, and I want them gone. When I hire an exterminator I don't ask him to show me the corpse of every rat he finds so that I can go over with it with a fine toothcomb. The world needs cleaning of these hybrids, Daniel, however insignificant their numbers are. Once we're rid of them, we'll have total control and we can move things along without any distractions.' With an air of finality, he stalked back over to his desk and sat down, setting the Apple down onto another holder that he kept at his right hand. 'Thank you for the debrief,' he said in a pleasant tone. 'You can arrange for Harold Kaczmarek to be taken home. The team will have finished cleaning his kitchen and replacing his window by now.'

Daniel nodded, but he was distracted, frowning at something that Rikkin had said which didn't quite make sense. 'Alan,' he said slowly.

'Hmmm?' Rikkin was already looking back down at his paperwork.

'There's something I don't understand. If you deleted Kaczmarek from the global consciousness, then why can I still remember him?'

A taut, straining silence stretched out through the room. Alan Rikkin had been drumming his fingers on the desk, but they froze in mid-air, shaped into an odd sort of claw. Then he lifted his head sharply to stare at Daniel as though he had never seen him before, and in a great, snowballing rush Daniel thought over the thing that he had just said, the information he had just given, and a glimmer of the implications of it struck him - obviously a split second after it had struck Rikkin.

Daniel had a naturally perfect poker face, however, and maintained his casually curious expression as Rikkin plucked the Apple from its holder once more, and crossed the room, and stood an arm's length away, his slate-grey eyes as cold as Daniel had ever seen them, and darkly suspicious.

Slowly, Rikkin lifted the Apple in his hand, and Daniel mentally flashed back to the Winter Palace and the cold statue of Jupiter holding a similar artefact aloft. The charge of energy built up around the Apple once more and Daniel braced himself for something, anything: a sudden pain or an instruction to stand on one leg or turn on the spot. He knew, it was clear, that Rikkin was testing him.

He failed the test.

No instruction came. If it was given, it never arrived. Small beads of moisture appeared on Rikkin's forehead as he strained visibly, trying to force his will through the Apple and into Daniel, and having no effect whatsoever.

Daniel looked back at Rikkin impassively as the man finally gave up and dropped the hand holding the Apple down to his side. They both knew what this meant, but Daniel's entire life now hinged upon convincing Rikkin that he had not yet realised it.

'Alan?' he said, in a convincingly puzzled voice.

Rikkin turned away slowly, hiding his face from Daniel's view. He walked back to the bank of screens and set the Apple down in its holder, stopping for a moment to simply rest his hand upon it. Then he went back his desk and sat down, his expression dark and pensive. At last he said, looking up at Daniel coldly, 'You should get on with your work. I have things to take care of.'

'Alright. Call me if you need me.'

Daniel walked out of Alan's office, forcing himself not to move too quickly, not to do anything that would give himself away. His mind was racing, heart beating a little too quickly, at the magnitude of what had just happened, and he realised with a calm, resigned certainty what he would have to do now.

Oh well, he thought. I had a good run.

Over ten years of service with Abstergo, and now it was all over. Oh, he could hang around, perhaps try to convince them of his loyalty so that he might be allowed to live, but Daniel had no interest in placing his life as the stakes in a gamble where his luck was measured by Alan Rikkin's benevolence. This thing - this cruel accident of fate which had given him unshakeable free will - made him a natural enemy of the Templars. Perhaps he should have known that his Assassin blood was always going to betray him.

So, he had to leave. He needed to get the best head start that he possibly could, and so he stopped by his office and made a call down to the Operations team he'd been working with, instructing them to return the senior Kaczmarek to his home. Rikkin would be watching him now, so he had to go about his business normally until he was far enough away to start running. He wouldn't have time to go home, and so he grabbed everything from his office that could be useful without weighing him down: a pistol, extra ammunition, a thousand dollars or so in cash, a spare knife (he was already wearing his hidden blade), an untrackable smartphone, and a list of security codes for the building. Finally he sat down at his computer, opened a single file and scribbled down an address and phone number.

He headed down to the ground floor. In the elevator, he ran into some people he knew and made pleasant conversation with them, joking about the weather. As he complimented one of them on her new haircut, making a show of flirting, he decided that if he ran into security downstairs he would shoot her in the face to let them know he was serious, and grab someone else to use them as part hostage, part human shield.

Luckily for his elevator companions, there was no one waiting for Daniel when the doors opened. Rikkin - the fool - was probably still brooding on the top floor, thinking that he had the luxury of time, that he could have Daniel killed any time he liked. He would probably make a show of it - have Daniel dragged into his office and make another boring speech at him before instructing the guards to shoot him. If there was an upside to becoming an outcast, it would be never having to listen to Rikkin monologue again.

Daniel nodded at the lone security guard as he exited Abstergo through the rear set of doors, the ones that led out into the parking lot. He had a vehicle out here, not one that he used often, but which would allow him to put plenty of miles between himself and Philadelphia in a short space of time.

He had almost reached his car when a rather odd sight stopped him in his tracks.

Emerging from the line of trees that framed the parking lot - filthy and unshaven, red-eyed and looking half-crazed - was Desmond Miles.

For a moment Daniel considered ignoring him. He could just take Miles' appearance as a blessing, a distraction, and carry on with the escape plan. But then he looked again, really looked, at the calm, detached fury and focus in Desmond's face, and something occurred to him. Daniel grinned and began running to catch up with the Assassin.