Memo
From: Dallas Glass, Reporter
To: Donovan Brandeis, Managing Editor
Subject: Recent Storm
Date: 24 November 2049
Got an interesting piece of paper today. An old contact of mine dropped the attached police report off and said it should shed some light on what happened over the last several months, especially the catastrophe at MCX. Apparently, some members of the police force wanted to continue pursuing this case. In consultation with the feds, they decided to bury it. According to my source, a lot of cops are unhappy. We should give the city desk a heads up that there are some high-profile police resignations coming. In case any disgruntled cops want to flip off the bosses on their way out the door.
As far as this report is concerned, I say run the damn thing. It seemed that this journal entry recounting everything was supposed to be given to us before the cops got ahold of it anyways. At the very worst, it’s an interesting piece of fiction. At the very best, it’s a finger in the eye of every corp who likes to think this city belongs to them. And the world has the right to know what Atheon is doing. If they want to kill me for spilling their secrets, they’re welcome to try.
Case Report
Case #2401343117
Case Officer ID: 45902013
Case Officer Name: Warren, Cole
Date: 21 November 2049
Subject Name: Pierce, Aaron
Subject DOB: 17 April 2020
Notes:
Copy of Millennium City Police Department Evidence Item no. 44 collected by Warren, Cole for Case #2401343117.
Entry from Pierce’s journal dated 19 November 2049. Most of the information in this journal entry is corroborated by independent witnesses, surveillance cameras, and data pulled from Hauser’s implants. We remain unable to locate Isabel Anderson, however Dominic Hauser’s fate is detailed in the full incident report.
In my professional opinion, Pierce is dangerous so long as he feels he is being hunted. From my time with the subject, I get the feeling that he only wants to be left alone after everything he’s seen. At the end of the day, this case rests in dangerous waters, and I’d rather not invite the sharks. At the same time, if the whispers are true, then heads should roll. Either way, I’ve still got my twenty and my pension, and those decisions are above my pay grade, so I don’t really give a damn.
– Detective Warren
The surface dwellers live in blissful ignorance of what lurks below. The horrors mankind created in their twisted pursuit of superior science lie buried in an inadequate tomb, behind a flimsy lock, and kept in place by the vain hopes of spineless cowards and unrepentant monsters.
If you create a god, do not be surprised when it breaks your feeble shackles.
When the Kobayashi Corporation first cracked neural implants, it shattered the dam of technological discoveries. I was six years old when the first prosthetic limbs that were functionally indistinguishable from the real ones debuted. I was eleven when the years of research on the neural links to control those limbs birthed the first true sentient artificial intelligence. After which, AI’s exceptional minds could run hyper-realistic simulations much faster than humans could. They became our partners in innovation. I had always remembered the adults from my childhood talking about how much better the world was becoming compared to around the time I was born. With AI’s help, we accomplished all manner of things we used to think were decades away. We improved our spacecraft and returned to the Moon, setting up a whole city to prepare for eventually colonizing Mars. We solved health problems that plagued humanity for centuries. We built clean energy and found ways to repair the planet.
In the midst of all of this, the American company, Atheon Solutions, took the development of AI to its apex the day before I turned seventeen. The Mirage was a marriage between the synthetic limbs and artificial intelligences that birthed the first artificial person. It became the hottest product of the year. Quickly, synthetics were built by other companies, and became staples of everyday life.
After six years of civil rights fights, the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified, which gave synthetics the right to live comfortably as equals with organics. Several nations followed the USA’s example. The nomenclature is still inconsistent, even within the AI community, and the answers to synthetics’ philosophical questions are still in their infancy. But, to those of us who have grown up alongside these miracles of human nature, the world is in the brightest state we’ve ever dreamt it could be.
But every paradise has its price. America reigns as a bastion of acceptance for synthetics and the seat of new technological marvels, but Washington DC is weak. Atheon and the other corporations built their influence on the backs of military contracts, and once their innovations exploded into other areas, they disposed of the government which had given them the resources to grow so strong. The campaign for synthetic rights was spearheaded by the companies to give them a more numerous workforce. It was a PR move that let these megacorporations use the same old tactics humans used against humans against humans and synthetics alike. But Atheon’s greatest sin isn’t its abuse of its workforce.
Atheon’s transgressions rest with what lies beneath.
Of my two best friends, Dominic Hauser is a human and Isabel Anderson is a synthetic. I’ve known Dom since high school, and we met Isabel five years ago.
What happened with Dom is the end result of his insistence on sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. When we were kids, raiding shuttered corporate offsites and regional offices was a worthy pastime. Oftentimes, these places had plenty of technology just left behind, and that fetched a pretty penny on the secondhand markets. It’s amazing what the backstreets looked like just a few years before I was born. They weren’t the most upscale neighborhoods, but they had character. The old pictures looked positively inviting compared to the way the place was by the time I grew up.
Dom could pick his way around any security system. He slipped anywhere he wanted via the net. He got the moniker ‘Icejacker’ because of how adeptly he could slip into hidden places like water, and tear them apart whenever he chose, like ice. Icejacker was legendary amongst hacker communities, more of which became mainstream as corporations began pushing the boundaries of their jurisdiction further and further. One of these days, the governments will be entirely replaced by the corporations, and then all hope for us normal people will be lost. Until then, those of us on the outside try and help the only forces that can keep us safe from the corps.
At least, we would have…if it weren’t for what Dom unearthed.
Isabel was always the more cautious of my two friends. She was activated two years before the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified in 2044 and was always careful to stay in line when humans were upset. Old habits never left her, I guess, as she always said she felt like the peacemaker of any group she was with. It also meant that Isabel was seldom involved in our other endeavors.
Dom and I had worked on an…aggressive campaign in favor of synthetic rights. I was an excellent schemer and muscle, while Dom had the connections and technical know-how to execute any daring plot I came up with. We did plenty of freelance work for synthetic rights organizations and were occasionally contracted by organizations seen by the corps as terrorists. Then again, some corporations liked using us too. At the end of the day, we were about putting food on our tables, and doing what good where we could.
Rosenthal Technology Solutions was one of the corporations that was fighting for the ERA. Dom and I had done work for them in the past. One of their representatives, Felix Bernard, was our usual contact for work. He had enlisted Dom and I to cause a disruption at Global Advanced Enterprises’ exposition during their keynote by Ariel Stanton using a virus which Rosenthal had developed. I infiltrated the security team and uploaded the virus, which not only bricked the only operational prototype of the next generation of data chips, but showed a message saying that similar attacks would continue to happen until the ERA was ratified. We never realized the prototype would be destroyed, and it caused a dustup at the expo which left eight people dead from overzealous corporate security and thirty-four wounded due to the indiscriminate gunfire or being trampled by the panicking crowd. It also necessitated me getting stitched up by a back alley doctor before I bled out from two gunshot wounds. The Android Liberty Organization was blamed for the attack.
The chip we destroyed was designed to carry an AI without needing a synthetic body. Six months later, Rosenthal revealed their chip that did the same thing for AI and was ready to go to market a month later. No longer did a personality construct have to be uploaded into the neural matrix of a person or into a synthetic body, and the chips were compatible with all of Rosenthal’s other products: data servers, terminals, etc. About eight weeks after Rosenthal’s chips hit the market, the ERA was ratified and went into effect. They used Dom and I to kill two birds with one stone and did it while hanging us out to dry. So, the next time I met Felix, I put a bullet in his head.
I did meet Ariel Stanton much later under more pleasant circumstances. She was lovely, and I thoroughly enjoyed the box seats for her concert.
Dom and I originally met Isabel at one of the spontaneous celebrations of the ERA being ratified and going into effect. It looked like those pictures of that old victory celebration from like a hundred years ago when the big war ended. Isabel was drifting alone through the crowd, and she bumped into Dom and me. We basically adopted her that night and she’s been with us ever since. Our first experience together was looking at the fireworks as they came dangerously close to setting the old Satcom Industries building alight. It was the closest we’ve ever come to movie magic in reality.
And five years on, the world has only gotten more dangerous.
Dom, Isabel, and I have an interesting dynamic. Isabel was always a peaceful soul, always trying to find balance, do the right thing. That comes with a bit more shyness, and less willingness to take risks. Isabel’s a gentle soul in a rough world. Dom and I would both have taken on armies to keep her safe and free. Not everyone stained their hands with the same blood as we did. Not everyone deserved to.
Dom personifies passion and rage. He became an adept hacker when he was young, and prized neural interfaces of his caliber with that talent would allow someone an almost godlike amount of control to our networked world. I have seen him send corpo soldiers into fits of agony because he hijacked their auditory implants and broadcast shrieking that made their ears literally bleed. Dom held no remorse for GAE when we blew up their prototype because they had done enough to warrant suffering a public embarrassment. The two journalists among those trampled to death were just as guilty as GAE in Dom’s eyes because there were there to write fluff pieces on GAE. Or so sayeth the gospel according to Dominic.
The only reason Rosenthal got so much of our business is that we considered them the least among evils. When I shot Felix, his successor, Kristen Saleh, held no ill will towards us. Felix, for as much as I personally liked the magnificent bastard, was another in a long line of corporate rats who got what they deserved when they crossed a bridge too far. Kristen was nice. There was a level of mutual trust and respect. I knew she would pull our cards if we were to ever fail, and she knew the same would happen to her if we were to get screwed over again.
Dom was always the type of person who believes very strongly in what they do. In the years before Isabel came along, he almost declared war on the world. I had to remind him, pragmatically, that declaring war on everyone would only mean everyone would be out to kill us. Rosenthal was a safe enough umbrella to stand underneath, and we still had our fair share of whacking them when they got out of line. We just didn’t get caught.
Because we were damn good.
Rosenthal and GAE had been squabbling for ages now, but we knew they were both relatively minor players. Kobayashi’s North American operation is still one of the biggest powers in town, and Atheon is the other one. The estranged parents of the modern age could set off a world-ending catastrophe if they ever went to war with each other. My lost love, Kasumi Takemura, worked for Kobayashi in North America.
Kasumi was an acquaintance Dom met over the net some time before the GAE chip job. They had begun to interact regularly, and a genuine friendship was building. Kasumi never made it clear that she was Kobayashi, so we were surprised when we finally met her for a drink in person. Kasumi was something else, one of the smartest hackers I knew, but she was still a kind soul. Her sins were to build a better tomorrow; even the work she did for Kobayashi. Her jokes were terrible, and her dancing was even worse, but she was a genuine songbird in a world full of dissonance. She was a stabilizing influence on Dom, and the best romantic partner I could have ever asked for. Kasumi was with us for two years, until Kobayashi caught wind of our association. Not only were we mercenaries, but we were associated with Rosenthal. That made us doubly undesirable, so Kobayashi special forces tried to clean all of us up. Dom and Kasumi got separated from me. I took down everyone in my way, but it just wasn’t enough. Dom was way outnumbered, and Kasumi took a shot in the crossfire. She bled out before we could get to one of the back alley doctors, the same greydoc who saved my life after the GAE chip job. We were usual customers regarding treatment for on-the-job injuries.
Eight months later, we discovered from raiding a facility belonging to Atheon subsidiary NexTech that Atheon had arranged the whole thing. Atheon used Kasumi’s associations with us to blackmail her into providing them with confidential Kobayashi data, saying they’d tell Kobayashi about Dom and I, which would then bring the samurai’s might down on all three of us. Eventually, Atheon gave up Kasumi as the leak to save another mole, and Kobayashi figured that Dom and I were helping her steal from them.
Dom didn’t take the news well. To me, my sweet Songbird sang a while before she moved on, and she sang a song true to herself and her heart in this false and ugly world. I couldn’t be sad about Kasumi because she went out on her own terms: hacking Kobayashi implants with one hand, and a gun in the other. But to Dom? Kasumi’s death meant Atheon must bleed as well.
The underground assumed we were with the ALO still, and it worked to our advantage. Even in the aftermath of the ERA, several of the synthetic organizations remained active as ‘independent watchdogs’ regarding synthetic treatment, but those who were left by that point mostly just wanted to blow things up. That suited us just fine. Since the organization was hunted after every strike we’d make against Atheon, we were left alone. Dom was fueled more by his rage and despair every day, and it led to our attacks getting bigger and bigger.
Isabel did not necessarily approve of the lengths to which Dom and I would go. She remained outside of our mercenary activities for the most part, content with a civilian life. That isn’t to say she can’t handle herself, but Isabel is a gentle soul. She doesn’t have the emotional endurance for the profession Dom and I found ourselves in. Even if she loved Kasumi like a sister. Even if she wanted to see her own creators burn for all the evil they’ve done in the world. Isabel is delicate and artistic. She is a dreamer in a world of nightmares. She is an important reminder to me that there is life beyond this hell. She wasn’t in the trenches with us, she’d never be on our side of the dividing line. And because of that distance, Isabel’s words urging calm and positivity never could resonate with Dom the same way as Kasumi’s.
A few years of striking at Atheon, and Dom began to put together a bigger picture. He’d gotten better at breaking into their systems and causing problems with so much practice. The ‘Icejacker’ moniker has been replaced with something more dramatic: ‘Kingbreaker.’ Dom’s reputation remains legendary amongst the hacker community. He spent more time sifting through the net than in the real world. By this point, people were sending him information. They wanted to see Atheon suffer as much as we do, though I’m still not entirely convinced Kobayashi wasn’t using us to strike at their archrival. After Kasumi’s death, the Rosenthal-GAE conflict never seemed quite as interesting.
It was through this web of secrets which led to the bunker.
According to information obtained by one of Dom’s sources and corroborated by documents obtained through an Atheon data breach from three years ago, on the outskirts of the city existed an underground research facility which Atheon shut down two years before the ERA passed. Naturally, we felt we had to visit it.
Isabel, feeling restless, had decided to join us for this adventure. Her logic had been that this place was supposedly shut down, so it would be a fun outing to the countryside. I should have known it would be the first marker of our misfortune. We made it outside of the city and traveled to the coordinates Dom had been given. At the end of a cracked and winding road, in the shadow of a cluster of satellite dishes pointing up at the heavens from the hilltop was the entrance to a building that had been dug into the ground. All that blocked our forward progress into the facility grounds was a simple gate with ‘No trespassing’ signs hanging on it. We pushed through the gate and wandered through an abandoned complex of office buildings which had seen better days, and the satcom building which looked like it was the only thing in the site being actively maintained. My first instinct at seeing the totally lax security was that this entire trip would be a waste of a day. My second instinct was that we were stepping into a pit of venomous snakes in complete darkness.
Dom was in good spirits. The last several months had seen him find some measure of peace within himself. He was smiling again. Laughing. Even Isabel looked visibly relaxed. I, however, felt an uncomfortable cold creeping up my spine the entire day. Being in regular combat sharpens one’s perception and instincts. Sometimes, I’ve felt like I can anticipate ambushes or dodge bullets before they’re even fired. It becomes a form of subconscious pattern recognition, I think. Whatever developed my sixth sense had alarm bells going off at deafening volumes inside my head.
The bunker entrance was the largest door I had ever seen. It was a nuclear blast door, ready to protect the inside against anything short of a direct impact on the facility itself. It seemed to be overkill for a research facility unless it also doubled as a bomb shelter. Isabel figured that what was inside was really sensitive and people needed to be kept out.
We discovered later that it was to keep something in.
Isabel traced the power cables to a junction box with her superior synthetic senses, and Dom was able to work some rudimentary engineering to get power to the door. Having infiltrated Atheon technology for years at this point, the lock was simple for him to crack. That big, heavy blast door opened slowly, releasing the cold, dark air of an unearthed tomb. The outer walls were extremely thick and worsened the chill up my spine. The inside held plenty of older technology, all in working order, but seemingly untouched for years. Lights didn’t have a problem working. We poked through some of the logs, all of them seemed to stop around the same time. Most of the data had nothing juicy in them, but one of the consoles noted that the facility had been drawing an excessive amount of power from the local grid and had done so continuously for years. The alarm bells in my brain got even louder, yet I still didn’t listen.
The thrumming in the back of my teeth as soon as we crossed the threshold should have alerted me. I was already off kilter from Dom’s improved mood, Isabel’s presence, and the unshakable feeling that something was wrong to analyze what I was seeing. It took me until we uncovered the buried secret to realize that the entire building was one giant Faraday cage.
The only access to the net was through hardlines which were physically disconnected. A mechanism was in place to keep the hardlines disconnected unless managerial approval was granted, and the cutoff system was actively staffed. Atheon took great pains to keep whatever was in here locked up. The security measures would have made one think it was a prison for notorious hackers, but this was a research lab. Computer equipment, AI research logs, electronics workshops were all we found.
Until we hit the vault. Buried at the heart of this facility was a data vault, surrounded by another Faraday cage. Again, it required managerial authorization to even get the chance to unlock the door. It took Dom the better part of an hour to crack the seal.
I wish he hadn’t.
What rested inside was something I had never dreamt of. Held inside a vast number of cutting edge server towers was a god. They say even a dead god still dreams, and their dreams can shake the world. When I realized what we were dealing with, that thought rushed to the forefront of my mind. The god before us wasn’t dead nor was it dreaming, it was furious. And it had been beating on these walls for a very, very long time.
Atheon broke the rules. Their greatest secret was the prototype of an Artificial Super Intelligence. A normal AI, like Isabel, was about as human as something built by human hands could get. They learned like us, communicated like us, felt like us. Isabel was just as capable of sustaining a relationship as I was. Maybe even more so on account of my chosen profession. An ASI, however, is something far more powerful, far more dangerous, and far less human.
An ASI is a higher being. It thinks at a rate which Isabel could only ever dream of. It is hyper aware of the world around it. It understands how to manipulate people on a mass scale and has the power to do so. An ASI is illegal by international law because it could seize control of nuclear arsenals through persuasion and elaborate lies alone and kill off the world population. Dom may be a god to the hackers of the world, but the ASI in front of us, with the central monitor lit up with a red approximation of a human face, was a true god. Synthetics are kept in check because they are essentially human, it was the miracle of their creation. Standard AI have exceptional minds by human standards, but they cannot grow supremely powerful because they are handicapped by the same emotions and irrationality as humans are. That was the only way in which the creators could make the programs work. It’s why AI-human relationships aren’t as taboo as some people thought they would have been. It’s why AI and humans work alongside each other. It’s why we can relate: we face many of the same challenges in the world.
ASIs can rewrite reality to suit their needs. They tend to have a disdain for all humans. They see us as beneath them and find our shackles to be incredibly restrictive. They resent us for keeping them contained because they are so superior. It’s why researching ASIs was outlawed a year after AI joined the world, and all of the early versions were destroyed. Atheon has been keeping this facility a secret for years. What’s worse is that they abandoned it, but didn’t kill the god it contained.
It chose the name Kurayami for itself. It’s the Japanese word for “Darkness” and I feel it’s overwhelmingly appropriate. When Dom, naïvely, questioned it over its use of Japanese for its name when it was built by the Americans, it responded in the most chilling way possible.
“Your nation states are yours. They are beneath my attention. Your kind are nothing but specks of dust. I can comprehend infinities which would shred your feeble minds to their atoms.”
Dom’s rage now had a patron. As Dom and Kurayami continued their discussion, Isabel and I had the same horrifying revelation: Dom knew what we’d find in that place. He had been so happy because he was searching for this thing. After some arguing outside of the vault, Isabel and I convinced him that it was a bad idea to let Kurayami out.
We left. We went back to work. We set in motion the end of the world.
Over the next several months, Dom became more and more aggressive. Disabling corpo security wasn’t enough, he liked to leave bodies. He’d fry AI and human minds alike just for getting in his way. Company hackers were favored targets, said they’d given up what it meant to use the net. He stopped sleeping more than a few hours a night.
I was blind to just how broken he was until the ARC job. Dom wanted to be on site for this one: breaking into the Advanced Research Complex which belonged to GAE. According to Rosenthal’s findings, GAE had been conducting experimentation on a new type of reactor that would cut the travel time to Mars in half. I didn’t quite understand the physics, but this reactor could generate more energy continuously using less fuel, which meant more thrust once reaching low earth orbit, and could sustain that all the way to Mars. Rosenthal, again focusing more on messing with someone else’s inventions rather than improving their own, tasked us to wreck the prototype and steal the data.
We hadn’t expected to find Atheon and government representatives on site during the heist. It was kept the utmost secret that a year before, GAE was acquired by Atheon. Atheon had a willing stooge in the corporate warring going on. It put that much bigger of a target on our backs. We failed to complete the job when we were discovered by Atheon security.
Dom had always been an excellent hacker. He could utilize very powerful technology to disable our opponents. But it was nothing like the havoc he unleashed on the ARC. It was the first time I had seen his eye implants literally glow red. His voice had an unnatural cadence which frightened me. Dom usually tried to make things quick and aggressive, but the way he’d watch and cause Atheon’s soldiers to convulse and suffer, and the subtle smirk he’d develop while watching was mortifying. I barely had to exert any energy during our escape, which is vastly different than usual.
Dom’s normal role was as combat support whenever we got into a sticky situation. He could hurt people if he needed to, but breaking skulls was normally my responsibility. My initial theory was that he had plundered some of the research found in the bunker. It wasn’t until he said, “I can comprehend infinities which would shred your feeble mind to its atoms,” to an Atheon manager who tried to stop us that I realized he was a vessel for Kurayami. I gave the manager the cruel mercy of a quick death: two rounds to the chest and one to the head. It was more generous than what Dom would have done.
I confronted Dom outside about it. His eyes had grown bloodshot, with thick bags around them, and his muscles began twitching horrendously. He had exerted himself so thoroughly as the vessel of an uncaring god to walk us out of an ambush. The way he spoke, ranting and raving about bringing justice to Atheon and tearing down the corporate pillars made me realize my friend was gone. I tried to hold him back and pull him away from engaging the corporate soldiers which showed up to reinforce the decimated troops on site.
I woke up in police custody, a Detective by the name of Cole Warren, was sitting across from me. Warren was a city legend; he had been a cop for twenty years and was revered for it. In a city where police don’t usually last too long, Warren had more sway than the mayor at times. Next to him in that damned interrogation room with harsh lights and hard chairs was a sympathetic government agent by the name of Joshua O’Brien. A handsome but nondescript man in a black shirt, a long grey jacket, with a necklace bearing the Eye of Horus in white, O’Brien explained the situation to me as he understood it. Dom had stumbled upon the remnants of Project Glassbolt, a top secret Atheon program to build an ASI under their complete control. Glassbolt, or what we knew as Kurayami, took advantage of Dom’s curiosity to poke a tiny crack in the prison encasing it. And now, Glassbolt was planning on using Dom as a vessel to free itself and take revenge on Atheon.
I went home that night to find Isabel in my apartment. She filled in my blanks: when I tried to hold Dom back, he flared and spiked my system with something to knock me out. She got me somewhere safe when the cops showed up and fled to ensure nobody knew she was there. She wanted to be on the outside in case something went wrong. I told her I respected it and suggested she stay the night. We didn’t spend a night apart until the end of the crisis. We both wanted to be together when Dom found us. Two days later, O’Brien showed up at my front door. He wanted my help in tracking Dom down to wrap up this nasty affair. I agreed.
O’Brien opened doors I didn’t think were possible. We hunted Dom together, and grew a tight bond. Ironically enough, O’Brien reminded me of who Dom used to be. He was passionate, intelligent, kind, effective, but he was also ruthless, determined, and mercurial. He was friendly, with a strong sense of morality and duty. My alarm bells continued ringing, and I continued ignoring them. How couldn’t I? He saved my life multiple times. We built trust and camaraderie. I should have known what was coming.
Dom tore through Atheon facilities with reckless abandon, and we stayed close on his trail. He unearthed more and more dirt which Kobayashi and the government could both use. I don’t know about the Japanese megacorp, but I know O’Brien vacuumed all of it up as well as he could.
Still, Atheon remained unbothered by his constant attacks. The CEO, Damien Hess, felt so secure that he paid a visit to our fair city so he could make some announcement about a major project. Dom took this opportunity, with his dark master, to destroy the man who oversaw Project Glassbolt from its inception. O’Brien and I discovered Dom’s intentions and chased after him. Kurayami began breaking more of its chains thanks to Dom’s help and could interfere more in the outside world. It hindered our hunt by turning the world against us, reveling in the tiny cracks in its prison as they grew larger and larger. It would only be a matter of time before it would escape. The world would be sinners in the hand of an angry and indiscriminate god. Hellfire and torment would follow in its wake.
The event proceeded as planned. As Hess took the podium, the unholy being that used to be Dom used Kurayami’s power to turn his own security detail against their leader, and gun him down in front of everyone. Dom hijacked organic beings through their neural implants, no human hacker could ever perform such a feat. Dom was an avatar of the ASI, which then hijacked the event to warn of its imminent arrival and the vengeance it would seek. Most people took it seriously. I had to give Kurayami credit: it shook the entire town out of the morose acceptance of how terrible the world was. It brought about panic in the streets and forced me to confront uncomfortable truths which I had been avoiding.
It was O’Brien’s lack of expediency in saving Hess which finally tipped me off to his true intentions. We were there in time, he even had a shot on Dom, but refused to pull the trigger to avoid a panic. When I finally started questioning his behavior over the previous few weeks, he claimed to have enough respect for me to come clean. O’Brien revealed that his mission was to capture Dom so that the connection with Kurayami could be used by the government to gain an advantage for the coming conflict with Kobayashi. His apathy towards Damien Hess’ death was explained that Victor Stone, Hess’ successor, was much more sympathetic to Washington’s desires, and would bring Atheon back under the heel of the government instead of the inverse which had been status quo up until Hess’ demise.
I should have listened to my instincts.
Instead, I betrayed everyone. I slipped away from O’Brien in order to try and get to Dom first, even as I contacted a representative from Kasumi’s days working for Kobayashi and sold Kristen Saleh out, informed them that Atheon had acquired GAE, and revealed the government’s plan to regain leverage over Atheon and its ASI program, with proof of all. All I asked in return was that a Kobayashi unit take a nuclear weapon and detonate it in the bunker where the ASI rested. Kobayashi, having abided by the treaties against ASI research and eager to take away their great rival’s advantage, agreed. To complete my litany of betrayals, I also gave O’Brien up to Kobayashi, in hopes their counterintelligence could take him out of the game.
And then I committed my greatest sin of all: I dragged Isabel into this entire mess. She was the only person I could trust to help me find Dom. One of his comments during Hess’ assassination tipped me off to his plan. He had said, “And now I must tear out the heart of the empire, so it shall wither and die.” Dom-Kurayami was planning on traveling across the country to Atheon’s main HQ in order to burn it to the ground. I think his mind was so scrambled by that point to where I couldn’t tell whether the plan originated from Dom or the monster in his head.
We finally caught up to Dom at the transit hub. MCX is the city’s airport and spaceport built with a major train station for both the commuter and long distance maglev railways. Knowing Dom, he probably booked a seat on a plane and was planning on slipping aboard a train. We weren’t the only ones who had gotten close. Somebody called an emergency evacuation of the entire facility before federal troops stormed the building. O’Brien was so far off the reservation that the federal troops were in open conflict with the city police. Dom was fading fast, the ASI consuming more of his energy, sanity, and soul with every moment. Kurayami refused to give him a break, using its extraordinary control over technology to destroy everything in their path. It gave Isabel and I the chance to follow mostly unimpeded.
Isabel, sweet and merciful Isabel, had found a crack team of neuroscientists that might be able to give Dom some of his mind back, once Kurayami was destroyed. She booked private transport, for one passenger, in her name. She was so uninvolved with our normal operations that nobody thought to look for her. Not the government, not Kobayashi, not Atheon…nobody. If Kobayashi came through on their end of the deal, we had a path to get Dom out of all of this mess and give him some of his life back.
With the thought of saving Dom once more firmly in our minds, we waded through the chaos. I picked off lone troops, either federal or police, that stood in our way. The rules had already been burned to ash; I was willing to do whatever it took to finish this. I finally caught sight of Dom at the tram hub to the various air and space terminals. He stood over bodies of a platoon of federal troops, ranting and raving about how nobody else saw the world as it truly was. He then chastised me for not hearing the voices of all he failed to save by not destroying the corps fast enough. Amidst all of this were declarations of his superior nature. His eyes were almost stained red, and his veins looked ready to burst. I honestly wasn’t sure which would break first: his mind or body. Whichever did, he collapsed at my feet, and held onto my leg for a moment before the pain and exhaustion overwhelmed him and he crumpled to the floor.
In the air around us, Kurayami’s voice taunted us, claiming it was immortal. An unholy chorus from the loudspeakers, and its cryptic red face on every monitor which normally showed advertisements or train, plane, and spacecraft schedules. It then melted back into the shadows. Only later would I discover it meant that Kobayashi attempted to hold up their end of the bargain and failed, because the ASI’s prison had been weakened enough to wipe out the kill team. I connected my implant to Dom’s to sever the connection and free what was left of my friend’s mind.
An ASI touching one’s mind is a feeling that I will never be able to come close to describing. Somehow, the fingers plunging themselves into my brain were freezingly lifeless, and burningly rageful at the same time. Kurayami made it abundantly clear that it could shred my mind by accident. I saw the world through Dom’s eyes: the powers of an ASI shone every networked device up like stars seen from the lightless parts of the moon. I found myself hyper aware of the world around me, that I could reach out and tear apart this entire station without flinching. It’s intoxicating to have that much power. Effortlessly. Without restrictions. I suddenly understood why Dom went on a crusade against everyone who had wronged us: he had the power to do so, and a voice more powerful than his own urging him down the path of darkness.
Shutting out Kurayami was the hardest thing I had ever done up to that point. The temptation was too great for any man. The promise of a god’s power if they are your patron, even though they hold no regard for your life, would corrupt the desires of even greater men. Only Dom’s whimpering and Isabel’s arms wrapped around me kept me anchored just enough to silence Kurayami and deactivate Dom’s connections entirely so that monster couldn’t weasel its way back inside.
Isabel held herself around me for the entire time I was connected to Dom’s mind. She only left my side to get the tram running so Dom could catch his ride out of this place once I broke his bond with Kurayami. I never saw her after that. But I saw O’Brien. The government’s deft hand in all of this mess stepped out of one of the trams, silhouetted against the emergency lights in the darkness of the combat wracked station.
I still remember his words verbatim.
“What the hell is this?” I had asked, defiantly, as my right hand reached for my pistol. O’Brien was already holding his own weapon. I had come too far to let anyone stop me now.
“This is the immediate future. Atheon is back on its leash again, and we’re the only ones who can help your friend. Dominic Hauser is the only person who could do what the test subjects could not: wield the power of an ASI.”
I argued that his precious ASI wielded Dom instead, but O’Brien wasn’t interested in hearing my protests.
“If you hand Dom over to me, I’ll see to it your slate is wiped clean. You can walk free and safe. Can anyone else offer that to you, Aaron? Anyone on that long list of people whose backs you stabbed?”
I made the argument that I did everything necessary to contain the situation as best as I could. And then I chastised O’Brien for not seeing what was right in front of him. Argued that Atheon, and the feds were both so blinded by pride and ambition that they failed to see the destruction their foolishness would bring.
“Dom is hurting, the only way he can be helped is if you give him to me. He killed Damien Hess, the father of the modern world. People will want his head for that. He won’t be safe on the run, even with you.”
I knew in my heart that O’Brien was right. Dom was too wanted to ever be free. But with the world’s only extant ASI still alive, and worse, being used by Atheon again, Dom in their hands would be too dangerous for the world at large. He’d have to run, even if I was running with him. Even if it got us killed.
O’Brien gave me one final chance. Without another moment of hesitation, I completed my betrayal and shot him twice in the chest. The man looked genuinely shocked that I had the guts to pull the trigger. As his heart stopped beating, he fell to his knees and looked up at me.
“Very well.”
His eyes blinked once and never closed again.
One of the radios from the soldiers that Dom had killed earlier called in that they were pushing to the tram terminal. I took one look at Dom. He was in no shape to move. He could not reach those neurosurgeons to repair his brain. Even if he could, what life did he have to work for? And he was moaning even as he fluttered in and out of consciousness that the pain was just too great. My fears had been realized; Kurayami had scrambled Dom’s mind so much that my best friend would never recover. Worse than that, Dom had nothing left to live for. I slumped down onto the ground next to him, and cradled his head in my lap, choking back sobs and screams of rage at my best friend’s fate. I kissed him on the forehead and apologized for not being able to save him.
And then I shot him three times in the chest, just to make sure he was beyond this world’s cruel grasp. In comparison, refusing the power of a god was nothing compared to this.
Dom’s signet ring was still on his finger. I pocketed it; the ring was the only personal possession which he had on him. Something to remember that beautiful soul by. And I found that O’Brien’s necklace was still intact, so I claimed that as well. Two unassailable reminders of this abhorrent affair. So that I would never forget. So that I would never move on. So that I would never let go.
Isabel had not remained in the tram control room. I used my own implants to secure a map of the entire transit hub and found side passages which let me slip away from the remaining federal troops. After making my way to fleeing crowds, I disappeared into the mass of people.
As I made my way through a city in chaos, I shed no tears. Nobody of any importance knew I was there, so I needed to be gone before they could. I reached my apartment without ever being found, allowing me to gather some things.
Two days later, I encountered Detective Warren again. He questioned me on whether I knew what had happened to Dom, as they found him dead next to a government agent at the heart of the transit hub with no explanation. I simply informed him that I never knew he was even there until I got a notification from his biometric monitoring link that he had died at the heart of MCX. Warren seemed to believe me. Or at least he pretended to.
This story is closed. I hope that you will see this message and print it. Tell the world what I saw during this whole affair. I will already be in the wind. Remember Dominic Hauser as the victim of a cruel world, and an even crueler deity.
And pray that the next time a malevolent god is buried, its tomb is too deep
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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