After Darren left the room, I spent a little time working on the medical VI. Again, it was only a relatively short time, but I managed to make some progress. It would still take me months to finish it, at this speed, but it was no priority anyway.

Suddenly I remembered that I wanted a new cyber chair. To be honest, I wanted several. After all, the others had begun to spend more and more time in VR. And these things were not that expensive.

Naturally, I had my personal design, tailored specifically to me. And it would take only four to five hours of the indyfab to make it. But in the same amount of time, I could easily make a complete set of ultra-bandwidth jack and cranial board, providing me with around $35 million, while a very good cyber chair, or as it was usually known a gaming chair, that was nearly as good as my design would cost me around $12k.

If the difference would have been significant, I would have made my chair, and bought commercial ones for the others, but as it was, I would be hard-pressed to notice the difference.

Still, I ordered several sizes, and in the end, spent a bit over a million dollars on them. My comfort, and that of the others, was worth it though.

Done with that task, I dedicated the last hour before bedtime to studying gravitics.

The next morning, I was, as usual, the first one up, and I decided to make a big breakfast.

Homemade bread rolls, scrambled eggs, bacon, and pancakes for all.

And just in time, the horde descended onto the mess room, some of them looking quite bewildered, and mostly still in sleeping wear.

I had taken the time to defrost some of the orange juice concentrate and prepared a pitcher of that.

“You are just in time. Breakfast is ready. Sit down and dig in.”

Jacky rubbed her eyes, and sleepily shuffled towards the table while asking:

“Not that I don’t appreciate this, but why?”

I shrugged and placed the last of the pancakes on the table.

“Why not? I wanted it, so here we have it.”

I then sat down as well, while the others one by one took place.

“You might have to use pepper and salt on the eggs to your taste.”

Mia looked at me suspiciously but still heaped some eggs and bacon onto her plate.

“So… what do you want for this?”

I looked back at her, slightly confused.

“Uhm, eating it? Was there a reason not to make breakfast this morning?”

“Oh, come on, you want something. Just spit it out.”

“No, seriously, I was up early and felt like a big breakfast. That’s all.”

Mark laid his hand on hers, and pressed softly, while Christine shook her head.

“Don’t listen to her. We others love it. If miss grumpy pants doesn’t like it, she can eat whatever the replicator spews out. What are these by the way?”

With that, she gestured towards the pancakes.

“Oh, these are pancakes. They are sweet, so put a bit of butter on them, and some preserve or sirup. Sorry, but I only have industrial preserve and synthetic syrup.”

I proceeded to pack a small stack onto my plate, adding some butter and generously drowsing it in syrup.

“So, anything new about Yang?” The question from Natalie came from nowhere. I just shrugged, but Darren smiled evilly and nodded.

“Yep, Vi… Veronica here gave us the way to take him out without triggering the mousetrap.”

I was a bit unsure, did he just nearly use my real name? But in the end, I decided I must have misheard him.

That only left the question about how I gave them the way.

“Uhm, I did? How?”

“You found out that Yang is a druggy.”

Most of the others, except for Mia and Jacky, hummed knowingly and mostly made signs of understanding and consent. We other three on the other hand just got more confused. Jacky tentatively lifted her hand.

“Ehm, can you… explain that for a bit? I don’t think I understand.”

Mark chuckled, and Natalie tenderly petted Jacky’s other hand, while she answered her lover:

“Remember, Darren is a Psionic. He can… influence some people. He is not strong enough to make them do things they don’t want to, but he can make them do things they are inclined to do anyway.

It is not the first time we took out a junkie by Darren making him take a fatal overdose.”

And Mark continued:

“And with the asshole taking an overdose, by seemingly his own free will, nobody can blame the whores. Well, at least not realistically. If the corpo-rats really want to cause a blood bath there, they will, pretext or no pretext.”

Now I understood. But the reminder that Darren was a Psionic tickled something inside me. Nothing concrete yet, but it meant something, I just did not know yet what.

I was still milling about it when I realized that Christine had said something to me.

I shook my head clear and looked at her.

“Sorry, I was somewhere else. What did you want?”

She frowned a bit, but asked her question again:

“I said I am a bit disappointed that you have not commented on the former slaves leaving.”

I felt my eyes go wide, and my mouth fall open. They have left?

My stammered reaction to that was: “For real?”

They all looked at me in wonder, before a wave of laughter sounded around the table.

After nearly a minute or so, they got themselves under enough control that Mark could ask me:

“Seriously? You have seriously not even noticed it? Fuck, Red, you are so… oblivious.”

Christine groaned and shook her head before she addressed Darren:

“Fuck, man, you called it. Again. How do you do it all the time? Shit, I was so sure that this time you had to be wrong. I mean, how the hell could she not even realize that they left?”

Unfortunately, Mia used that moment to throw a barb at me: “Because she is a self-centered, selfish little bitch, if you ask me.”

Instantly the good mood evaporated, and I heard Kate growl, which by the way was an extremely unsettling sound.

“Shut up. Red might be oblivious, and completely absorbed in her work, but she is not selfish.”

Natalie continued: “Yeah, she is… a bit dense about people, but at least she tries. That is not something we can say about everybody sitting here at this table right now.”

Even I realized that the last part was directed at Mia, but that was… not important right now. We all knew that she was… difficult.

“No, seriously, they have left? When?”

Ryan chuckled again for a bit.

“Around three weeks ago. They did not feel right living in this house where they were raped and tortured for so long. So they took their money and left.”

“But… why did I not know about it?”

“That… is the question, isn’t it? Did you not notice that they were no longer here all this time?”

I thought hard, but no, I did not. In all honesty, they blurred into the background for me.

“No… sorry, but not really. Why did nobody tell me about it?”

Darren snorted before he answered me: “To be honest, we took bets when you would notice.”

My face fell. Did they really think of me that badly?

But Darren continued:

“Not that we don’t like you, but… you are a bit hard to approach. Most of the time you are either in your lab, doing who knows what research, or in cyberspace, doing who knows what.

And sorry, but it is typical you to simply forget about them. We know you try to get a bit closer to us, but accept it, you are not a peoples person. I bet that you would barely even notice if we all were gone.”

My face heated up. While he was not wrong, it was an uncomfortable truth. Heck, I had spent nearly 10 years in real life mostly alone, the only human interaction during that time just another weekly mental torture session. But I honestly tried to do better… and to realize that I failed so badly was painful.

“No… don’t go there. You are doing better. Hell, expecting you to do even better than you do now would be expecting miracles.”

Sadly, Mia used that exact moment to inject her opinion: “Speak only for yourself. I think she could do much better.”

A venomous “You mean like you?” from Natalie brought it into perspective, just not for Mia.

“Yes, like me. I am much more social than her.”

“You are an unlikeable bitch. We suffer your presence for Mark, but believe me, nobody of us will be heartbroken when he realizes how fucked up you are and boots you to the curb. V here on the other hand tries to be better, she just doesn’t know how yet. But in general, she is nice enough, you just have to make her realize the issue.”

When Mia opened her mouth to answer, a sudden band announced that Kate had enough, when she hit the tabletop with all four fists.

“Enough! Let us not ruin this nice breakfast any further. Change the topic and eat.”

We all dug further into the food, but the good mood was gone.

When we were done, I began to clear the table, but Darren stopped me.

“Let Jacky and Mia do that for once, please. We can use this moment to talk about the plan with Yang.”

I sat back down, shrugging.

“Ok, if you need me.”

“I don’t think it would work without you. We need a plausible com blackout for the guards to make it work, and it would be way better if you could edit me out of any footage they record.”

“That should be easy enough. Sure, if they look they will find out that somebody edited a person out, but when the guards talk about you, they know that anyway.”

He chuckled, together with the others.

“That is the point. They won’t tell them about me. They won’t even remember me being there. But I have no influence on computers.

If you were not here, available, I would still manage it, but I would have to mask myself, physically that is. With you here, well, the guards won’t know, and the computers won’t know.”

I nodded.

“Ok, that is plausible. Can you tell me what exactly you plan on doing?”

“That is simple. I will intercept him when he enters Manton street, and with a tiny touch, I can make him feel the need for his fix. A need that can’t be satiated. He will, in one word, take one dose after another. I’ll also make the guards a bit inattentive. Not too much, we don’t want Shieldwall to investigate why they acted that way. Just enough that they don’t see Yang taking his drugs.

And that is where the com blackout comes into play. It has to happen when the overdose sets in.”

I frowned.

“But with modern nano-tech, they will be able to get him back.”

Natalie interjected:

“Remember, he shuts down his biomon, so PEES won’t know about it until they get the notification that the contract is terminated. And if the guards can’t call for help… he doesn’t use a skimmer, so he will be in traffic for at least 30 minutes, if not more. With a severe overdose, that is way too long.”

“Oh, I see. But they will be suspicious about the com blackout.”

“That is why I asked if you can make it plausible. Anything that seems legit.” Darren sounded sure of himself.

I thought for a moment. Then I had an idea.

“Do we know when Yang started this whole ‘fun’?”

Natalie shrugged but took out her tablet.

“Yeah, I think so, why?”

“I had an idea. I can manipulate the logs of the security system so that it shows suspicious activity a few months before Yang began his carnage. And then trigger an automated audit, which then crashes the whole computer system for an hour or so.”

Mark shook his head questioning.

“Huh, I thought the whole idea was to make it seem like something natural? If the whole system crashes, it will be hard to make that seem to stick.”

But Christine just laughed.

“Oh, that is sneaky. What she proposes is making it look as if somebody hacked the system a few months before the plan was hatched, when the hookers had no reason to go after Yang, and now a routine operation just triggered a land mine.”

“And when I do it early enough, there is no system that might record Darren. I’ll have to do it when Yang and his thugs have already left, but before he reaches the red light district. Should be no problem.”

I was, in my head, already planning on where I would place the blame. There were a few Jacks that, frankly, deserved a nice increase in their bounty. Not that it would do them much harm, but a tiny bit more attention… why not?

Of course, it would have to be somebody from the US, but that was no problem. There were around 200 Jacks all over the United States. And a couple of them were… not nice. A couple of them had even tried to lock horns with me. Well, with Seraphim, not Spectre.

That was before I had reached my current status as a tech when I operated as Spectre’s broker.

And one of them… let’s say while there were a few that I thought deserved it a bit more, none of them would go after a B-class corp in NYC.

I could not help grinning a bit evilly at the thought of Tr4c3r N0v4 getting a bit of a spanking.

I even had some of his combat utilities, that I stole from him early on. One of them made a decent data mine, and in the right place would shut down the whole network for a couple of days.

“Ok, that sounds good. Of course, timing is everything. We can’t have Shieldwall stop Yang from going, but when the com system is down…”

“Do we have a way to stop Shieldwall from calling them on a personal com?”

Urgh, ok that could be ugly. Unlikely as it was, if it happened it could ruin everything. Hm, cascading failure… yes, that could work.

“I… think I can. I can induce a cascading failure in the Brooklyn matrix. That should take out all communication there.”

Kate rubbed her chin.

“But would that not be extremely unlikely to happen at the same time that their in-house com system is down? Could look kinda sus.”

“That is why I’ll make it a cascading failure. I’ll set it up so that it is the crash of the matrix that triggers the data mine. And I will frame Tracer for the Matrix crash as well. He should be happy about the notoriety. Might give him even enough bounty that he can knock on the Abyss’ door.”

Darren had to be a bit of a spoilsport though.

“Don’t you think that is a bit of overkill? We don’t need the whole Matrix in Brooklyn down. We only need maybe half an hour of Shieldwall not calling Yang and his thugs back home.”

I sighed.

“Fine. I can also trigger several alarms inside the building. Fire, attack, biological, nuclear, and whatever else they have the alarms for set up. Should make all of them confused for a few minutes. Together with the lights flickering, the automatic doors opening and closing randomly, every speaker blaring some other automated message, it should be enough to make them forget about the people they have away.”

I think my look made it clear that I was not amused by him curtailing my fun. And the bastard had the gall to just smiled at me.

“Well, how long do you need to set that up?”

“I’ll have to prepare the data mine and place it at the right point, forge the logs, and then initialize the audit. Then remove all traces of me, and then get out of there. So, a minute or so.”

Mark coughed at that.

“A minute? Seriously?”

“For one, that equals four hours for me, and for two, I did all of the hard work yesterday. Now I have just to log into the system and configure the changes. A full minute is with a generous buffer if something goes wrong. But even if it takes longer, I plan with 15 minutes, and just set the trigger accordingly.”

Mark had the decency to turn red.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about this time thingy. Still can’t wrap my head around it.”

“Ok, I think we have a working plan. Only thing is to call the client and ask them if that is what they want. If they want to send a message, we will have to go with the original plan, and they have to eat the response.”

Natalie folded her hands in front of her.

“Or has anybody anything to improve now?”

Nobody had, and by now the table was cleared, so we all stood up.

When I saw Darren walk out of the room, the thing nagging in my mind suddenly clicked.

Frankly, I suddenly got angry and rushed after him.

“Darren, can you wait a moment, please?” I think I managed to make it clear that I viewed that not as an option.

He stopped, sighed, and turned towards me.

“How about we talk about it in your lab. I am sure you don’t want everybody hearing what we are saying.” He almost immediately confirmed my suspicion, and I took a deep breath but nodded.

“Yes, I think you are right.”

When we came to the lab, I held the hand up for Ryan, who was on guard duty.

“I think it is better if you wait outside.”

He looked at me questioningly.

“Fuck, Kitten, the way your mood just changed, I think I should be with you.”

“I’ll have Warden control the automatic defense. If something happens, he won’t survive it. But… if what I think is true, these are some seriously dangerous topics for me. Ben Walker knows about it, or at least everything important. But I want to keep it as small as possible.”

He sighed but nodded.

“Ok, as you wish. I just hope you are right, and it doesn’t explode in our faces.”

In the lab, I closed the door, and then looked at Darren accusingly.

“How long have you’ve been reading my mind?”

He leaned against one of the tables.

“It is not quite how you think it is.”

I lifted my eyebrow.

“So you have not violated my privacy by listening to my thoughts? Or is there another way you knew about Max, how much he stole from me? Or my real name?”

“Yes, and no. Can I try to explain it to you, please?”

I angrily balled my fists and took a few deep breaths, but in the end, nodded.

“Fine. But I really hope it is a good explanation.”

“Ok, first, I think I have to explain how telepathy works. It is not me digging into your brain, stealing your thoughts from it. I can do something like that, don’t get me wrong, but it takes a large amount of concentration and energy.

What I usually ‘use’” He literally made the air quotes with the word use, “is basically something that you can view as an extra pair of ears.

Everybody, and I mean everybody with that, more or less throws their thoughts out into the environment, and we Psionics can hear them.”

I growled.

“And you have not learned to not listen? You want me to believe that? You would go insane in days. Try again.”

He scoffed.

“No, it is a bit more complicated than that. Not listening takes concentration as well. But that is not the point here.

What is important is how, well let’s say loud and clear people project their thoughts. We have found a few factors.

The race is an important one. Psionics are barely noticeable. The same with Mutants like Kate. Normal humans are generally much louder.”

He took a deep breath.

“And then we come to Pures. For some reason, Pures are exceptionally understandable. Another factor is, frankly, native intelligence. The dumber they are, the more muted they are. Conversely, the smarter they are…”

He let that peter out, and I could slowly get an idea of what had happened.

“And I am more on the intelligent side.”

He scoffed again.

“Talk about an understatement. Fuck, one of the reasons we left Seattle a couple of months after getting there was that I had problems turning out all the Pures. But you are in a league of your own.

I’ve never encountered a mind that brilliant, that clear and loud.

Fuck, I can hear you clear from the other side of the building if you are agitated. And believe me, I tried to ignore it.

But it is as if I tried to ignore somebody with a megaphone screaming into my ear at times.

It is better if you are calm. Then I can be in the same room with you and not have to listen to it.

That, by the way, is one of the reasons why I try to help you with your mental baggage. Not the sole reason, I honestly like you and wish for you to be better.

Also, when you are in the matrix… well, at low compression it is hard to follow your thoughts, so I can ignore them. At high compression, it becomes an incessant background droning, but you usually are quite relaxed and happy in cyberspace.”

But of course, whenever I was upset he had to listen. And naturally, whenever I was upset, I tended to think about quite a few of my secrets.

“So, what have you found out about me? Really?”

He sighed again.

“Before I answer, I want to make it clear that I am no threat to you. I’ve known about it for months now and said nothing. And you should assume that I know all your secrets.”

I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten.

“Yes, even that secret. But think about it. You fucked over some corps. Do you think I am upset about that? Hell, I applaud you for that. Yes, the bounty is… substantial, but seriously, even if I were so inclined to turn you in, do you really think that they actually pay it out? To a mercenary? Get real.”

I was trembling, partly with anger, partly with fear.

Fuck, he knew all along.

“So… you could have helped me all along with Frankel?”

He shrugged.

“Not really. Sure, I realized after the first day what you were up to, but, sorry, we were in the same boat. I did influence the tech-head so that he was more fixated on your board, but that was weak, as I could not reach him.”

A sat down at my desk, placing my head on it.

“And what now?”

“Now nothing changes. I’ll still try to help you get calmer, and try to ignore your thoughts, but in the end, I think I already know most of your secrets. I don’t plan on revealing any of them.

Fuck, if I did that, what do you think Warden would do to me and my friends? Do you think I would survive her releasing the Lamb? Especially if she directly targets me? Nope, not happening. So, yes, I can destroy you. And then she will destroy me. We have reached the point of mutually assured destruction.

But unlike the old nations using that balance of power, we are not enemies. I still think of us as friends.

Oh, and before you ask, no, none of the others know anything about it. But, seriously, you should give up the false name. It played its course. And you like Vivian much more than Veronica.”

I shrugged my shoulders, without lifting my head.

“I’ll have to think about it. For real, I can’t even begin to really understand it yet. I need to calm down first.”

“I understand. Are you still up to helping us later?”

Did he think I would just jump off because of that? But, well, he was right in a sense, I was pretty upset. But I’ve never broken my word if I could help it.

“I’ve given my word. I’ll help you. I… honestly don’t know about after, but for that one Op I will.”