“So, there was this little home for wayward youths...I swear the children there were all ungrateful, little, ne’er’-do-wells, I swear… Anyway, the old biddy that ran the home was threatening to sue the company for some alleged slight or the other...Some nonsense about nanite-corruption in the waterline...And well let’s just say, that it’s quite fortunate that their part of their arcology ended up having a critical malfunction in their ventilation and air purification systems,” said a man.

“Hm? Oh, was that the old Bennet Mega-Tower? Wasn’t that one of Ivanhoe Residential's buildings...And isn’t Residential a subsidiary of your Nautilus-Behemoth Corp? Tsk, tsk, are you so shameless as to pretend that ‘that’ was an accident?” said another man.

The first man just laughed and shrugged, his palms pointed towards the sky.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to plead the fifth on that one, old bean. As far as I’m concerned that was just good old-fashioned bad luck for them, and good luck for us,” said the man.

“Speaking of bad luck, how about that explosion that wiped out that little plant of yours, Charles?” said another man.

“Pft, I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I can say is that Lost-Sleipnir mourns the loss of all those workers in its Decem city plant, and regardless of the fact that they were trying to unionize, we still send our condolences and well-wishes to their families,” said the man named Charles.

“Uh-huh...And how's that investigation, into exactly what went wrong, going?” said a woman.

“No comment…” said the man named Charles. His answer drew raucous laughter from the crowd.

Emilia Li was an alumni of the prestigious Hopefield College. The Hopefield College was a school attended by many of the executives, senior managers, and officials that ran Mega-City Decem. Emilia was technically here on business, but she was also attending an alumni reunion that the school was throwing. Which was how she’d ended up being walled in by a group of dull, shameless, highly-inebriated, folk who’d gathered at a corner of the venue to chat. The conversation had taken a weird turn where all they were doing now was using innuendo, and implication, to brag about past misdeeds.

Thus one part of her mind was focused on the task of monitoring the programs that were helping her hack Hopefields’ networks, and backtrace through their encrypted logs, so they could siphon and copy the school’s financial records for one of Emilia’s clients. While another part of Emilia’s mind had to stay focused on socializing, while her auditory and ocular implants took records every word that was said and all the mouths that were saying it.

The folks here thought they were being smart, but the corporate landscape of Lux-Aqua-Tempestas had been a den of vipers for so long, that their clumsy attempts at doublespeak, equivocating, and liability-distancing was far from enough to protect them. They’d already said enough that any gumshoe with the drive, and any court with the motivation to sink their teeth in, would be able to cause these people and their corporate masters a fair amount of grief.

Emilia hadn’t set out to get “this” kind of intel but she’d be happy to take it and sell it all the same. Justice might well have gone the way of the unicorns and dragons in Lux-Aqua, but one could always trust that the eternal competition of the corps would ensure that a corp that was caught red-handed doing the kind of evil shit that they all did, would be properly punished. If only so that the company’s competitors could drag it down, get a pound of flesh and a leg up in the economic environment. It was risky business, but lately, it was of the sort of risk that Emilia was willing to take on.

The evening passed relatively peacefully, with Emilia allowing loads of lecherous old men and the occasional old woman, to try and ply her with liquor. Trusting that her augmented immune-system and her metabolic filters would keep her from actually getting drunk. Meanwhile, her partners would get drunker and drunker until they either wandered off, or passed out. Each of those executives and political magnates getting escorted away by their private security teams.

Eventually, Emilia had to make her own exit. She’d noticed some alarming movement in Hopefield's security. They were on to her. They didn’t know who she was yet, or where she was, but they must have been alerted to Emilia’s digital snooping. Emilia could only sigh at this.

The problem wasn’t one of Emilia having bad tech, or bad software. The problem was her. She mostly did physical work. IRL thievery, and so-called social hacking, that was limited to befriending, or tricking, people with the right passwords and certifications, to get her where she needed to be, in a semi-legitimate fashion

As far as her cyber-hacking and technical expertise went, Emilia was middling at best. She barely understood the code, in most freelancer circles she’d be considered your textbook script-kiddie. The only reason she’d dared to take on the particular job she was dealing with, was because her scripts and tech were of a beyond exceptional level. The sort of tech that could only belong to the sort of hyper-advanced aliens that people would meet, lose their minds after seeing the faces of, and then spend the rest of their lives on the funny farm afterward.

It was technology that didn’t just stop at bordering on being magic. The tech was so good, that Emilia was still able to finish the job despite her screw-up and leisurely exit the building. Hailing a self-driving cab, scrubbing her transaction from the cab and cab company’s records, and then stopping on a certain street a good distance away from Hopefield, only to hail another cab that would take her to her actual destination on the opposite end of the city.

By the time, Emilia Li emerged from that second cab, she was no longer Emilia Li. The utterance of a few passphrases, and engagement with a strange reality-altering UI, that created more questions than Emilia would dare ever try to have answered, had returned Emilia Li back to being good old-fashioned Emily Yang. Her original self.

“Hmph...That really is too damned uncanny,” muttered Emily. Shaking her head as the cobwebs left it.

If she was a paranoid type, or the sort to spend any real-time thinking about life rather than just living her life, the very concept of the “New-Identity-in-a-box”, or “NIIAB” product that she’d bought from a certain store should have filled Emily with a great amount of existential dread. The NIIAB didn’t just create false personas, they artificially created real personas. Real identities with histories, backgrounds, families, and friends...to match the records that were generated.

The NIIAB went far beyond merely supplying the assortment of digital and legal certifications and documents necessary for one to be considered a person in Lux Aqua. No. Simply by opening a box and eating what looked like a microchip made of candy, the whole world could be changed to an extent that was actually a bit frightening. The NIIABs didn’t even need to change one’s physical features though that “was” an option if one wanted. They’d just sort of alter-reality to fit a given narrative.

Thus despite coming out of a box, and being a person that Emily herself had partially created based using the sliders that appeared on the initialization menus for the NIIAB, the whole world would seem to fall in line with the new identity’s existence. For instance, a thoughtless decision to make “Emilia” popular in high school and college was responsible for Emily being mobbed by all those drunk executives. There were many of them that seemed to think that Emily was their best friend, or reported shared memories that involved them and “Emilia” hanging out in their shared youth.

Emily had been able to even give herself jobs up to a certain level of power within a certain company using the NIIABs. Briefly spending time as a manager in a certain corporation. Though, eventually, she had to skedaddle...It hadn’t been because the corporation had caught on to the deception, but because the corporate environment was so hostile and dangerous in and of itself, that particular persona’s rivals in the company had begun making attempts on her life.

The craziest part was the fact that Emily herself wasn’t immune to the power of the NIIABs. There was a small but very real chance that if she spent a prolonged period of time within a person, or if heaven forbid she experienced some kind of head injury, or cyber-attack that messed with her memories, she could easily just sort of end up being swallowed by those new identities.

This was because even without the head trauma the NIIAB's abilities would grant suitable memories to their users for the sake of making it easier to bring life to the illusion. Meaning even Emily had a few false memories of time spent with those executives.

The only limits Emily had been able to see thus far was that attempting to create an identity that was too big would be rejected by the NIIAB’s UI. Thus she couldn’t make herself into a President, or Prime Minister, or CEO. The NIIAB also couldn’t create, or replace, deep-relationship, like she couldn’t just make herself some wealthy person spouse, or favored child...Though interestingly, she could become a wealthy person’s bastard if they were the sort of person who had a large number of children that they’d been neglecting anyway.

Beyond that though, Emily had seen very few limits to the NIIABs, and it probably should have scared her to think about this kind of technology out there. Potentially in the hands of corporate agents and johnny-law. It should have been especially frightening in light of the New-Identity-In-A-Box’s relative cheapness.

The actual price for a single NIIAB was kind of high, especially for a small-time freelancer like Emily, who often found herself living paycheck to paycheck. Yet in light of the kind of profits one could make with the NIIAB so long as one was willing to burn the identity afterward, the cost was basically nothing. For corps and the governments that already had massive resources, the price for buying NIIABs would have been less than nothing. Which meant that the world should conceivably have been filled with nothing but spies and undercover cops.

However, somehow Emily found herself not worrying about that possibility. There was an exclusivity to that shop that made it feel like they weren’t just selling those things to anyone on the street. Beyond that, Emily had never been the sort to live in fear. Even without the NIIABs Lux-Aqua had always been filled with stuff that could keep the average person up at night. Such as the roaming hordes of killer robots, the flesh-devouring nanite-storms, and the sinister cabals of evil AI that were supposedly trying to take over and/or destroy the world.

Thus instead of worrying, Emily simply counted her gains. She’d just finished a job and she was in the mood to celebrate. Thus after lingering in a crowded area in Decem’s downtown for a bit, to send the files to her client and receive payment, Emily headed over to that certain little shop, which also happened to be an excellent bar and restaurant. Electing to have a drink with one of the few people who still knew Emily as Emily, before adopting a new identity.