Deus Ex: Black Light

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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ONE
FACILITY 451 – ALASKA – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

“How much do you remember?”

It was a woman’s voice, careful and steady, metered with just the right balance of maternal concern and authoritative firmness.

He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a dry, papery rasp. It was difficult, as if the act of using his voice had become foreign to him. He gave up on the attempt and tried something else. He tried to focus on the woman’s words, to find her in the room.

“Take your time,” she told him – then an order, to someone else. “Give him some water.”

An infinite white space surrounded everything, blurred bright but without dazzling his eyes, and if not for the warmth and the stillness of the air he could have believed he was on some expanse of frozen tundra, stretching away to an unseen horizon. At the edges of his vision, trains of golden icons trickled down, vanishing one after another. He half-raised his hand to wipe them away, as if they were raindrops caught on his eyelashes, before remembering that they were being projected directly into his synthetic retinas.

The hand and the arm it belonged to ghosted up before him. Black as a shadow, the fingers moving, twitching. It fell away again, and he understood that he was lying in a bed, the pull of gravity holding him down. The tundra was a ceiling high above, out of reach, and by degrees he felt himself shifting upwards as a mechanism behind the mattress raised his torso to a shallow incline.

Other ghosts came into sight. The sketches of human figures.

He flinched at the sight of strangers, the echo of a fight-or-flight reaction triggered by something he didn’t immediately recollect. It was the dying ember of another memory, gone before he could grasp it. It left him unsettled and wary.

A robotic manipulator drifted closer, proffering a squeeze bottle of clear liquid, and he leaned forward to meet it, letting a nozzle hook his lip. Cool, fresh water whispered into his arid mouth, a faint medicinal taste washing over his tongue. It was like he hadn’t taken a drink in centuries, and for a long moment he just let himself enjoy the simple pleasure of it.

But then the flow of the fluid touched a different fragment of recall. Suddenly he was drowning in icy salt water, the cold filling his throat and his lungs, the impossible force crushing him like the fingers of a giant hand. He choked and spat out the liquid, gasping and retching, shock throwing him forward. Wires hanging from sensor disks on his throat and his chest pulled taut, others tearing away, sending contradictory signals to the monitoring devices crowded at the head of the bed.

A tidal wave of absolute panic crashed over him, the brutal and unstoppable force ripping away all his defenses, crushing his will in an instant. He knew that this was death pressing in on him, knew it without question because he had been through it before,
more than once
.

The first time, it had been a cauldron of razors and fire, ripping pieces of him away within and without, changing once and for all what he would be. He had survived that.
Barely
.

The second time, it was cold and pressure threatening to crush him into oblivion and leave nothing behind.

He remembered some of it now. Not a distinct chronology of events, not second by second, but flashes of action disconnected from one another. A random pattern of blinding, painful moments held together like pearls on a string.

The shrieking of tortured metal under the impact of a colossal volume of polar ocean. The wild screams of the mad and the dying. The thunder of his fading heartbeat. Lances of light through glassy, shifting waters. And a terrible knowing, a certainty that he would die out there and
nothing
would stop that from happening.

I should be dead
. The thought grew, sharp and diamond-hard.

His artificial eyes adjusted steadily, the color tone of the room shifting as it gained greater definition. Digging deep, he reached past the fear and found the steel that had never left him. Took it, held on to it.

The next breath was rough, but it was controlled. By force of will, he moderated his ragged breathing and concentrated on calming his racing pulse. In the corner of his vision, a softly blinking warning icon faded to nothing as the hammering of his heart subsided. Sweat beaded on his flesh, and he swallowed hard.

“I remember the sea.” They were the first words he had spoken in months. “The cold.”

“You’re very lucky to be alive,” said another voice. A man, this one, the accent behind it a firm northwestern burr while the woman had sounded more like a southerner. Those facts emerged in his thoughts automatically, some ingrained means in his mind immediately sifting their words for data, for
clues
.

He blinked again and now he could see them better. The woman, of average height with a dark face framed by a white headscarf; the man pale and fatigued. Both of them wore doctor’s coats and cradled digital pads in their hands. At their shoulders, a small monitor drone the size of a softball floated on a cluster of whispering impellers, patiently framing everything in the room with a blue-tinted lens.

The woman tried on a practiced smile. “You were clinically deceased when they plucked you out of the ocean. But a combination of the chill and the actions of your Sentinel implant kept you from going beyond our reach. They were able to pull you back.”

“A lot of other people weren’t so fortunate,” said the male doctor, and there was an edge of reproach to the words.

He settled back against the mattress, pushing the squeeze bottle away, uncertain how to respond. His thoughts were still churning and disordered, and when he closed his eyes all he saw was a torrent of jumbled recollections that had no sense of order or narrative. He looked down again at his hands, his arms. Both of them were identical, carbon-black synthetic constructs that terminated at his shoulder joints. Once they had been smooth and polished, but now they were scarred and pitted with surface damage. He tried to remember the time before he’d had them, but for now there was a blank space where any memory of meat and bone might have once existed.

Touching his bare chest, he found healed scars but again, nothing to connect them to. The part of him that was flesh felt almost as artificial as the metal and plastic.

“Is there anything else?” said the woman. “Anything more you remember?”

“
Darrow
.” Unbidden, the name floated up to the surface of his consciousness and drifted there.

The two doctors exchanged a look, a silent communication passing between them. “Do you know who that is?” she asked.

“He died up there.” Past the pair of them, the wall came into sharper focus and it was suddenly clear that he was looking out of a window on to a snow-covered landscape. The near-absence of color in the surroundings, the room, the people before him, it knocked loose another shard of recall and he remembered being in a different white room. Someone there had been important to him. The memory brought with it a bitter sting of emotions that he could not parse. He shook his head, forcing the moment away.

“Can you tell us?”

“My name is Adam Jensen,” he said, cutting down the question as his impatience flared. “I remember who I am. But not where the hell
this
is.”

* * *

Within a day, the two doctors – the woman was named Rafiq and the man McFadden – decided he was lucid enough to leave the recovery room and move to the facility proper. They described it as a place to heal, but it wasn’t like any hospital Jensen had ever spent time in.

Rafiq told Jensen he had been a police officer once, and he recalled pieces of that life, more and more of it as the days passed by.

This place reminded him of the secure wards where, as a cop, he had sent psychologically unstable criminals – not quite a prison, more like an asylum. What that said about how he was seen by his doctors made him uncomfortable.

When Jensen asked them if there was a next-of-kin he could talk to, they told him they had no records of anyone – but he was free to place a vu-phone call to anywhere he wanted. An instinctive reaction that came out of nowhere made him lie; Jensen told them he didn’t recall any contacts, but that wasn’t true. He just didn’t want them listening in on any communications he made. As for his infolink implant, that stayed resolutely offline, doubtless disabled along with anything else that might have made him troublesome.

Facility 451 was a collection of prefabricated modules that had been assembled into an unlovely pile of blocky shapes, and parked out in the sparse landscape of the Kenai Peninsula. Two decades of unrestricted corporate exploitation and rampant pollution had turned this part of Alaska from carpet of forest into a bleak shadow of its former self, a naked space of half-dead scrubland coated with gray, polluted snow. Remote and thinly populated, the World Health Organization had chosen it as one of a dozen sites for places like 451. They called them ‘processing clinics’, but as Jensen walked the limits of its corridors and high fences, he found himself thinking of other, less palatable ways to describe it.

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