James Swallow - Deus Ex - Icarus Effect

“We’re flying too close to the sun,” she said to herself.

“The Illuminati see themselves as an intellectual elite. If we are Icarus, they think of themselves as Daedalus, his father. The guiding hand of the parent. The creator and mentor.”

Anna’s lip curled. “I studied Greek mythology in college, and I remember that Daedalus was an arrogant bastard. The man built a maze of death, and killed his nephew when he thought he might be smarter than him.”

“And the Illuminati have killed, and worse. But the truth is, what you have seen is only one thread in the whole. What is taking place right now, the assassinations that claimed the life of your friend and all the others, these things are only the precursor. This is just one battle in a greater campaign they plan to win. At any cost.”

Her mouth went dry as the scope of that statement settled in her thoughts. “What do you mean?”

When Janus replied, she felt a stab of fear deep in her gut. “Would you like me to show you, Anna? I’ve been building a model of all the potentials. It is incomplete, but there is truth there. You could consider it… a glimpse of our tomorrows.”

And then she heard herself answering. “Show me.”

The hacker Janus did as Anna asked. The screen rippled, and the cascade of images returned—but this time they were almost too fast for her to register, a barrage of light and color and sound that washed over her with hypnotic force. She couldn’t look away, and across her scalp she felt her skin crawl. The image-storm stuttered and blinked like an old analog television signal, hazing as it tried to tune itself into her. Anna suddenly became aware of the augmented optics in her eye sockets, for the first time feeling them as if they were spheres of hard, heavy steel. Something was happening; Janus’s images were moving in synchrony with the digital processors built into her artificial eyes. It was like a switch flipping inside her mind; and she saw—

—the skyline of a city made of tiers, fires raging, and weapons discharges sparkling in the twilight, chaos, and disorder rising like a tide—

—crowds of panicked people desperately trying to flee hordes of crazed rioters, all of them augmented, all of them mad with wild fury—

—a wall of video screens filled with a storm of screaming, hissing static, and before them an enhancile woman collapsing to her knees, tearing at herself in crazed agony—

—orbiting above the Earth, a communications satellite shutting down, lights dimming, dish antenna retracting. Then video screens, holograms, advertising billboards, cell phones, televisions, computer monitors, all of them showing the same message in bright red letters—NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL—

—a field of crosses, made from machine parts and cybernetic limbs, behind a sunrise over barren grassland. In the distance, a string of fallen power lines— —a ghost town of fallen buildings and empty streets— —a dead future-

It ended as quickly as it had started, and Anna stumbled, suddenly robbed of her balance. Her eyes throbbed and her skull ached. The woman rubbed at the skin of her face and it was hot to the touch. She glared up at the screen, which had returned to its neutral aspect.

“What the hell… did you do to me?” Kelso was familiar with strobe-effect crowd-control systems, and she wondered if Janus had used something similar on her, the pulse-image stream casting some kind of soporific effect through her optics. She felt weak and nauseated.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disorient you,” came the reply. “But the data is only sketchy. It is only the impression of a possibility. It’s difficult to comprehend in a more linear fashion. Try to breathe deeply. Normalize your heartbeat. You’re not injured, believe me.”

Anna glared at the screen. “You’re lucky you’re not standing right here in front of me…” She trailed off, her stomach tightening.

“I’m sorry ” Janus repeated. “But do you understand now? Did you see?” She took a shuddering breath. “I’m starting to, I think.”

There was movement behind her, and she turned to see Lebedev enter the tent. He had a curious look on his face, as if he realized he had intruded on something private. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” Anna bit out. “Are you looking for me?”

He nodded, sparing Janus’s screen a quick look. “We have a problem. D-Bar and my people have gone through the contents of the flash drive you brought to us. There’s a lot of material there, but what we really want exists in a subpartition that we cannot access. The key to the Killing Floor is inside that thing, if only we can crack it open. But it is protected with multiple-layer firewalls and a kill-switch. If we try to brute-force it, the drive will erase itself.”

Anna folded her arms. “I can’t help you with that. Ron Temple was the only one who knew the codes for his subnet, and the Tyrants killed him right in front of me.” She turned to the screen. “Can’t you do something? I thought Juggernaut’s hackers were the best of the best?”

“Even we have our limits ” admitted Janus. “I’ve been watching D-Bar’s attempts to crack the device. He won’t be successful. To penetrate the subpartition, we need a connection to an active Tyrant computer server. It is as if the first lock nestles inside a second. Without both, it won’t open.”

“Then we’re no better off than we were a day ago…” Lebedev said, his expression turning stormy.

“There has to be some way!” Anna retorted. “After everything I went through for those damn files, we can’t just write this off!”

The ghost-image in the screen shifted slightly. “There’s another solution ” said the hacker, after a few long moments of silence.

“Explain,” said Lebedev.

“It will be here within the hour.”

They waited at the dockside, and Kelso scanned the surface of the shipping channel. The water was murky, patched with rainbows of fuel oil and slicks of floating trash. Out in the middle of the vast canal, huge robot cargo ships without conning towers or portholes sailed silently toward the docks, icebergs of steel emblazoned with the names of the corporations that owned them.

Beneath the turgid waters, something stirred, coming closer, making ripples into waves as it rose up from the gloom.

“There!” Powell called out, pointing with a slender cyberarm. He was one of the New Sons, and from what Anna had been able to gather from watching him interact with Lebedev, the man had some degree of authority in the group. He carried himself with a swagger, and she saw prison tattoos peeking out from under the collar of his body armor. His men came quickly to the quay and took up firing positions; they were armed with an assortment of rifles, everything from twenty-year-old Heckler & Koch assault weapons, through to the modern MAO submachine guns that had supplanted the old AK-47 as the signature firearm of rebellions the world over.

Lebedev frowned at the river as the water churned and a shape broke the surface. Anna saw a steel spine and plates of anechoic polymer as the vessel rose into the sunlight.

D-Bar craned his neck to get a better look. “It’s an autonomous trawler sub… Like, the little brother of the big computer-controlled cargo barges.” Fleets of similar unmanned ships, deployed from carriers in the Atlantic, plumbed the depths for shoals of fish driven from the higher waters by the effects of pollution. “Our buddy Janus must have reprogrammed this one, split it off, and sent it here.”

A hatch opened on the dorsal hull, the plates retracting backward, and the stink of wet, rotting fish billowed out to assail them.