SpoilerI've put passerby, softy, scavver, and pert in the glossary with expanded definitions for anyone confused.

  [colpse]Victor POV –I awoke from the adrenaline spike my cybernetics initiated, albeit slower than usual. My 103rd birthday was yesterday, and I’d gone a little overboard with the hooch. Checking for updates on my holo-ring, I was being paged to the office again. Just great, I can never get a full night’s rest these days.

  Apparently, ‘something’ had come up, quite literally out of the middle of nowhere. In the office, they were still confirming whether or not the footage was doctored or not. It seemed likely given the automatons that appeared in the video bore an uncanny resembnce to those seen in an old 20th century action thriller, but so far, all the V.I. indicators rated it as authentic. The desk jockeys deemed it worthy enough to call me in to make heads or tails of it all; I couldn’t really bme them for it either, the lower echelons seriously cked autonomy in their decision making, and I had signed the employment contract stating I could be paged at any time, from anywhere. At least I had good benefits.

  I popped a couple relievers, deciding to y off the pervitin today; taking them too many days in a row could get you hooked and I wasn’t about to risk my career on a hangover. The Ministry of Health was careful to only issue a few Perts in a month to avoid risking addiction, but I had a stockpile given things hadn’t been busy up until the st two weeks. All in all though, I enjoyed my time employed with the Ministry of Foreign Retions. The dome-life that middle management could expect to live be worth any hardship the work might entail. I’d never go back to the living in the digs, that’s for sure.

  Putting on my suit, adjusting the tie, I made my way out the door, and hopped on my monorail bike. I took a deep breath, before punching in my destination. The fresh air never got old, though the humidity could be extreme at times; at least it wasn’t a rainy day. Fake weather or not, condensation droplets could pour down almost as hard as real rain if there was enough of a buildup.

  The dome light was only just brightening from its dimmest state, as I passed over, under, around and through the dozens of sea-scrapers that littered my route to the office. It wasn’t the main office building for the Foreign Retions Ministry, but if my promotion went through, I’d finally get to work at central.

  Walking through the sliding gss doors, I gave the cute secretary a wink – I think her name was Audrey? – before she checked me in through the security point. I was getting a little frustrated waiting for the dumb machine to check for any signs of an identity cloak, it seemed to be taking longer than normal, but that could just be my grogginess making me impatient. Finally satisfied the machine confirmed my identity with a beep before letting me through. I took the lift to the twelfth floor, and walked to my office.

  The middle aged passerby who had paged me was sitting in one of the waiting chairs next to my door with his information tablet; he got up to shake my hand before we entered the room together. Passerbys usually made up only the lower echelons of Mariana City, but that was changing as the city outgrew what the now more limited number of us elders could handle. The one sitting in front of my desk right now was vying for my current position. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth having someone so young take over my position.

  Taking my seat behind my desk, he began his briefing. “Mr. Zhang, while you were on your way to the office, we confirmed the authenticity of the footage we received. The footage was recorded by a frontier reporter in the west end of the North American continent. Furthermore, our contact at the Mariana Times reached out regarding a tip from one of their sources; apparently someone ciming to have been there is saying they have information for us, but they refused to speak to the Times. They want to speak with the Foreign Ministry – us, sir – in an attempt for sanctuary.”

  I began tapping my fingers along my desk and sighed. “Tell them no guarantees on asylum until we know the value of the information they’re providing. I’ll have to submit a pre-emptive report to central and a confidential information request to the Agency regarding the automatons before we meet in… Say two days? That should be enough time for me to get that all done.” The passerby nodded, and left me to my devices. He forgot to close the door on his way out. Kids these days.

  Sitting back down I quickly wrote up a preliminary report and filled the proper forms for an information request to the agency regarding the automatons. We needed to know who was developing them; I doubted it was one of the Ocean States, more likely would be a design from one of the rger Under Cities. It was pretty rare Ocean States ever had need of regur ground forces, our issue would mostly be sub-aquatic combat had we ever -god forbid- been rooted out by the Klexon. I doubt they even care, it’s been more than fifty years and you’re telling me they never thought once to check under water? Yeah right.

  The Klexon mostly only bothered the surface settlements and the occaisional Under City since they were generally easier targets, not to say they wouldn’t be hostile to dome dwellers either, but they just never seemed to ‘find us’. Central and the Council of Nations had come to the decision they wouldn’t poke the hornet’s nest so to speak; so far that pn has worked great. The problem is, none of them openly have access to battle-android tech like that, and if they did, they sure wouldn’t be supplying it to some rogue-borderline scavver outpost like that. We might have an organized smuggler problem in our midst if other nations are having their prototypes stolen and distributed like this… The only thing that didn’t add up at this point was the person commanding the automatons in the footage, she didn’t look like any scavver I’d ever seen; she might have even been a softy…? Why would a softy ever decide to live in some decrepit shithole like that though? Too many questions with not enough answers.

  I submitted my paper work, and span a few times in my chair. It’d probably be a few hours befo-

  A notification popped up from the agency approving my request. That was… fast… Apparently, all the other parties within the Council of Nations denied any involvement, we’d forwarded the footage to them hoping they’d give answers, but I guess not. As far as espionage goes they… uncovered nothing. Well, shit. It seems like this mysterious contact is our best lead so far.

  I waited a few more hours, almost tempted to just go home again when I got another notification from my boss at central, Director Adamik. He requested I work overtime this week and said I’d have to do a full debrief for the ministry heads. I had my work cut out for me, honestly a Pervitin addiction seemed more and more like a likely outcome from this whole ordeal. I sighed and rested my chin on my palm.

  The silver lining is that it was at least going to have me in the spotlight; my chances of promotion were going up drastically with this. They might even open up a new ambassadorial position for me if I was really lucky.

  Sebastian, my passerby subordinate from earlier knocked on my door. “Sir, it’s urgent.” I sighed again, the st thing I needed right now was more work.

  “Come in.” Sebastian, taking the invitation, sat down in front of me again, turning his tablet showing Mariana Times Live. For fuck’s sake, why’d they have to go and release the footage?

  “I could have sworn we told them to keep it on the down low, so why are they bringing this to the public eye?” I voiced my inquiry in a begrudging tone.

  He shrunk in his chair at my question. “Well, according to their chairman, their shareholders have been pushy over their recent quarterly, and they didn’t really have an option but to publish such a big story first when it fell right into their p…”

  I smmed my fist on the desk and clenched my teeth, but rexed a bit after a bit of thought. “That’ll be the Ministry of State Secrets’ problem, not ours I guess.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “They’ll want their own report on how this leaked, too though. Which I find dumb since they should know already that the one who leaked the footage was also the one who had first provided it to us.” It’s a stupid decision on the news agency’s part anyway. I wonder if they realize they’ll be fined for not following our request – likely negating any stock increase they’d have seen. Unless… Damn it! They did it for the ratings! Fuck, I should have known. News agencies these days are cut-throat.

  No trips to the bar for me tonight. I went straight to bed when I got home.

  “So, you were the mayor of this settlement, Mrs…” I let her finish my sentence, “Mrs. Sarah Connor, sir. But you can just call me Sarah.” She finished.

  She put on her most innocent smile. I knew better though. These gutter scum passerbys were almost as bad as the surface scavvers, and worse by a long shot than the beggars in the digs. Savage opportunists, and more often than not criminals the lot of them. Her scars betrayed her, she was nowhere near the poor little dy she was struggling to portray, I could tell she was struggling to be proper with her manner of speech.

  I gave her a polite smile back. “Well Sarah, what is it that you can tell us about the woman in this picture?” I pulled up a digitally enhanced image of the woman who commanded the automatons, the angle wasn’t the best, mostly showing her from behind and a bit from the side, but it was enough if she supposedly had spoken to her face-to-face. “Keep in mind your asylum application hinges on your honesty.” I reminded her.

  For a moment, I saw a tinge of rage on her face, her poker face finally failing her. “She’s the one that fucked us.” She spat. “We met her about a month ago, her name is Julia, though I don’t recall her st name, but she referred to herself as a ‘General’.” She snorted after that st comment. “I should have known the deal was too good to be true, we came to a heavily skewed in our favor agreement for munitions in exchange for our produce and meat pnts. Not too long ter and the whole pce went to hell.” She expined.

  “And what sort of munitions did you acquire from her? Was that all there was to your partnership with this Julia person?” I needed more information on just what equipment she gathered, it might tell us which nation they got their supplies from.

  She eborated. “She’d sent us one of the more advanced models of G.E.F. crawlers, one of the rail cannon kind… She had easy access to at least a dozen of them, since she ter lent us some during relocation along with cloaking modules for every one of them.” My eyes went wide. The Luhansk Syndicate had the means to produce that variant of APC along with access to its schematics, but they wouldn’t have anywhere near enough soft era cloaking modules to spare for something as pointless of relocating a bunch of random surface dwellers. Nor did they to my knowledge have the means to reverse engineer them for production – it being lost technology since the destruction of the City State of Mini. Something fishy was going on here…

  “Is that all? Surely not?” I asked her somewhat desperately. It didn’t make sense that they’d offer the surface dwellers so much help just for a bit of food when they had access to such advanced tech.

  “Hmm… She’d also gave us some sort of hand held rail gun; she’d told us it was one of their original designs.” She thought for a second, her memory clearly not the best. “She gave us some SAM defensive missiles, too and somehow knew our uncher’s specifications and what they’d fit.”

  I nodded along, putting on my poker face and pretending it was all stuff we’d already known. I don’t care how useful this information was, the st thing Mariana City needed was another sleaze like this in the digs or elsewhere. It reflected badly on me as well if I approved asylum for too many undesirables. “Unfortunately, I don’t think this is enough to approve your asylum application.” I gestured to the notes I was taking on my tablet.

  She stiffened for a second, before taking a deep breath. “There’s one more thing… But if I tell you, you have to promise me you’ll accept my cim. It’s a secret bigger than the rest, and I was pnning on living big after selling it to an information broker…”

  I looked up from my notes and let out a deep sigh. It was unprofessional, and honestly she technically did give me enough information to approve her cim, so I begrudgingly agreed. “Let’s hear it, then. But so help me god if you are lying, we will find out.”

  She let out a breath of relief she hadn’t seemed to realize she was holding. “I promise, it’s the truth, nothing but. Julia’s way of coming to our aid in the footage… According to my men she emerged from a weird portal that just formed in the middle of our settlement with her automatons. She used the same method -this time I witnessed it with my own eyes- to deliver the APCs we needed to evacuate.”

  My expression darkened. Nobody, and I mean nobody should have access to technology like that. From her description it sounded simir to how we used to travel the stars, but much more accurate. There was nobody with the means to research tech like that without completely exposing themselves, let alone a surviving example from an old starship to work from.

  “Very well, I’ll make sure your application gets approved.” I lied, and ended the call. We would need every st detail we could extract from her, ethical or not.

  I filled out a detailed report to the Ministry of Defense, urging the importance that both we get all the information we could, and that she not be able to leak the info. Whatever shitty settlement she escaped to would also need to be silenced one way or another; we couldn’t risk this getting out.

  Whoever this Julia person was she could make or break the Council of Nations if she had any more tech- No… She already had enough tech to flip the world on its head. This could mean the end of the Xenos invasion once and for all. As much as the Council of Nations didn’t want to poke the hornets’ nest, an opportunity like this had never come along before.

  I smiled. My position at central was guaranteed with me at in the middle of this unfolding situation. Whoever this Julia chick is, I’ll have to thank her for showing up when she did. I continued where I left off on my presentation, armed with new information. I’d have to revise a lot of what I’d already got done, but that was okay. It would all be worth it in the end.

  I forwarded my boss a quick summary from my notes. I figured he’d consider it urgent to know at least the gist of what I’d gleaned. And only a minute after sending it, he called me on his holo-ring.

  “Victor, you’re not just messing with me right? What you sent me is hard to believe.” He appeared to be at a fancy dinner party, but it was quickly fading to the background as he power-walked out of the building.

  “I find it hard to believe too, but the one Sarah Connor, supposed mayor of the settlement in the footage, cimed to have seen almost all of this first-hand.” I shrugged. “That being said, I guess we will find out. I’m having her sent to the Ministry of Defense for further questioning.”

  My boss’s eyes went wide upon hearing that tidbit, but his face soon softened. “I’m not a fan of their methods, but I guess there’s no real choice when the stakes are so high.” I nodded in agreement. Director Adamik was approaching his second century and was much more morally rooted in the soft era than I was. In his opinion directly accessing memories from someone’s brain was an immoral invasion of privacy. Normally, it was a practice I shouldn’t even be aware exists, but well... News travels around fast in the ministries. I wonder why he keeps his hangups on mind reading, but doesn’t hold them when it comes to annihiting a settlement of surface dwellers which as far as I know are innocent.

  I gave up trying to understand the thoughts of my much senior colleagues, as my boss finally got into his monorail car, presumably destined for central. “I’m having the heads of the ministries assemble now. We’ll be waiting for your presentation. I want you there by midnight.”

  I began to voice my compints. “But Sir-“ The feed cut off before I could finish. It’s gonna be a pretty crap presentation if that’s all the time I have.

  Remembering that I have people under me, I decided to call in a few of my inexperienced passerby desk jockeys. They’d only had a decade’s worth of experience at the Ministry of Foreign Retions, but I trusted them enough not to leak state secrets. I messaged them, and they entered my office a few minutes ter.

  I nodded to each one. “Pedro, you’re on graphics. Melina, you’re on yout. And Rick, you’re helping me sort through all this.” They stood there, staring at me stupified. “Well?! Let’s get to it! We need this powerpoint presentation done yesterday people!” I shouted at them, as we finally got to work.

  AnnouncementWe're all finally getting a chance to to learn about the wider the brain-in-a-jarverse! How Exciting!

  The first few chapters I feel acted as a really drawn out prologue, but that just makes the big reveals all the more spicy I think. The meat and potatoes of the story is only just starting.

  As always, hoping you all enjoyed! :D