This night had more emotional ups and downs than a trampoline party at a liberal arts school. I creep as slowly as I possibly can towards the meeting room in hopes that maybe the stuff I’d heard in church as a kid was real and I’d get Raptured into the lake of fire to burn for all eternity or whatever before I actually get there. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen, so I’m standing outside of Meeting Room A, Chad and the universe intact. Gracias por nada, Anticristo.I grab the tiny bottle of Bacardi hidden in the secret pocket inside my jacket, chug it for strength, and take a deep breath. Ahhhhh.
I peek around the doorway and let out an inaudible gasp. The ZPE projector doesn’t have a boring PowerPoint slideshow pulled up on its holographic wall of light—someone’s projecting anime in front of the wall in bright, glorious, HD beauty. Maybe I have the wrong meeting room? I lean forward a little more and see Chad sitting on the table, exclaiming and physically freaking out to each action on screen like a normal person would at a football game.
Nope, this was definitely the right meeting room. Goddamnit, this was really bad. Really, really bad. Chad was a closet weeb? He seemed like the kind of guy who doesn’t play anything but Madden 2K72 and only turns on his Telavision on NFL Sundays. This changed my entire perception of the little shitbag. I could start to feel my hatred for him fade the slightest bit, which just makes me even fucking madder. I carefully shift to get a better angle on the screen, and—
Oh no.
Oh fuck no.
He’s watching the latest episode of Princess of Ping Pong, and he’s watching the Japanese version and using a NeurOS to process it all naturally instead of tainting it with the dub. He bought the Japanese language pack! Chad’s not just a closet weeb, he’s a weeb with dedication and really, really good taste. This is a more horrifying outcome than I could have ever imagined. He’s even shouting out her magic tennis skirt’s catchphrase during the transformation sequence and doing the pose. This is going to make despising him so much more difficult. Fucking Chad and his fucking perfect hair and fucking perfect body and fucking perfect taste in Chinese cartoons.
As he breaks the pose, he catches a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye and freezes, panicking as he rushes to close the window and switch back to a boring PowerPoint slide.
“H-hey Blake, I, uh, didn’t think you’d actually show up. Come, have a seat.”
“Didn’t take you for a weeb,” I say, plopping down in one of the office chairs at the back of the table.
“W-well, you never asked.”
Thankfully, as the quarter-bottle of Vodquila I stole from Sergeant Baldio and the Bacardi I chugged outside kick in, I remember why I have to keep hating him. “Didn’t really have a ch-chance to, Ch-chad. Every time I saw you, you were too busy fucking or killing one of my girlfriends.”
“Blake, she told me she was single, if I had known, I would not have–you know–and your second ‘girlfriend’ was a dangerous, illegally-created rogue Sex-ART with a violent Limiter, that YOU called us about! It was a complex situation and—”
“And let me guess, you were just… just following Telecom orders, right? If T-Telecom told you to fucking suck off a bridge, w-would you, Chad? Would you!?”
“If they told me to do… what to a bridge? You need to stop drinking, Blake. Your Freud is showing.”
“You heard me, b-bitch! I… it’s a common metaphor, damn it!”
“Blake,” he sighs, running his fingers through his feathery perfect blonde hair in patronizing exasperation, “I think you mean ‘jump off a bridge.’”
“No, Chad, that’s stupid. Why would they tell you to jump off a bridge? How does that help them at all?”
“How would it help them to force me to suck a bridge’s genitalia, Blake!?”
Smoke rises from my alcohol poisoned brain as the rusty wheels inside try to process a way to turn this back around and make Chad look stupid instead, but the douchecanoe is right. “J-Just start the PowerPoint, bridgefucker,” I mumble, slumping down into the chair.
“I guess I will give my ‘why we need to be friends now for the sake of saving the world’ pitch when you are sober,” he sighs, quickly clicking past a dozen bullshit slides about being sorry or wanting to start over or whatever shonen friendship bullshit he wanted to jam down my throat like the bridge jammed its cable-stayed dual-suspension puente-pene down his own. “We will start with the Bloody Tears briefing section of the presentation, in that case. Blake, what do you know about Bloody Tears to start out with?”
“Uh…” Shit, what did I know? “…they… they have cool hackin-ass bleeding-eyes skull tattoos on their hands,” I say, removing the glove on my right hand (that Tonio had insisted I wear for some reason) and descriptively raising my own tattoo to show him.
“FUCK!” he exclaims, quickly falling to hide behind the desk. “Careful with that shit, Blake!”
“…what? It’s j-just a tattoo, dumbass. It’s gonna hurt you, LMAO.”
“Luh Mao?”
“No, LMAO, like–”
“My god, you really do need this briefing,” he replies. “Put your glove back on and we will continue.”
“Fine,” I mumble, putting the glove back on as he rises back to a standing position. “That’s all I know about them. All that I can remember, anyway.”
“In that case, you might want to take notes.”
“TELA WILL TAKE NOTES FOR BLAKE-SAN,” a fucking nails-on-chalkboard screech booms from my pocket as Tela shows up on the table to my right, way too fucking eager with a notebook in hand. At least she’s doing something useful for once, I guess.
“Well, first things first,” Chad says, clicking to a slide with an image of the tattoo and a couple paragraphs, “we need to get you up to date on the tattoo. First of all, it is not a tattoo. Or, rather, not just a tattoo. It is a powerful neuroweapon chan called a BONEary SKULLjector, BS for short—we did not make the name or the acronym, I know it is bad—that has been embedded into each member of LDS, including yourself.”
“A boner that does what now?”
“Alright, bear with me,” he continues, advancing to a slide that shows a bizarre schematic he’s clearly rigged up in Telesoft Paint. “The eyes in the skull actually contain tiny, super-powerful light projection nanotechnology that lock onto the victim’s eyes when activated and proceeds to tamper with neurological activity via photic pulse technology—”
“T-tell me in English, Chad. You might not be-believe this, but I’m a little drunk.”
He makes a face like he’s fighting back the urge for homicide, inhales deeply, blinks a couple times and continues. “…alright, the eyes of the skull tattoo are projectors that lock onto the victim’s eyes and submit a pattern to the brain, through flashing laser lights, that can cause one to go comatose, die, etc. ARTs were made out of brain mapping tech after early AI mapped the human brain to a customizable template BiM [Brain iMage], right? Basically, Lágrimas de Sangre took that perfect map of the human mind, figured out what inputs would crash the computer we call a mind–the exploit, if you will–and can now utilize certain patterns of flashing lights like binary to input these deadly codes and completely destroy people.”
He flips to the next slide. “The lasers are powerful enough to go through sunglasses and even closed eyelids, presumably sensing where the eyes are through thermal imaging, then automatically increasing in intensity until it registers an exposed pupil… so it’ll burn through any shielding devices or even your hands if you try to cover your eyes. It is... very problematic.
“So you see, anyone who opposes a trained cultist with the embedded skull-chan can be killed or rendered a vegetable in the blink of an eye, no pun intended. It is incredibly dangerous, and if the masses knew the tech was out there, there would be chaos in the streets. We have been calling the deaths ‘heart attacks’ and walking our partners in the hospitals through the steps to fake the papers and the autopsies, but we can only keep it up for so long. Heart attacks do not cause foaming at the mouth or vomiting blood usually and the public is not THAT stupid. It seems LDS members are somehow immune to it themselves, which is the only reason it is a viable weapon for them I suppose—we need to figure out what makes their own minds resist it, and hopefully through that, find a way to neutralize that threat–and soon.”
“Well, that explains why everyone who saw my hand flipped out so much,” I mumble. “How do I activate it?”
“That I do not know,” Chad sighs. “Maybe a certain hand motion, maybe there is a certain impulse in the mind that triggers it, like trying to flex a specific, non-existent muscle to fire a blast from the palm of a Pneumat suit. Maybe it somehow connects to one’s NeurOS, and the exploit is through it and not the brain itself–the victims so far have had NeurOSes, but that’s not statistically unlikely or significant. If we had clarity on how to activate the attack, we would already be trying to figure out the code from having you do it in a controlled setting or something. That is one of the things we need you to find out undercover.”
He clicks to the next slide. “Beyond that information, we know very little about the cult. It appears to be an anti-Telecom organization, possibly anarchist in nature. It seems to be a very diverse gang of humans and ARTs consistent with Telemerica demographic trends, so it doesn’t seem to be racially motivated at all, which is rare for a gang of this size in this district. We also know they have ties to various criminal activity in the Undernet and the creation of several rumored new nanodrugs--well, new to the district, at least.
“From inconsistent reports, it also appears there might be copycats: fake copies of the gang, either for camouflage or for trying to regain an edge in the nanodrug market. Ultimately, we do not know who is behind LDS, or what their ultimate goal is, either, so it’s impossible to tell what is a real lead and what is not. They are on our radar only from our run-ins with them and from following their body trail. You are our first true ‘in’ at all, I am afraid.”
...
“...and?”
Chad clicks as the black “END OF SLIDESHOW REACHED” screen comes up. “And, uh, that’s… uh, that is all.”
“Wow, that’s… not v-very informative, Chad,” I say through a yawn that turns out to be more of a hiccup that turns out to be more of a burp.
“I mean, it is more than the public knows. As far as they know, Lágrimas de Sangre does not exist, and all information about them and about the BS weapon is locked down in the Telenet for civilians. There are whispers about it on the Darkworld side of the Telenet, and I am sure they communicate digitally somehow internally, but this is some super-secret shit that we are working with, here. That is why you getting this ‘in’ is such a big deal. I cannot believe you did not bring anything home from an entire initiation ceremony, even in your pockets…”
“Oh, I m-might have,” I mutter. “Th-this isn’t the same jacket. I threw up all over the fancy one I had taken with me that night, so I left it by the window.”
“Blake, are you serious!?” he shouts, slamming his palms on the table. “Holy shit, Blake, how can you not have thought to check your pockets!?”
“I was too drunkover.”
“Too what!?”
“Have you ever been so hungover that you’re still drunk, but you’re drunk AND hungover?”
“Thankfully, no.”
“Well, I was… I was too drunkover to think that far.”
“Well, we are basically done here for now anyway,” Chad says, turning off the ZPE projector. The makeshift holographic wall fades into a cascade of falling photons and reveals the very boring normal wall behind it, reality glitching slightly around the zone until it settles down… nothing abnormal for large/concentrated amounts of ZPE, though I did think I caught a glimpse of something in the brief static… or I’m just drunk. “Go home, look in your pockets, get some sleep, and do yourself a fucking favor—stop drinking and get back to working out. You are lucky Tony didn’t make you retake the fitness or drug tests. You need to get back in Ocean View PD shape.”
“You’re a shape,” I mumble as I skulk out of the room. Fuck Chad, even if he is right.