Deus
Ex: AL-X-5 SPADE II
or The Story of Alex Denton
Contents:
Chapter
1 - Boiling Choice
Chapter 2 - Illumination
The Ending
The time was three hours past noon, on the twenty-third of August, the year was two thousand and sixty-four. The agent stepped from his vehicle, his foot planted firmly on the dry earth - dry from being deprived of its once beautiful vegetation. The agent gazed the surrounding areas. He analyzed what he viewed, and transmitted the information to a waiting antennae. His second foot planted on the dusty ground, this time stirring up a small amount of particles, which, being just slightly heavier than the air, bounced gracefully towards the agent's nose. His nose caught the particles, and separated them from the fresh ocean air before inhaling the oxygen into his lungs. The temperature was ninety-six degrees, the humidity was greater than ninety-nine percent; he was on the biggest island of Hawaii.
The agent was called Alex Denton by his colleagues, but when people asked him his name, he had no answer, he could only say what he was told to say: "Denton, Alex Denton." Sometimes people gently snickered under their breath, and looked away to display that they were focusing their attention somewhere else - that the way he had said his name did not make them laugh. The people that did this were always over the age of forty four; this could have been a coincidence, but it most likely had something to do with the fact that only people of that age would have been alive to see one of the James Bond films. These films were almost all virtually destroyed shortly after a military activist group hunted and burned all media that had even the smallest reference to high-tech weaponry. They had finished this mission in only two years. The reason people laughed when they heard Alex Denton say his name, is that when they witnessed James Bond saying "Bond, James Bond" more than once - in each of his films - they remembered that phrase as a trademark of that character. When Alex Denton phrased his name in that same "Lastname, Firstname Lastname" format, their memory was redirected to recall and link the two phrases, which provoked a coincidence instance, and therefore forced them to analyze why. When no solution could be found, their brains instructed them to hide their lack of knowledge with laughter. However, because it would be inappropriate to show psychological weakness and overt friendliness towards a clearly superior human such as Alex Denton, they had to hold this laughter inside their head as much as possible. When they did emit this laughter, Alex Denton was confused, because he had never laughed, or heard any of his colleagues laugh in the entirety of his existence for as long as he could remember. When he introduced himself to someone not authorized to know his first name, he would state "Special Private Agent Denton, E - I - I." His code-name was "SPADE 02", he used this code-name only for interceptable communications. No one has ever laughed at his formal EII position, as EII is an acronym for Everett Industries Investigations, which is an organization that no ordinary person wants to know personally.
In Hawaii, the agent closed the door to his vehicle, and began to walk towards a large building. The vehicle appeared to be an ordinary sports car to the untrained eye, and when the agent disembarked, closed the door and began to walk away, no one noticed this as being something that was unusual in any way. No one thought that maybe this vehicle was not what it appeared to be. No one cared that the agent was named Denton, or that he was somehow different from any of them. Some peered at the ordinary man leaving his ordinary vehicle; not one person had any doubts that they would all be as safe as they had ever been within the next six hours. Not one person thought anything of this man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, wearing shorts, sandals and sunglasses. As he walked away from his vehicle, a boy of the age of fifteen looked at his sunglasses and his hair. He thought that the sunglasses appeared to be expensive and/or bad-ass, but that his slicked-back hair was out of style. The style now, he thought, was biologically manipulated hair - it was what all the artists were doing in America, and therefore it was what the American people enjoyed.
The agent neared the building, there was nothing standing in his way but apprehension. He had many choices, but almost every one of them led to the same outcome: someone had to die today. The building was the Everett Grand Royal of Hawaii. Everything was prepared, ready for the agent to complete his mission. He walked around the building, being very careful not to step on the wrong areas, as this particular ground had security sensors installed under its artificially developed plant life. The general area of this hotel was beautiful. The building seemed to slant against an invisible wall of mist, as it overlooked the clearest, bluest ocean anyone who ever visited this hotel had ever seen. The vegetation rapidly increased in density as one became nearer to the building, it seemed that, after traveling from a barren parking lot, the plant life suddenly sprung and bloomed into existence. There were reds, yellows, greens of all sorts, and all the colors of the earth mixed and danced together - flirting with one another in an endless loop of beauty. It was all artificial, nothing was real, but only agent Denton and the people who created it knew that.
The agent climbed to the top of the roof covertly - scaling the side of a wall as if there were a ladder attached. He climbed to the top of the roof and looked down. His view was aimed straight down to the top of his target's skull. His view never wavered, he just crouched on the top of the building and thought. He stopped, looked away, he did not understand. Why was this a test? He had a clear shot, there was no challenge in this assignment. He could not understand what his commander meant by what he had said earlier "...they're really goin' to test you out on this one Alex." It did not matter, but he decided that this was not the right way to execute this mission. He climbed down from the building and traversed a mountain far from the hotel. It was a rocky edge, but there was a slope for tourists to climb up if they wanted. On the top of this giant mountain, he found many trees and other such forms of cover from which he might peer out with his ever reaching hands, and choke whom ever he wanted. He spun around quickly - there was a noise, it was getting closer. He waited. Nothing, it was just a tour robot, guiding the tourists of Hawaii through the great forest on the top of the mountain. The tour party was traveling along a well hidden road, disguised by shadows and creeping moss. He waited for them to pass. When they did, he again peered out from behind a thick bush; he peered across a great chasm to the hotel that he had once been crouching on top of.
His vision was augmented.
It did not take him long to pinpoint his target's skull, which was sitting on his target's body, which was sitting on a very expensive outdoor chair on an extended balcony.
It was an easy target.
His hand slipped into his shirt and withdrew something that would help him decide his fate over the next minute. His outreaching hand stretched as far as it could. He took aim: his nano-augmented vision helped him to see his target clearly, even though he was over a mile away; his nano-augmented muscular structure allowed him to hold his arms steadier than any person on the planet; his nano-augmented brain allowed him to discard distractions, and focus directly on his target. He stopped and thought. His aim did not waver; his finger brushed against the weapon's firing mechanism.
He wavered, but his arm and his hand did not.
He tightened his grip, and he looked directly at his target for almost two minutes, never losing concentration.
His mind wavered. He thought.
Finally, he asked the question, "Why?" The question answered it's self. He already knew that he understood why this was what he had to do. He knew that he understood what the test was, and what he needed to decide.
The
man's heart throbbed, his mind pulsed. The man walked into his fate without
fear.
"...and
vision?"
"Check."
Suddenly, the man's eyes shot into the light - into his experience. Their pupils slitted and closed abruptly, and their lenses dimmed and broadened; their deep brown irises seemed to glow with excitement. Even after his eyes tried so much to narrow the light from entering his nerve pathways, it was still overwhelming. It was the eyes' first time seeing, they could not have been prepared for the onslaught of illumination that came rushing at them at three hundred kilometers per second.
"Let's
get the linkup going, Johnson."
"Yessir."
"I'm having a problem getting the sound - his transmitter must still be
initializing."
Sound! The man knew the word - it related to the way he was able to receive and process the information coming to him through the side of his head. Ears! He thought subconsciously about his ears "That's where the sound is going to!". He somehow knew how his ears appeared, where they were, and what they did. He was in complete amazement - innocence - at everything that he was experiencing. It was all for the first time, but he didn't know that, his mind was too busy concentrating on processing all the new things that he was finding. Somehow, he began to understand what they were saying. "They", being the "people" beside him, communicating by vibrating and projecting waves to the ears of their fellow "humans". Two words stood out to the man: "humans" and "people." He knew what they were, but he could not describe them, he could only see them in his mind. He felt a strange camaraderie and relation to these "people"; these "humans" that he somehow knew so well. It disturbed him greatly, and the back of his brain began to process the thought.
"So
can he hear us, then?"
"I think so, but we won't know for sure until this damned thing starts
working."
"How you commin' along with that linkup, Johnson?"
"Almost done, sir."
"Well Everett wants it done by yesterday, so I suggest that you...OH! Mr.
Everett! I, uuuhhh, wasn't expecting you - I was going to call..."
"Yes, yes, yes. It's fine H, just coming down to check on your progress."
"Well, we sent a report up just fifteen minutes..."
"I got the report H. It got me excited - I wanted to see for myself. Listen,
I'll just sit down here *unrecognizable noises* and watch you work. Is that
OK with you?"
"Ummm, well, yeah, I guess that's fine but..."
"I won't get in your way - just pretend I'm not here."
There was an extended silence.
"Come
on people, keep working. Please, don't mind me. I don't want people working
with me that are afraid to be themselves in front of their Alpha."
"Well, that's fine, but I can't explain everything to you Mr. Everett..."
"H!" the voice boomed, "How many times do I have to tell you?"
the voice became softer - "Just pretend that I'm not here, OK?"
"Yeah, sure. Great." There was heavy breathing for a second or two, and suddenly the voice seemed to be stronger and less scattered, the voice proudly yelled "OK people, lets get this man standing on two feet!"
The man heard all kinds of noises, his eyes began to come into focus; they had stopped feeding him pain and confusion, and they now fed him an image. He saw two black streaks, parallel - stretching vertically in the middle of the image, all else was white. As his vision toned, the black streaks became black rectangles. The rectangles started at a third of the way vertically into his image, and stopped two-thirds of the way up. The rectangles were identical, and the space between the two was almost precisely twice their width horizontally. His vision was now fully toned, and he noticed that there was a large square made of a blue line about the width of the rectangles bordering this beautiful image. The image was clear to him now, but there were only four colors present, which seemed peculiar to him for some reason. The colors were the black rectangles, the white field, the bordering blue square, and a strange mixture of one color - an odd, unknown color, that seemed to expand from the two black rectangles.
What
the man was seeing was more important than most people would ever know. It was
a ceiling - the top of the interior of a room, and fewer people have occupied
the room than have occupied the oval office of the American White House. An
understatement would be to say that this room had been visited by powerful people.
The ceiling that the man's eyes were straining to see covered more than just
a room - it covered secrets, conspiracies, lies, power, deceit, ancient trades
and deals that went back as far as anyone alive could remember and farther than
anyone alive could ever know. In essence, the ceiling serves as a cap to the
root of a specific fear. This room is more than two hundred meters below the
surface of the earth - there are two rooms and a long tunnel conjunct with it;
all else beside the room is earth.
The man walked. The man walked through rain, snow, sleet, and hail. He walked through temperatures upwards of one hundred and forty degrees, and below negative ninety degrees. He walked through plague, corruption, suffering, and apathy. He walked through all of this, but he walked through with honor. He walked with courage, bravery, righteousness, conscience, clarity, justice, and wisdom. The man walked into his fate without fear.
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