Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported
These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.
These early adopters found out what happened when a cutting-edge marvel became an obsolete gadget... inside their bodies.
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It is the year 2038.
Adam Jensen, formerly a conspiracy busting mercenary badass, sits in a run down motel room in Hell's Kitchen, New York.
He didn't check in with much baggage, excepting a decade of extreme emotional and physical trauma. After he threw in the towel, decided to /really/ retire, he figured he would be able to live off of occasional PI work, and hell, maybe just crawling through some vent shafts until he got somewhere with a hidden cache he could sell to some idiot on the street, or just look for an ATM to ... reroute funds to his account through.
Lying on a bed that squeaks everytime he shifts his massive, nearly 400 pound augmented body in a vain attempt to find a position that allows him to drift into sleep... he decides maybe a drink will help.
He sits up. Creak. He yawns as he reaches toward the night stand table, cluttered with credsticks, EMP grenades, a pistol, and some strange looking prototype for a dual purpose, wall mountable, but also throwable explosive.
LAM? Was that the acronym they went with? Not important in the long run, just a souvenir from his last and final corporate espionage contract.
He blinks a few times and waits for his once bleeding edge, but now ancient occular implants to resolve his last remaining bottle of cognac.
As he reaches to take a pull, straight from the bottle... darkness. Moments later his vision of the cluttered nightstand table is replaced by a 600 x 480 jpeg, blown up to encompass the entirety of his approximately 8K total field of view and resolution.
It is an image... of text. Very low resolution... Papyrus font. It states that his occular implants will no longer be receiving any software updates, and that his implants are now out of warranty, and non compliant with a recently passed consumer safety law, and as such must be shut down for his protection.
Startled by the darkness, then abrupt disclaimer, then darkness again, Jensen fumbles while reaching for his drink. How... how is there an audio message thanking him for his purchase of the wrong model of occular implants... playing through his infolink? Shouldnt those sub systems be firewalled?
This is the last thought that ever passes through Jensen's mind.
In blindness, as the wrong corporate sound file played through the space between his ears, Jensen never realized he had knocked the prototype LAM off of the nightstand, which armed itself, beeped several times, and then exploded.
-=====-
Downstairs, a 3 year old Sandra Renton screams when one of her father's hotel rooms explodes, triggering fire suppression systems before the power goes out.
She stumbles out of the lobby out on to the street. A minute later her exasperated father, crying out for Sandra, finds her outside bawling. He embraces her and thanks God that she is alright.
While he was reaching down to grab his traumatized daughter, he noticed she was standing in a pile of ... broken glass?
Embracing his only child close to his heart, he looks up at the front entrance to the motel lobby.
It takes him a few moments to breathe deeply, more slowly, and eventually calm down enough to realize what has occured: The letters 'H', 'i', and 'l' were knocked off the wall by the explosion of Jensen's suite, leaving the neon sign advertising the name of the hotel to now read only as 'ton'. Sandra just happened to come to be standing in the debris field.
"What a shame," he sighs ... "what a shame."
-{====}-
Author's notes:
Sure, sure, you've heard about Chekov's gun...
... but what about Jensen's Lightweight Attack Munition?
=P
It is an image… of text. Very low resolution… Papyrus font.
Lmao
They unfortunately can and will keep getting away with it.
PAPYRUS!!!!!!!
I know what you diiiiiiiiid
He never asked for this.
Oh god, his obituary at this point.
Addendum:
The last drops of Jensen's cognac drip down the blown out street facing window of his motel room, glistening as they slide down the broken and jagged remnants of what used to be the neon 'H' of the old Hilton hotel...
... falling to the snow covered sidewalk...
... like tear drops, in the rain.
-=====-
An unknown distance away, Bob Page notices on his main holoscreen that a green blip in New York has flashed brightly three times, turned red, and then extinguished itself.
Page taps the right side of his forehead twice rapidly, for more information. An ancillary screen with simple integer indicators decreases by one, for two categories.
Visible as something like hyperchromatic QR codes, the column headers are instantly captioned within the brain of the determined corporate mogul by a Versalife prototype, low-impact, extra cranial wired overlay/projector, which Page volunteered to have installed on himself.
A subtle smile creeps across Page's face as he observes the translated column headers reading out to ... 'Known Sarif Associates', as well as 'Individuals w/ Compromising Knowledge'.
Now with a full smile on his face, he is somewhat surprised by what he sees when he jubilantly pivots and spins a half rotation to face toward his personal bar.
Megan Reed is weeping bitterly in the background.
Her face is as illuminated by the lights of the antechamber as Page's cruel and mocking visage is obscured by the darkness encompassing the main hologram display station.
Page's expression turns to a frown as he /formally/ notices her.
"Was there something I should be aware of?"
Reed bites her lip to stymy her tears.
"... No."
Page does not notice Reed's Versalife ID Badge on the floor of his own private communications bunker until he is forced to retreat to it for safety 9 hours later...
..Two hours after his system alerts him that Reed has not logged in as scheduled on her personal work station, and one hour after some kind of presumed system malfunction has erroneously opened the cages of every single creature in the Versalife BioGenetic Research Laboratory on SubLevel 8.
Is this an original ? If so, do you write because I want more. You had me wanting to look up the book to buy it lol. Good shit
Yeah, this is original and no I did not use ChatGPT to come up with it rofl.
I was just bored and ... got inspired? I guess?
I am ... reasonably confident that if I wrote and published a book of what is more or less Deus Ex fan fiction, I think Eidos would sue me into non existence.
I dunno. Maybe I will write more someday?
Kind of between jobs... and living situations... at the moment.
Very nice read
Thank you!
You missed the opportunity to end in "What a shame, what a rotten way to die".
Well, I figure that Dad Renton (i forgot his first name rofl) does not actually care about Jensen, as he is more or less a slum lord. He /mostly/ cares about his daughter, and of course the neon sign. This is cyberpunk dystopia after all, empathy is expensive.
To quote some guy that made some movies about space battles: "It's like poetry, it rhymes."
Haha. I thoroughly enjoyed this comment. It was so well-written. Thank you for writing this.
Thank you for the compliment!
Life has been... difficult for me this last year. Poke around for some of my other comments in this thread for more details.
I did not expect this little fun story that popped into my head upon seeing this article to have such a positive response, and it is nice to receive any validation at all after what I've been through.
So again, thank you!
