FSE

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"-delays in the promised investment into the updating the infrastructure along the orbital holiday platforms has been blamed for a downturn in tourism revenue. A spokesman for the Haitsuba zaibatsu has said that..."

"- was announced that three biological rights terrorists were arrested earlier today following an attempted bombing of a Neurolink research laboratory in the Kyoto prefecture earlier today. This act follows extension of trans-human rights accord to include people of..."

"- completely and utterly deny the charges made by these women. Women who, I will point out, have never presented any evidence of the sexual assault that they claim happened. These are lies, plain and simple, intended to threaten my appointment as supr..."

"- subversive elements like Samedi and these so-called anti-fascist hacker friends of his should have no rights. If we want to show these sorts that their kind are not welcome, we need to be willing to wipe each and every one of..."

"- release of airborne particles that is believed to lead to the growth of sclerosis within earlier models of cybernetic brains. Government agencies have denied that such pollutants were ever spread amount the..."

The man waved his hand, and the newsfeed voices fell into a silence, a shimmering wall of holographic monitors blinking out of existence around him.

Sunset bathed the office, painting the skyline that sat just beyond a glass pane dome that encapsulated the man's office with shades of orange and gold. Below he saw the lights of the city, the neon drum of the evening in Oldtown playing a muted tune. Above, he saw the stars, pinpricks through the dark layer of cloud.

Clasping his hands behind his back, he stared out over the city, watching the sunset. The light cast his shadow across the room of his office, seeming to make the already sharp edges of his tailored suit even more razor-edged. He inhaled, savouring the intricacies of it all.

"Sir?" echoed a small voice.

He turned his head, barely moving his body as he did so. The heavy, powerful antlers that sat atop his head moved with him, twisting to form new shadows on the floor. "Ashley" he said.

Ashley stood in the doorway, her arms folded. Most of the other staff would have been intimidated, hesitant in the man's presence, and often said so in hushed voices around the water cooler. But Ashley had no inclination towards that. She stared at the man, her gaze just as strong as his own. Five decades working in the business had taught her that nobody, much less a stag like the man before her, would give her a second's worth of respect unless she stood and demanded it from them. She walked forward, briskly, placing a sheaf of papers on the man's desk. "The day's accounting reports" she said.

The stag nodded. "Good" he commented. "Paper, though?"

"I presumed you would prefer it" she said, trying to keep her tone neutral. "It's getting late. I'm going to finish up for the day."

"And what about..." pushed the stag.

"No word yet" she said.

The stag arched an eyebrow. The manner in which he interrupted him grated on the man's nerves. "I could change your contract, you know" he said. "Have you forcibly upgraded into an android body. You might be more fuckable then."

"I doubt it" she said, humorlessly. "I'd still be too biological for your tastes."

He gave a sharp, almost mocking smile. "I want that prototype found" he said. "Give me good news. Any good news."

"There was a potential" Ashley said. "A three-cycle signal on the border of Newtown. Think that's likely?"

The stag began to leaf through the sheets of paper, barely looking at Ashley any further. "The fly?"

"In the vicinity" she commented. "But we lost contact. It was a noodle bar, if that's any indication. You think the fly's been taken?"

The stag turned his gaze down to the papers, and didn't respond.

Ashley waited for a few moments. Still no answer. She gave a shrug, turned on her heel, and walked out. Somewhere deep inside, she hoped that the old man would choke on the papers.

Barely glancing up, the stag finished scanning the first few papers. For a moment, his dark hazel eyes flashed a sharp green as they finished their scan, processing the data and feeding it through to his brain. He checked his wireless connection, and frowned. According to the reports, long-term profitability would suffer by a fifteen percent margin if they weren't able to make a turn-around on improving their research and development output. He sighed, dropping the papers back onto his desk. It looked like he would have to put more weight onto their military contract for the next few months; perhaps, he thought, try to push through some of the resources in order to patch up where things were falling through. With a wave of his hand, he turned the newsfeeds back on. At that, a wall of monitors once more sprung to life.

"-anticipates that famine will continue to affect the country. Since voting to re-establish their independence, the small nation has been unable to establish sufficient protein farm land in order to feed its population, and without imports... "

"-stands as a testament to the modern motion picture industry. With a box office return that was unrivalled since the golden age of cinema and audiences who hung on his every performance, it appears that people will continue to mourn his death..."

"-leading proponents of the new field which has been dubbed 'magience' by researchers. However the concept is scoffed by many, including members of the ethno-nationalist front who claim that it is simply an extension of the Frankfurt school..."

* * *

A sharp, high-pitched electric buzzing sound attacked the air, and Rowan scrambled to stand up. With a thud, her head collided with the underside of the desk that she was laying beneath, causing her to drop her digital screwdrivers and multi-tools. They scattered around the worn old wooden floor of the apartment, all the while the mouse muttered sharp little curses as she scurried to pull them back towards her.

Sitting up, she bundled armfulls of tools into the arrayed pouches and pockets that dotted her hips and legs, jamming them into her denim overalls and makeshift hold-alls. The buzzer sounded again, just as Rowan tried to hop up to her bare feet. "Alright, alright!" she snapped, pulling her goggles back onto the crown of her head. "Keep your augments on! I'll be right there!"

The buzz sounded again, and was then quickly replaced by a heavy banging on the metal door instead. The mouse kicked a small wheeled desk-chair aside, dodging around several small tables that were arrayed with loose and disorganised piles of machinery. Standing on an old keyboard as she hurried to the door, Rowan hopped up onto a tiny little ladder which brought her up to the height of the door's sliding security panel. Sliding the panel aside, she peered through the hole into the alleyway outside. "Who is it?"

"It's me" replied Cybe, briskly, "let us in."

For a moment, Rowan didn't speak. Instead she pulled one of the many cracked lenses from her goggles down over her right eye, staring through it suspiciously. "What's the password?" she demanded.

Outside, the android wolf hammered his fist against the metal door once more, causing it to shake. "Just open it!" he snapped. "I have him, and I don't know if we're being tailed or not!"

Cursing, Rowan began pulling back the door's array of bolts, chains and locks, one by one. When the door eventually opened, the wolf hurried in, dragging Luke behind him. The fox seemed to stare blankly into the near-distance, as though entirely unaware of the world around him.

"My word!" muttered Rowan in amazement, slamming the door shut and reinstating the security bolts, "It's him. It's really him! Holy crap, Cybe, why did you pull him out so soon?"

Stumbling almost blindly, the young fox followed behind the android. The wolf guided him down onto the wheeled stool, before turning back to the mouse. "I didn't have a choice" answered Cybe. "He noticed that I was blanking the corp's robot's eyes. I had to pull him out of the bar before he caused a scene."

Tutting in annoyance, Rowan hurried over to the table beside the pair. "But triggering the memory's feedback loop? Do you never think things through before you act?" With that, she began to dig around the arrayed and assembled pieces of machinery. "Damn it, you shouldn't have even taken him into a public space like that in the first place."

"I needed to win his trust" replied the android. "What was I supposed to do? Bring him over here right away? Wouldn't he have thought that was a bit strange?"

"No less strange than dating a robots" she muttered. "Where's my cognital dissemmilation projector?"

Cybe glanced around, looking at the mess that laid piled around the room. "Your what?" he asked. "I've never heard of such a thing."

"That's because I just invented it yesterday" she retorted. "It's got a lens and it's covered in blue sticky tape."

Nodding, the wolf began to search around, eventually finding the object buried in a small pile of old circuit boards next to the bed. He threw it to Rowan, who caught it nimbly and hurried over to Luke. The fox had not moved the entire time, sitting on the stool with his head tilted downwards.

Cupping the youngster's chin with her fingers, the mouse lifted his face up. She peered through her goggles, examining quizzically. "He really doesn't know?"

"No idea" said Cybe, shaking his head.

Rowan gave a soft sigh, and pointed the lens of the device towards Luke's eye. She pressed a small button, and the lens emitted a series of blazingly bright flashes, whining loudly as it did.

For a moment, the fox barely reacted. Then, flailing his arms defensively, he tried to bat the offending device away from his face. "Get off!" he wailed. "Turn it off!"

Leaning back, Rowan threw the machine onto a nearby workbench. "This is going to be a long evening" she muttered.

Stumbling to his feet, Luke glanced between the stranger and his wolf companion. "Where am I?" he demanded. "What's going on? Who's she?"

"Try to relax" responded Cybe, stepping closer. "Just breathe."

Pacing back, the fox bumped into a table, sending a pile of screws tumbling. "Who's she?" he demanded, pointing at the mouse.

Rowan shot Cybe a glance. The wolf inhaled. "She's a friend" he said, his tone as calming as he could make it. "Do you not recognise her?"

"Never seen her before in my life" replied Luke. "Should I?"

"You see?" snapped Rowan, turning to motion in agitation to Cybe. "It's useless. We can't recover anything with him."

Luke's head darted around, looking around the room with a growing sense of disorientation. Panic danced in his wide eyes. "Listen" said Cybe, moving over to place his hand on the fox's upper arm. The fox pulled away, nervously. "Listen" repeated the wolf, "she's a friend, okay? A friend. You're safe. This is her home. Her name's Rowan, okay?"

Slowly, the fox's breath began to slow. He nodded.

"Rowan's a friend" he reiterated, "she can help you."

Shimmying her way over, the mouse looked at Luke with a doubtful expression. "I don't know if I can" she muttered with a tinge of hopelessness, "the rewriting is pretty intensive, right?"

Luke seemed to straighten up once more. "My memories?" he asked. "They're wrong, aren't they? You said that."

Deliberately, the wolf reached over and grabbed a nearby chair. He wheeled it over beside the fox, slumping down onto it. "Your memories were over-written. Changed. Altered. The ones that you think that you remember, they are more like a dream than anything else. Your real memories, well, I think that maybe we can recover them, maybe. But after what they did, they..."

"How is that even possible?" asked Luke, incredulously. "You can't just reach into somebody's brain and alter their mind like that."

Cybe glanced down. "The mind is just data" he said, "it can be reprogrammed. Once they had access to the augmentations linked into your brain, they..."

Luke slapped his hand down against the table, sending a quick shudder through it. "I don't have any augmentations, though. Remember? I'm fully organic."

At that, Rowan spoke up. "Actually" she began, "your brain is roughly fifty percent mechanical. I did the work on it myself, although you won't remember it."

"What?" sputtered the fox.

Scurrying a few steps closer, the white mouse began fiddling with a few pieces of tech that lay scattered around the desk. "About three years ago, when you first joined us. They enhance your sensory perceptions and reaction times, increasing the speed by which you can navigate in digital spaces. I even did some custom mods to allow for more secure wireless hacking, you were very keen on that. Here, try changing your vision mode to infrared, you'll see what I mean."

Luke's jaw hung open for a few moments. "That's not possible" he stuttered. He glanced down, looking at his hands. Carefully he probed the fur around his forearms with his fingers. He certainly felt as he had always felt, looked as he had always remembered looking. The story that the pair were spinning was just so utterly impossible.

Cybe continued. "If you didn't think to look for any internal augments, there's no reason that you'd believe that you had any. That's part of the rewrite. Then they placed you into manual labour - I'm not sure why. I moved in to extract you as soon as we could."

The fox started to shake his head at the impossibility of it all. "Who are you people?" he asked. "Who did this to me?"

"Don't answer that" snapped Rowan.

The wolf spun around, turning his chair to face the anxious mouse. "He has a right to know" replied Cybe.

Placing down the piece of tech that she was working on, Rowan retorted "We don't know how closely they're monitoring him. They could have a wireless tap on all incoming data. They could use that to find out about us."

"I'm already blocking wireless access" said the android. "We have to tell him."

"No" she insisted. "Not until after we've done a full data retrieval. Look, I can get started in a few minutes, once I've got this..."

Luke stood up.

As both pairs of eyes in the room turned towards, the fox didn't say anything. For several moments, silence reigned throughout the small apartment. An anxious quietness seemed to not only surround the trio, but pervade Luke himself. He barely even seemed to breath. Then, abruptly, he said "What will happen to me after that?"

Slowly, Rowan stammered, "Well, your personality - your real personality, from before - I should be able to restore it."

"But what" asked Luke again, "will happen to me?"

"I suppose" she said, "I guess, you mean, that your current personality, it would be..."

Cybe stood up. With one hand, he motioned to Rowan to stop. "We can't do it, then" he said.

"What do you mean?" snapped the mouse, turning her expression to the wolf. "We have to get him back and finish the run, or..."

"Recovering his previous personality" explained the wolf, "means killing his current one. That isn't right."

"We're not killing it!" retorted Rowan. "It's just data recovery. We're..."

"It's the same thing to me!" snapped Luke.

At that, the trio fell silent. Another few minutes passed, nervous and uncertain.

Finally, Luke turned to Cybe and said "I'm not sure that this date has turned into a bit of a disaster, hasn't it?"

* * *

"Sir?"

Ashley glanced around the doorway, checking to see if he was even present. At first, she wasn't sure that he was. However as her eyes grew accustomed to the dim lighting of the office, she saw him seated behind his vast marble desk.

He barely looked up, instead his eyes gazed forward, staring off into realms that contained streams upon streams of digitized information. It was not the first time that she had witnessed him like this. At times, the stag could sit there for hours, barely moving, doing little more than examining the information that would inevitably lead him to make a single concrete decision that would direct the future of herself and the hundreds of other employees around her.

"Sir!" she snapped.

Almost wearily, the dim haze that seemed to emanate from the stag's pupils dimmed - not deactivated, but merely faded somewhat. "I thought you'd left" he mumbled.

"I was on my way out" she said in response, as though to remind him that she had no intention of staying any longer than she felt that she absolutely had to, "when we got the call. I wanted to tell you..."

The stag turned his head a few inches towards the door. "Report that the fly has caught us our fish?"

She nodded. "Positive identification leaving a noodle bar on the border of Oldtown. Do you want to mobilise?"

The stag sighed. Stupid girl, he thought. Maybe he would be justified in replacing her with one of the new android models. "Angela..." he began.

"Ashley" she corrected.

He felt the nape of his neck bristle. "Ashley" he corrected himself. "I'm a stag. My ancestors were prey. They were hunted, right?"

She nodded. Internally, she wished that she could check the clock, head off home, not waste time with this tedious conversation.

"When they were hunted" continued the man, "the predators would choose the optimum time to strike. They would move in when the herd was separated, when the weak or the young were alone. We apply those same rules to the world of business - when I close a deal with a company, it is done when they are at their most vulnerable, because that way we can reap the most rewards. Do you understand?"

"Yes" she said, "entirely. We'll monitor them and maintain our target."

The stag nodded. "I could change it."

"What?"

"Your name" said the stag. "I could change your contract. Force you to call yourself by any name I want."

She smirked. "I can quit."

"No" he said, "You won't."

She folded her arms, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. "You're right. I won't" she said, looking at him. "Still want to rip out my brain and put a machine inside it?"

The stag gave a light chuckle. "Maybe tomorrow. Go home" he said,

With that, she turned and left.