Chapter 116: Lawful escort

  Diana

  Ripley had… certainly changed. It was ironic, knowing that for a brief period of time we both coexisted within cells. I wasn’t sure if his time in isolation here was what made him like that or if it was whatever he had been up to on August 30th, but as I glanced back at him…

  His Shardware was different, less robust, but something in the way he wielded them gave him an air of danger. Those eyes that had always seemed rusty now had a golden sharpness hiding within them, but despite that, he still seemed… noticeably Ripley Donovick.

  But there was a depth to his soul that drowned everything I knew about him. I’d seen the clips, he was Dreadwire. A Gold Grade mercenary even someone like the R0N1N relied on — a man who had instantly grown infamous throughout this city in one night. I'd seen the reports, their attack on Yuzhou was devastating but the corporation wasn't willing to reveal the severity of it.

  A man who worked alongside the R0N1N... it itched at my heart to question if all this really was for his mother. It seemed too big of an attack. Although, when I made the choice to come and help him out on Twilight's request, I was willing to give him them the benefit of the doubt. She'd figure out one way or another to get him out, and I bet as soon as he left these walls our records would be scrambled so there would be no evidence he was ever in there. Breaking the law like this didn't come easy, but as it stood, he was the only other person dragged into this mess and I could relate to some of the crazy bullshit that he'd probably gone through. I could see it on his face.

  He seemed older. Stubble had grown across his face, and he had gained some muscle mass — be it artificial or organic — far away from the meek-looking Shard Op’ I’d seen three months ago. There was an undeniable edge to him, one of a man with a plan in mind.

  “So why are you-“ He began but I shut him up.

  “Right now…” I whispered. “I am an Investigator of the law escorting a wrongfully accused civilian out of the holding cell. I will not tolerate any unwanted chatter even if from a prior acquaintance. We are to uphold conduct within these walls.”

  ———

  Ripley

  Oh, I got what she meant. We could have unwanted attention watching us right now, most likely. Or there was some other threat that. So I sat down and went through the motions, noticing that the Datacube she used was of the same make and model as Mirage’s typical brand.

  Ah, so that’s how Diana found me. But why would Mirage go through her?

  ———

  Diana

  Further away from the holding facility, I led Ripley over to the car Dryder had let me borrow. It wasn’t paid with the price of luxury, but it was… functional. Getting in, before I spoke, I tapped several buttons in the exact order the paranoid man had told me to, apparently, it activated some concealment protocols.

  Ripley, though, he stared at the car in awe. He rubbed the control panels like they were the second coming of The Founders. “Uh… who modded this?! It’s remarkable!”

  “It’s a coworker’s…” I responded. “He’s uh, letting me borrowing it for this errand.”

  “Right, right.” Ripley nodded, still dazed. “So how’d you find me?”

  “Your…” I paused. “Girlfriends couldn’t contact you, apparently there was some weird signal blocking them out. They contacted me instead to see if I could figure what was up with you, I was honestly surprised they even trusted me enough to do it.”

  “Last I heard you were…” Ripley droned on, and my grip on the steering wheel got a little bit tighter.

  “Yeah. Soul Killer got me.” I responded bitterly, I don’t know why I felt so strongly about… being sidelined, but I was. I had started to trust Ripley and now… maybe it was wrong of me, but he’d risked his life for me once before and now he switched up all of a sudden.

  But maybe his circumstances called for it, and I was in a dangerous situation. It would have been stupid for him to rush after me, just as it had been for Anthony, but... I needed confirmation. “Why didn’t you…?”

  “You probably put two and two together, hell, you saw my Claws already with that golden wire. You know I’m Dreadwire, I already had a prior engagement with Missy. But also, honestly…”

  Ripley smirked in the rear mirror. “Anthony’s a shit negotiator.”

  My thoughts turned quiet, before they blew up like thunder.

  “Don’t fucking talk about him like that!” I hissed, my grip on the wheel cracked the plastic, but I forced my breathing to ease as I saw Ripley visibly taken aback by me. “I… a lot has happened and… well… Anthony’s in a coma.”

  ———

  Ripley

  Hearing those words, I wanted to punch myself and tear my brain out of a shattered frontal bone with my claws. Sinking deeper into my chair, I was beginning to realize that maybe by refusing to help Anthony I had… no, it wasn’t my fault. None of what happened to Diana was my fault.

  But the fact was, I made a choice. The choice not to blindly charge into the unknown, and that was my reason. “It was dangerous Diana, not like when I went in to fight Metal Heavens. You’re talking about The Uncaged, you were kidnapped by them. And I had a responsibility I’d dedicated myself to before, one that… could seriously help my mother.”

  “Are you telling the truth? It was for your mother?” Diana stared me down through the mirror.

  “Honestly, no.” I shook my head. “My mother probably doesn’t want me to do any of this, she’s said she’s content with dying before. But I’m not, I want her to live… I’m doing this for me, out of my selfish desire to have the life that I want. And a huge part of that is my family… I can’t let her die. I'm willing to do what it takes.”

  Diana stayed quiet through all of that, but her eyes dimmed the longer I spoke. As she turned a corner, her voice settled with a heavy sigh. “I… I get what you mean, just keep civilians out of it and I'm willing to turn... a blind eye. I’m sorry for bursting out.”

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  “I’m sorry too, honestly… I can’t even imagine what you went through.” I looked at her, trying to console her with my eyes but unsure of how to even begin.

  “The bastard held me in one of their… farms.” She staggered out, her eyes becoming unfocused like memories were tearing her focus away. “The Uncaged, they’re fucking evil. Ripley. Soul Killer’s… some of sort of psionic hivemind with a fetish for mutations and… MALs. They had me fighting MALs. They could make them out of corpses.”

  That… was a lot of information.

  I held myself back for the moment to ask her in further detail, instead choosing to make my own revelations. “I really wish I could have helped you… but I did find out more about our Implants from Ms. Himiko. During the heist… I… plugged up to the network and she got into my head, she said she spoke to you as well.”

  Diana braked the car suddenly. “She… she did. At the auction where…”

  “Yeah…” I took a deep breath in, ready to say the big thing. “Our Implant probably comes from a descendant of a MALtitan.”

  ———

  Diana

  The second Ripley said those words, everything clicked together. “You mean The Infinite?”

  “How’d you guess?” Ripley looked at me in surprise.

  “At that auction they sold MALtitan bits for billions. I felt a weird… resonance to The Infinite. Like it was calling for me, sort of the same as when I’m near you.”

  Just as I said that I could feel a part of his… Energy reacting like it was calling for mine. It felt so malleable to his thoughts, the slightest shift in him echoed through the waves of Gold running through his nerves. And yet, I felt some strange comfort in his presence, despite the time we spent to our own devices… that Energy was honest. And I could tell that right now, he was genuine with his remorse.

  “Like…” Ripley said exactly what I was thinking. “A part of you is missing.”

  He then said something else that garnered my interest. “My mom said that Dual Adapters are only stable when both of their Implants come from the same MALignant. If you felt a similar resonance to the MALtitan then… I guess that confirms it, we have a shared Source-Shard Fragment. I think so, at least.”

  The Source, I needed to know more. “What do you know about it?”

  “It’s an authority or… power of some kind. Creates Deviant Mutations in SIM Adapters and Unique Features in BUG Adapters. By the way, a Deviant Gene is a Mutation that stays at a Gene Capacitance of 1. You have anything like that?”

  “I do, I think Soul Killer brought up the term a few times.” I said quickly. “And you have a Unique Feature then.”

  He nodded, and for a brief moment silence filled the car.

  Then we both spoke simultaneously.

  “I can absorb any mutagenic material without lasting consequences.”

  “My BUG allows me to absorb and focus Warpcode into mimicking a new Feature.”

  …

  “Oh…”

  ———

  Ripley

  We’d trusted each other just a tiny bit more as we explained in more detail how our Implants worked.

  “So you can mimic Features?” She said, and I went a little further than I admitted as I told her how I'd begun to also alter BUGs to create specialized modules for my mimicry and that it let me focus my development on one key area at a time. Her eyes had a peculiar glint as I described the minutiae of Warpcode Manipulation within Implants. I also spoke, in brief, that I'd gained a second Unique Feature in Shardweave but hadn't quite figured it out yet.

  “Hold up, you can manipulate another person’s Mutations?" I asked in return, and she wasn't sure, it had started with Unstable Biology and developed into an enhancement of synergy between her Mutations before it became consuming Mutagenic Material and resources... until it eventually became some weird sense she claimed to have about others Warp Energy.

  The conversation went on for a long time as she drove to my apartment building, as we compared and contrasted the exact natures of our Implants to determine their shared causality.

  At first, we thought they were simply to absorb. But some of our various abilities weren’t directly linked to that. Diana had started out gaining extra Meta-Mutations, whereas I was only able to mimic Features. Only after we both needed external sources of Warp Resources did we develop those faculties to make more of the resources we needed.

  Our final conclusion ended up being the same one I’d first come to back in Ms. Himiko’s digital subspace. The nature of our BUGs, of whatever our Source was, had to do with the ability to grow. To adapt."To..." We both began, and the same word crossed our lips. "Change."

  That power of The Infinite’s ever shifting form but molded down for human scale.

  But at this point, we were anything but human.

  As we continued conversing, we began to share the stories of what we were up to. I didn't quite tell her about Goliath's presence inside of me, but that The R0N1N had orchestrated the heist to take away what was frankly a terrifying bio-weapon. She seemed relieved before telling meof Soul Killer, the nature of their terrifying mutation and the ability to steal the bodies of others through pollen extracted in red spider lily flower. And how she had met the Dogwhistler controlling another individual as well. The worst part was how she had described that the Soulless could become MALformed in a moment using a vial containing a concoction of crimson liquid where those flowers were concentrated.An injection into an Implant... the hibernating presence of Soul-Death.

  It was exactly what I saw back with Nathaniel, the homeless man who had been a pawn for Dogwhistler. Every word of hers had an ember of rage and despair burning out of her, the fiery drive that spilt from her speech reacted with my heart and strangely made me more compulsive into… wanting to do something.

  But what could we do?

  “Shit.” We both came to the same conclusion. The Uncaged had an expert each in BUG and SIM Implants in The Dogwhistler and Soul Killer, if aimed to eventually learn how to control the MAL themselves…

  If that were to ever happen then Founders, it was terrifying.

  But what was I going to do about it? As it stood… while I didn’t like The Uncaged, I wasn’t going to wage war against them… but just thinking about what they could do…

  I didn’t know, not yet. My focus was my family. It was my mother… and it was Elsa and her Personas.

  Maybe Diamante and Missy.

  Truth is, I’d come to care about people who were putting their lives in danger… and… I had enough people. For most of my life, it had only been me and my mom, Hoaqin too and…

  Just them.

  And although I wanted to say more to Diana, we’d reached my building complex. I stared at it for a long time, scared for what I would be returning to.

  “Hey Ripley…” Diana sighed. “We have to… work together for this. But I’m going to be honest. I don’t think we should be… too friendly. Not if we have this strange compulsion to kill each other or… I don’t know, it’s weird.”

  “Everything is weird.” I agreed. “And yeah, I think that colleagues work best for us.”

  “Right.” She smiled meekly. “Before you go, take my new Sigil ID, it’s what my um… Soul Killer-killing friend made for my more… undercover operations.”

  An invite was sent along the view of my lenses for the identity of a Lillian Rose, and I accepted it, returning her with my own Dreadwire ID.

  “Huh… one more thing Ripley.” She tapped my arm, before her eyes briefly went out of focus. I also felt something, a deep surge of pain and wanting recompense. Wanting to burn.

  She pulled her hand back. “When you’re… done with saving your mother. Become a police-contracted Mercenary for the Swarm… otherwise I… I don’t want us to become enemies.”

  I thought of it for a long time in my head, but only smirked. “Well then I’ll need to think of what you should do once Anthony’s back and running.”

  Diana’s lips faltered for a moment, and I wasn’t sure if I said the right thing or not when all she responded with was. “Goodbye, Ripley.”

  …

  “Goodbye Diana.”

  And so, I returned home, knocking the door so that my mother could-

  Diamante opened it, the crimson lenses of his eyes searing with the intensity in them, and inside the room were Missy, Elsa… and my mother - unconscious and on the couch. A biomonitor and IV drip were attached to her, a steady pulse of her heartrate coming slowly - too slowly.

  ———

  Diana

  I didn’t drive away immediately. Instead, my hands reached for the Silver Nexus SIM in my pockets. Ripley had said he had done one thing I had no capacity for… manipulate a BUG by combining their qualities.

  But… what could he do to a SIM?