Panacea by TemporalTravels Synsense presented itself as a family-oriented business, an anachronistic throwback to the days before personal area networks and cyber implants. Their building in the heart of the New Vegas skyline was topped with solar collectors, good for publicity vids but irrelevant compared to a thermo neutron reactor in the basement supplying their server farms’ expansive needs. Their lobby was the size of a booge’s apartment, a stark contrast against the open spaces of their contemporaries, all designed to highlight the insignificance of the visitor. The walls were paneled with extinct wood species, and the floor had two couch lined conversation pits. “Coming soon!” an overhead display announced cheerily to everyone entering the lobby. “Panacea, the Seamless Solution!” Gen passed the facial recognition cameras at the entrance while fishing out a stack of documents from her messenger bag, then absently adjusted her sunglasses and tapped a freshly printed Rook and Finch, Esq. identification tag hanging from the pocket of her white button shirt. Her brown hair was tied back in a corporate ponytail, and she complemented the look with a dark blue suit. The security guard mirrored her look except he was dressed in black, sporting an ex-military buzz cut and probable cyber mods hidden under Italian fabric. He looked up with disinterest from the reception desk, conducted a quick threat assessment, and went through the motions. “Do you have an appointment?” he asked with a slightly metallic tone. “No, and that’s the point,” Gen said blandly, tapping the documents. “I need to see Elvis Yang.” According to the company roster, he was a technical assistant, 30 years old, with a few wedding photos on social media and very little activity otherwise. “You’ll need to have an appointment.” Gen flashed the documents but pointed at a prominent title: “Petition for Divorce.” She looked at the guard over her sunglasses and cocked her head. “How am I getting an appointment for this?” Zealous Guard #1 stared back impassively. Gen stared back. Also impassively. “A bitch like you served me just like this.” “Sorry, buddy. You’ll find someone better.” Gen nodded towards the elevators. “Which floor?” “Fifth.” Once the door dinged shut, she hit button for five and then looked at the high corners of the passenger compartment. There were no visible camera attachments, and the signal scanner in her sunglasses didn’t register any hotspots. Anachronistic sometimes went too far, but she wasn’t complaining. Gen took out a first responder override and waved it over the maintenance panel, which clicked open in response. She turned a manual knob and sent the elevator into emergency mode, which automatically sent it back to the lobby in a nonfunctional state. She sat down and checked a timepiece from her messenger bag. Normal quitting time for Synsense was in half an hour, after which there would be a steady stream of wage slaves headed out the door. Afterwards, she could have access to the whole building, and more specifically, the servers containing the source code for Panacea without having to contend with full staffing. Synsense had marketed it as the complete solution for personal electronics, combining banking, identification, and social media in one app. Gen and her compatriots believed it would be a tool for total surveillance. Unfortunately, the interface was too convenient. The design was too intuitive. Its potential was too useful for people not to take advantage of the software. It was poison, and the people needed an antidote. = The smell of the Diamond Club at two in the morning was a mixture of sweat, stale tobacco, and desperation. Across from him sat a man, black hair greasy with exhaustion, furtive eyes following the ivorine sphere as it slowly bounced across the wheel, buoyed by the forlorn hopes of a miraculous reprieve and the cost of a discounted soul. Soren paid the man little attention. Caravan was ultimately an even odds game with a small house advantage, but only if you covered yourself by betting on two of the three sets of possible numbers. There was a two-thirds chance of landing on a winning set while covering the loss from the other, and so it made for an effective way of killing time without drawing attention, and that's what he wanted to do. Still no sign of her. A lack of electronics meant old school tradecraft, and it also meant no communications. The sphere landed with a solid, final thump into the red well labeled 34. Harvest. The man across the way blanched just as the serving girl came back with a tray bearing a frosted ceramic mug and a thin glass flute of red liquid. She was dressed in a dark red silk sleeveless dress with a plunging V that left no doubt of her femininity. It stopped mid thigh in a swirl of fabric, leaving a stretch of smooth, alabaster skin before it was hidden by a pair of knee high calfskin boots. It was meant to distract but not invite. He took the mug with one hand, simultaneously letting a copper five dollar chit drop on to her tray with a clack. She smiled gratefully as he sipped at the dark ale, a Bron XVII from last summer. The chit was a calculated tip. Flashing silver twenties brought too much attention to her, both from her employer and jealous coworkers, but a five was enough to garner attentive service in the hopes of more. Soren felt sympathy for the girl. She was young, but the weariness on her face and the pointed ear mods from Off Strip said she was there because she had to be, and not due to some absent father issues at home. He took the glass next and sniffed at the wine, crinkling his nose. "Cayman 22?" "Yes, sir," came the reply, slightly tinged with anxiety. "Send it back, I don't know what I was thinking. Flower pressings." He placed the glass back on her tray and raised an eyebrow ever so slightly. Clack. The relief and gratitude were immediately evident. "Right away, sir," she said, and walked away. It'd never make it back to the kitchen, of course. It was a good vintage. If the croupier noticed the exchange, he didn't comment. Soren collected his chips and walked away from the table to his room, sipping the last dregs of the Bron as he went. When he got to his door, he casually wondered if someone had searched his room, as he ran one finger along the back of the door handle. It came away, black with the charcoal dust he had smeared there prior. Satisfied with that at least, he unlocked the door and entered a sparsely finished double room, thick curtains drawn against even the moonlight outside. Closing the door to the casino's light, he allowed his vision to adjust to darkness as he navigated to the bedchamber, which was really just a small adjoining room. He placed the mug on the windowsill, on top of a fold of curtain fabric, then stretched deliberately before returning to the sitting room. Soren settled into one of the high-backed chairs that had long since been retired from normal use. She was definitely overdue. The Book said to consider the location compromised and to evacuate, leaving little behind but a scribbled alias in the guest book and a few anonymous stacks of chips. What that Book failed to consider was a contact left standing in an alleyway at midnight, growing increasingly paranoid, wondering if they were going to be sentenced to a slow death in the corporate oubliette, all for the sin of being late due to a recalcitrant child or other pedestrian cause. Soren took precautions, of course, but one could be conscientious to the point of cowardice. Ironically, there was no Panacea to be found when protocols met real life. As if choreographed, the sound of ceramic breaking against wooden floorboards came from the next room. Smiling thinly, Soren sprang from the chair and ran into the bedchamber, just in time to see a humanoid shape form out of the window curtain. He lowered his shoulder and slammed into the body, sending the two of them into the adjacent wall with a resounding thump that shook the room. Whomever it was let out an exhalation as air rushed out of a suddenly compressed diaphragm, but there was no gasp of surprise. His was a professional who had already processed the broken mug, surmised it was a tripwire, which should mean... Soren instinctively parried a thrust of fabric that turned into a silver blade, as the sharp edge sliced through token resistance offered by mere cotton, unconsciously noticing that he caught a metal bracer in his left hand instead of a bare wrist. He ignored a blossom of numbing pain caused by leg greaves impacting his right hip by kicking out to what he hoped was his opponent's right knee. Whatever his foot hit, it was solid but yielding, and the curtained figure visibly buckled with a hiss of pain. Instead of being able to control the knife hand, Soren’s attacker slowly turned the blade towards him with unusual strength, the two men locked in shaking competition, each of their hands grasping for advantage. For good measure, Soren kicked out again, keeping the stranger's legs apart and off balance, but in that fraction of time committed to the kick, he felt the stranger's off hand withdraw. Faced with no way to anticipate an opponent who undoubtedly was reaching for a second blade, Soren sent a solid fist into the stranger's chest with enough force to send him back over the windowsill. The bulkiness of the curtains suddenly vanished, and he tore them aside a second later, hoping to assess what kind of prisoner he had left to question from a two-story fall. There was no body on the cobblestones below, save for a prostitute walking drunkenly down the neon lit alleyway, oblivious to the struggle that had taken place above. The only sounds were echoes of mirth from Paradiso Road, and the occasional fluttering of banners at the faux keep far in the distance. “I suppose it's going to be a one-sided conversation,” he murmured. = Gen sat in an eighth floor bathroom, second stall from the wall, with a newly purchased laptop balanced on her legs. She had pivoted from a local printer into the Panacea server, but there was a problem. NetSec had dialed the sensitivity of their monitoring software to the highest levels on the eve of their release, which meant she could only trickle data out at a snail’s pace to her local drive without setting off every SysAdmin’s personal cell. There was another problem. There was simply not enough time to exfiltrate the entirety of the source code in the time she had. Physics was an uncaring mistress. Gen had tried to scrape the code over the course of the evening, trying to find any vulnerabilities, but it had been washed through several iterations of military grade AI pen testing. She had attached what interesting code segments she could find and sent them to Soren’s burner email account, but it wouldn’t be enough by a long shot. The rate on her transfer window suddenly dipped to zero, but immediately restored itself to the rate she had set not a second later. Gen immediately shut down the wireless and slammed the laptop shut, stepping briskly out of the women’s room. NetSec might have had set an upper data transfer limit for her IP, which she wouldn’t have known until just now. She headed for the emergency staircases, just in time to hear an elevator ding from around the corner. Gen didn’t need to see the black suits before making a decision. Taking a deep breath, she opened her laptop and re-enabled wireless, then pressed against the release bar, undoubtedly triggering another alarm in Security. Tapping keys as she took the steps down, she readied another data transfer. = Soren grinned insincerely as he was handed a neon colored beverage from a DCP partygoer, blending into the crush of humanity along Folsom Street. He should have left his burner on a random party bus long ago, but held out hope for one last message… which then buzzed in his pocket. Accessing the attachment, he froze for a moment in the street as he read it, then forwarded it to a secondary account for distribution. She wasn’t getting out, but the internal memos between SynSense and the government to install backdoors in their software were digitally signed at the highest levels. Setting the phone to reset, he threw it into the back seat of a waiting AutoCab before disappearing into the humid night. It was another document to read in the terabytes of information people ingested each day, but perhaps it would convince enough people to the dangerous precipice the world was walking alongside, when freedom would truly die.