The contract itself was simple and straightforward: infiltrate, grab the artifact, leave and wait for the call. True to habit, Dot packed her backpack, a notebook and a pen.
Time to collect data.
And data is best gathered in public spaces.
She stopped at a café and poured herself a large black coffee, no sugar. Bitter and thick — she knew she'd need it. The plan was to spend the rest of the evening researching the job, rest during the day and slip into the target on the next night.
It was late, so she headed to her favorite LAN house. The place had an unsanitary air; a few lost souls in every shadowed corner, screen light the only sign of life.
Dot sat at a table in the back facing the entrance. She set her bag on the small table, pulled out her notebook and pen. Despite having access to sophisticated tech, nothing felt safer to her than paper and ink to jot down data.
She did it more from habit than necessity; one of her greatest assets was an annoyingly accurate photographic memory.
She input the address from the contract and the screen blinked: Quarantine 17. A brow lifted. She hadn't heard that name in ages.
She remembered her teenage nerd days, when she had a soft spot for conspiracy theories. Located in one of the city's still-unrestored sectors, Quarantine 17 was one of the blocks belonging to the Containment and Quarantine Areas.
A place of ruins, basically.
Dot had always been fascinated by the history of the Great Fall, the era when society fractured, followed by a chain of nuclear explosions that almost wiped the planet clean.
Countries, entire continents had become dust and memory.
Decades of exposure to residual radiation, environmental isolation and forced adaptation triggered what scientists called an epigenetic awakening in some communities: dormant genes activated by extreme environmental trauma, producing humans with enhanced cognitive and physical capacities.
Against all odds, among bomb rubble and genetic revolutions, this resilient group not only survived, but multiplied and evolved.
Today they are the Shrouded.
Self-declared the result of human evolution, they were the first to reorganize. They surfaced as colonies, then sects, and eventually became the elite of the current society.
There was a conspiracy theory that the Shrouded were the product of lab-created genetic experiments, made using genes harvested from Ascendants — the Ascendants themselves a product of natural mutation. Evolutionally, it made more sense.
Especially because even before the Shrouded, there were scattered records of Ascendants. They weren't organized, or at least there was no serious official document attesting to it, but they appeared sporadically in history, biological anomalies.
Accounts described them as people with unusual eyes and inexplicable powers, a genetic mutation never fully understood.
The grand conspiracy argued that the Shrouded were the attempt to replicate those Ascendants genes in labs, refining them into a "new humanity." While Ascendants remained rare, solitary, volatile anomalies, the Shrouded were the domesticated, perfected mutation.
The theory was believable, considering, at least in Dot's view, the Shrouded were all too beautiful, too intelligent, too organized to be purely natural. Plus, they bore a glyph, a birthmark-like symbol, and pupils shaped like a cross.
Hence the spiritual links people attached to the Shrouded.
Dot rolled her eyes at all of it.
Ascendants, Shrouded, beta humans... in the end it was all the same tired speech with different labels. Ascendants were urban legend to her, mythic figures used to prop up conspiracy narratives. As for Shrouded, she'd met one, gotten in too deep, and seen that like everyone else, they had flaws.
Flaws of character, in her personal experience.
She shook her head lightly, snapping out of counterproductive thoughts.
She jotted the location into her notebook. The map confirmed the obvious: getting in wouldn't be hard.
A quick search showed the building was the Retention and Research Archive. She dug a bit more and found a site curiously named Conspiracist Relics.
Her eyes skimmed the pages.
The site was full of conspiracy fluff and had a knack for spinning stories. After the wasted text, she found an operation and closure date. A quick mental calculation put the building out of use for about fifty years.
Technologies from that era were relics now, but caution was key. She made a mental note to touch base with Nyx about useful tools.
She kept reading: the site claimed the place stored obsolete data, technological artifacts and out-of-circulation documents.
So far, nothing special.
But the building's structural features and security systems allowed it to store sensitive materials in a confidential, high-security way, and that caught her interest.
According to the site, the place still functioned as a camouflaged vault protecting restricted items, despite being deactivated and vacant, "subject to occasional review for reactivation or alternative use."
That seemed debatable.
Especially judging by the current photo: graffitied walls, main gate apparently forced open... a three-story building. Note to self: bring sturdier clothes.
She messaged Nyx, giving the building name and operation date. With Nyx, she got straight to the point. Her fingers were quick:
"Are we using drones or disabling cameras?"
As she was putting the notebook away her communicator blinked and a short text popped up.
[Private Message Received]
"Give me the signal and I'll disable them."
— Nyx
The reply made her smile. She sent a thumbs-up.
Nyx was an enigma to Dot.
When Walkyria gave her contact, she warned not to expect warmth. Nyx was more like an AI bot: direct, blunt, answers too short to be human.
After many jobs together — Dot in the field, Nyx remote — Dot couldn't resist poking her now and then. One bored day during a Contract she opened the comm with a stupid grin and typed:
"answer me, chat: if you had to choose, which one would you prefer? chatgpt or gemini?"
A reply came in under a minute:
"is this lack of service or lack of dick?"
It was the only time Nyx used a question mark. Dot laughed out loud, that silly grin stuck on her face. She answered:
"awww, I'm lonely AND bored, chat. give me attention."
Silence. Nothing but the usual Nyx vanish. For anyone else it would be the end of the convo, but Dot pressed on:
"chat... did I hit your free daily usage limit?"
A low snicker escaped her. The silence spurred her.
"chat... can you give me a motivational phrase?"
The reply came seconds later:
"fuck u, •"
Dot laughed alone. That was Nyx's humor: dry, cruel and irresistible.
The friendships she made in this underworld... a rich field of half-mad people.
She closed all pages, cleared her cache, plugged in a flash drive and ran a cleaner to wipe her history. While it ran she idly visited dubious joke sites and a cat adoption page.
A short beep signaled the cleanup was done. She removed the flash drive and pocketed it.
Time to prepare.
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