Per company guidelines, this dossier will be released in compliance with the Rigspolitiet and proper legal channels with and only with certain sections removed or altered. — — — The following is the psychorecord of Sarcoma, IMF Solutions Special Division agent 003, on a commission for Nexevolve Organics (NVO) to eliminate Frederik Fruergaard. Recording begins 4/1/2120. Begin recording. A spinning helix of golden green light is affixed to the ceiling of a steel box. In a far off land, a giant isopod lays squirming in the murky ducts of a skyscraper. Biology doomed to an infinite recursive loop. Three days ago a high-explosive fragmentation grenade thrown by some pencil-pushing loser clipped my everything, severing an arm, leg, and most of the skin on my chest, yet here I am. The resewn limbs and skin throb, excreting opaque puss as I shiver on the autopsy table, reassembled, resurrected, a walking and talking man of Theseus. My employers often laud me as a pioneer into the cognitive and biological fallout of ressurrective technology. The potential risks to public consumption are supposedly still across an ethical line, but that seems less likely than the fact that they have no idea who makes them or how, same as me. A couple years ago, corpo scalpers managed to ransack a couple of these resurrection contraptions from confidential sources and sell it to competitors for primo. That, plus some surgeries and enough synthetic compounds in my blood to kill every mosquito that tries to bite me for the rest of my life, and I can get spat back out about twice a week if need be. In certain spaces the scalper’s slogan was ‘toy with the underlying abyss of ephemeral life and pierce the veil for endless, forgettable swaths of grunts and flunkies to use’. Wordy, but it gets execs foaming at the mouth. Putting aside the reattached flap of skin covering my upper-right ribs, I believe they’ve otherwise swapped my injuries with new hardware. A cybernetic hand of blued steel is welded into the split flesh of my remaining forearm. It squeezes with the PSI necessary to, roughly, pop a head like a grape. My leg is, hispanic, I think, a cadaver with darker skin and thicker hairs, repurposed in contrast to my newly-gestated light-pink mole-rat-esque dermis. My hair has reverted to my initial crew cut, although it is now a similar neon pink. As far as I can quickly identify, all that remains of my previous self is my right arm, right leg, torso, and probably my head. The table slowly rises and tilts me up to stand. The room, a steel box. I’m splayed out. In the warped reflections on the metallic wall I see that perhaps there is in fact nothing left of the original man I was, from what soupy memory I have of him, yet I smile the same smile of vague amusement I’ve always had. A y-shaped scar is across my whole chest, an autopsy scar, and another where my kidney should be. The base of the y has a split, where my bellybutton was. I was wide open, am still wide open. I begin to reach for the gap. Something is squirming beneath my skin. Doctors walk in, stop my hand. Someone and someone, two guys. I placidly stare, doe-like, and slump into their arms, covered in blood and guts, tracking viscera. I’m dragged like a little baby out to the street, through the offices. Company colors, kaleidoscopic, everywhere. It’s at once both a haze of incomparable modern corporatism and an ancient stain of Pangean labor. Lars Jermovich is wheeled out of his cubicle as I pass, head only somewhat intact, by a Security, Redefined™ officer. Suicide or termination, unclear. Bye, Lars. The doctors throw me limp into the street, a bloody, messy puddle. They start talking at me. Due to resurrection costs, rehabilitation costs, public relations kickback, and the client’s refusal to pay in full, you now have a total balance deficit of ⟴200,000.00. Your next target is Frederik Fruergaard for exactly that price. Reminder, you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters. Human and human only. Get out of our sight. A duffle bag lands on my back. An hour passes on that pavement, adapting back to reality. A sea of people steps over and around me. A NecroMech clunks by. The assemblage of tech and rotting corpses reeks, no matter what they change. A big cop made of the dead, a mammoth, rotting skull for a head, red pinprick eyes beneath a cold brow. At night you can’t tell what they’re looking at, what they’ll do, they barely talk. True bioengineering is in its infancy yet the repurposing of dead flesh into new bones and coded brains is easy as pie. Stop thinking about it. Get up, rip my head off the ground. My pavlovian, constantly salivating mouth drools into the pavement. I sit criss-cross applesauce on the ground and open the bag. My LifeSensors, a combat cocktail syringe, and a Mejo Decontaminizer RPO. The client is no joke to give to me a handgun like this. I root around in the bag. A bowie knife in a sheath. Standard procedure to get a knife. — Ace Hardware. A brown and green world of masculinity and compost. One of the only companies to remain unaffected by the recent rebranding movement. There’s no need for them to renew themselves, I guess. No one bothers to do it better, and they’ve got less they need to make people forget. Duct Tape is ⟴23.00. I am ⟴200,000 in debt. I take it off the shelf and tape the knife’s sheath to my right leg. Easy access. A voice in my head says someone’s looking at me. Down the aisle, she looks normal. An employee. Orange vest. Another, then another walk over. I finish with the tape, and place it back on the shelf. Wonder what they feed these people now. I stand between the steel shelves and on the dirty epoxy floor and look back at them, making escape plans. I forgot to put on my LifeSensors. Sir, you need to be wearing pants, they all dryly mumble. This is a silly request of course. My body is engineered for working at maximum proficiency. Anyways, contrary to popular belief, the neon green sunglasses, LifeSensors, don’t actually sense life energy, but holes in the background death matrix, along with displaying a task management list to incentivize hustle-grinding. I’m sort of like an entrepreneur, in the spiritual sense. They tightly wrap around my head, and it hurts a little as the needle embeds into the socket behind my ear. Reconnecting, my eyes light up with details on the job. Some executive, but it’s hard to ignore all the employees watching me. They all have life forces, so none of them are vacants or naaldlooshii, at least. Backgrounds; all class threes. No wonder they stare so blankly. A pang of sadness for their place in the hierarchy causes a single errant twitch in my smile. But it checks out, no corpos or feds, either. I open my mouth to speak. Halfway through ‘hello’, a green-gray bile erupts from my lungs, pushed out as my vocal chords open. Some comes through the hole in my abdomen. I slump, but barely keep my footing. I wave without looking, bloodshot eyes peeking over the rims of the LifeSensors. They look at each other, then all play rock-paper-scissors for who’ll clean it up. I like seeing them be people. I get a little dopamine hit. One that looks sort of like Luis Garavito walks up and hands me blue jeans. Here you go. Thanks. I vomit a little more in my mouth and swallow it. — The city is weird this time of year. The forecast said the rain would only be a PH of 4.6, but the mist of it stings my eyes. The sun smiles down with an eternal malice. A bright, brisk summer noon. A lot of people stay inside but not enough. Wowood©, Drywall+, blood-orange buzzing neon signs, tan eggy puke cooked on the pavement, a Dunkin Donuts, pink Eco-Briks, fluorescent whites and blues, an illegal start-up for live aztec bats, primal blood and guts of an interconnected web of business and winning and poverty and losing. A gaudy homemade brutalism. The graffiti, the hydroxyapatite head of a NecroMech, the wild eyes of coked-out Walk N’ Talk™ businessmen, the private military companymen preparing to bash in the skulls of the unhoused. Interior lives and thoughts and beings all stuffed in padded suits as a culmination of all that came before. The street spirals and stretches out before me in an sprawling landscape of God’s creation. — The NVO Offices, Nexevolve Organics Office Park. That’s the location of the target. In the spotless landscaped grounds, skyscrapers huddle together in a community so homogenous it almost makes you think foreign beliefs pose a threat. Synthos, Elysium, Pure Optics, Advanced Orbital Instruments, Agamemnon, Gamestop, Gerry’s Metoids, The Madison Square Garden Collective, NVO, all constantly cannibalizing each other. Each time one adds another floor to the top, so do the rest. They’re somewhere around ninety-seven each. I see construction on the roof of Synthos. Fruergaard is an interesting target. He was the CEO of Nexevolve Organics, but Pure Optics supposedly pierced his medulla with a bullet last May. Family disappeared, too. Fruergaard pioneered biotech, so they’re probably living off the residuals in Big Texas. Who really knows, I don’t keep up with the news anymore. After the incident, the supreme court prosecuted Pure Optics, but Pure Optics proceeded to threaten to vaporize the justices’ offshore bank accounts and shell companies with an orbital laser. I suppose there’s just no way to know if they’re willing to compete so violently, and I don’t intend to ask. I didn’t say this business was easy. I’m not right, any which way you slice me. As I read hallucinated floorplans and security diagrams of Nexevolve, my main concern with my genetic data isn’t if I’m unhealthy, but if my employers take a little from under my fingernails and use it to make a tiny clone of me that they can torture to get even more of my data, a process I’m intimately familiar with because it’s how I got these building schematics off of an inside trader last quarter. NVOHQ is constructed entirely of Neuromesh, a white metallic-glass-something that reads your mind, covered in wires full of electrified komodo dragon blood. It's expensive stuff, so expensive that even Nexevolve had to cut down the annual budgets for boiling Eurasia with radiation when they started building all the offices with it. Despite that, they remain one of the most environmentally-friendly companies, merely using internal temperature control instead of climate manipulation. While inefficient and also dumb, this requires a ventilation system through the building, which I can exploit. As an IMF special agent leaking from the noggin with their branded modifications, strolling through the front doors of the offices shouldn’t be too strange. Then it’s just to slip away and navigate the vents to the top floor, presumably where the target is, and then we’re finished. Finito. — As I approach the sheer-white front entrance, I remember that not only are there no traditional doors, but that this place makes me feel very uncomfortable. The mesh forges a rectangular hole which slides open before me. I walk through and when I turn around it’s like there was no exit, no outside to this. I already am lost in this labyrinthine concoction of polymers. There’s no security. Wait, scratch that, they’re in the walls. Life forces, probably living chemical weapons or a bioslave legion. Nice lobby, though. It’s completely empty, and I mean completely empty, except for two Kuwaitis in the center pummeling each other while a naked fat man with a stogie squats beside them, sweating, salivating and repeatedly shouting “this country used to build railroads”. The blood ruins the color palette. I think they’re paid performers, mascots, but it’s just a hunch. Do I recognize them? I push this down. On the far wall is an elevator, already opening on its own. My mind is a fortress, I’m one of the top dogs now, they said, yet, I am growing nervous. As I pass, fat man eyes me up and down. Be a good sport and get in there would you? You look right! What? You look right-o! Yeah? Ah, never you mind. Rip him wide open, Malik! Let me see! Yes! Yes! How far you’ve fallen! Okay. Entering the elevator, there’s an ID card scanner. I don’t have an ID card. I gauge the ceiling. Fragile enough. My new hand rumbles and sputters and when I jut it upwards it feels like it’s going to tear off my body with all my nerves stitched to it. The uppercut blows the ceiling off, and it disappears into the elevator shaft. I feel sick. The walls start closing in around me. No, wait, they’re really closing in around me. The malleable walls are going to crush me because the walls know my plan. Get moving. Pull myself through the roof. Just in time, the elevator is swallowed up by the mesh. Keep moving, who knows how much they know of what I know they know now. Why didn’t I think about the Neuromesh more? Or less, godammit, which is it? Clambering around the shafts, I access the IMF schematics database again. IMF. There are at least ten ways to harvest DNA, and they could be using all of them on me when I’m allowed to sleep. Damn! Focus! I can’t see a foot in front of my face. My glasses make all the shadows green. What am I even looking at. Just keep moving. An air vent in the wall. Just keep moving. Some deep-sea creature squirms from the vent into my mouth as my body contorts through the small space quickly shrinking just behind me. It’s all going exactly to plan, right on schedule, I am a grade-A badass. I travel through the ducts for an hour, for miles, up or down I can’t tell, but closer. The grates and cracks speak to me of the unintelligible mutterings of the clandestine groups deciding the fates of countries, heinous sounds of an extremely violent and possibly sexual nature, home rules for top golf, a single man bobbing for apples in his dark office, sermons to the ten thousand pound alien below Nevada, business analytics on the heat signature of the sun, rooms stuffed to bursting with flesh. Eventually, they tell me I have reached my destination. I kick open the vent, dropping silently into the midsection of a long, drab hallway. One way I see no end, spanning into a blistering desert haze, and the other; a grand mahogany door. Immediately, the neuromesh floor before the doors opens, birthing some biotechnical pallid humanoid thing, already standing. It raises it’s hand at me, mimicking a gun, while spitting something into a radio built into it’s head. There is a life-force within it, faint. Then it goes quiet and just stares at me. Rules of engagement, I think. I guess I’ve blown it. I observe. Where would this thing hurt most? Some unintelligible crap comes over his radio. Suddenly a foot-long metal bolt shoots through the officer’s wrist. I lurch away. The bar nearly skewers my brain, sticking instead into some non-fatal part of my clavicle. I collapse. Something instinctual snaps open. A spiral of bulbous, pulsating intestines erupt out of my lower abdomen and splat onto the humanoid, knocking it to the ground. It wails as the organ moves on its own and consumes it’s forearm. I remain on the floor, twitching and seizing. I feel cold. The PR costs could be a real pain for this. The officer can’t move, now both it’s arms are wrapped in my innards. I begin to adjust, and stand, the parasitic organ stretching out like a new arm. It encompasses its head, lifting it off the ground, and just as the sinews between its neck and head begin to snap off, I shoot it six times. The thing goes limp. My intestines rubber-band back into my gut, dropping the body with a ‘thunk’. When was this implanted in me? Before I can think, several more creatures of unspeakable amalgamation burst forth, armed and dangerous. Reaching an adrenal phase, my mental facilities are in the ballpark of an octopus, or a really smart parrot. I grab the neck of some velociraptor-thing and stab it to shreds, slam a bloodsucking nematode into goo on the wall. I tear the bar out of my neck and inject the combat cocktail directly into the wound then rip the gums out of a man’s head and knock another man’s teeth out with those teeth. I swing blindly into a phantasmagoria of sounds and smells and they make foreign invocations and it makes no difference. I stare blankly, smiling, as ribbons of them shriek into the night. The intestines defend their vessel, slinging me around, more a leg or grapple than an arm. Deep below, palpable fear strikes my heart, a fear I can’t escape no matter what I’ve done – fear that urges me, bids me act before it’s too late to act ever again. The aggression that lets me squeeze every last drop of blood out to light the lamp of free enterprise and suddenly the hall is aflame. The surfaces around me shudder, spiking towards me. I’m covered in a gummy pulp. Heliotrope, vermillion, puce, sapphire, goes to dark. — A proboscis monkey prods my open, insensate eye. Get up, focus. I’m still inside. I jolt upright. The monkey hollers, waddling in circles. I could be five thousand feet below sea level or light years above. Another monkey falls from overhead, squawking at me. I restrain myself from killing it. The place looks like a military bunker. Not neuromesh, but concrete. The ground is grass, somehow. There is soft lighting from no particular source and several dark hallways attached to the room around me. Am I still high? A voice sounds across from me, out of the shadows. Your limited human mind may not be able to comprehend me. It’s just some guy. He is the palest man I’ve ever seen, though. His skin looks pinched-back and tight on him, balder than bald. A face distantly like my own, a wide smile. He wears a fuzzy, ornate bathrobe and a tie. He’s followed by more monkeys of a variety of species. This is the target. He spreads his arms. I am Frederik Fr- I cross the room in about three seconds and plant my hands on each side of his head and snap his neck with a ‘crack!’. Veins pop out and he wobbles for a second before falling over. The monkeys point and jump up and down. My LifeSensors say he’s got a bit of juice left. His mouth flaps open and shut, eyes pooling with blood. You- you venereal cyst. Then he’s dead. Mission accomplished. I look around. Where am I? My floorplans have no relation to this. My positioning system doesn’t have a read, either. I am exhausted. I sit down. I pat a little Tibetan macaque on the head. It smiles at me in a funny way, thin lips spread to wide teeth. Happy little guy. Maybe I should just shoot myself? Let the body retrieval guys do their thing? I sit for a good forty seconds. It’s nice. Then: the same voice comes from the same shadowy stone doorway. Mercenary! It’s Fruergaard again, but now he’s naked. He has a little juice box of something. I look at him and his dead body. There’s two of him. I laugh at the living one. The monkeys cackle. You… you fop! They sent you? Their plots will obliterate my studies, my foundational studies, you know? I taught these monkeys business management! They understand the proprietary algorithms, yet you wouldn’t get one step wet, would you? I don’t know what you’re saying! Alright, “pardner”, I’m on the level. I’m not on the hooch, you know? Do you have any children around? Or their plasma? I’m getting dry. Frederik shakes his little juice box at me. No, I don’t. Bah! Come here, sport, come here. I pull out my handgun, and point it at his head. He squints. A Mejo Decontaminizer? They’re really puffing you up, huh? Just come here. In this dark room through here, it’ll change your brain chemistry. He talks like some snake oil salesman if he was five hundred years old and Danish. I blow his head off. The shot echoes into the halls. The skull’s whole structure explodes like a balloon full of wet putty. It gets quiet so quick that I can hear his waxy gore slop to the ground. I sigh. Where the hell did he come from? I get up and saunter into the darkened room. It’s small, but I can’t see. Inside, there’s the sound of computer fans and gurgling liquid. I feel for a light. I yank a little pull-chain, illuminating the room in dark-red light. In front of me are two large molds, or I guess one. In the casts are an extremely detailed approximation of a person. Defecating out of a dispenser above it is a paste of meat, a human smoothie, slowly slipping into the gaps of the mold. Big server blocks whir by the door, hooked to the dispenser. I walk closer. Some monkeys file in after me. Suddenly, the cast folds shut, and a hissing comes from inside. Steam erupts out of it, lightly burning my skin on contact. Then, it opens, dropping out a standing, living thing. He looks around, with a strange innocence, for just a moment, before regaining clarity. It’s Frederik. A monkey jumps on my shoulder, causing immeasurable pain to my stab wound had I not been on pain killers for beluga whales. It chucks a juice box off a shelf beside me to Frederik. His fingers stick to it, little pieces of skin oozing off. I observe his struggle to take the straw off the side and out of its little wrapper and poke it into the box. I observe his melty anatomy. He’s been reprinted from scratch. Never heard of this before. And he has his memories? Frederik lifts a weak finger and hazily points between me and the mold and says: I know what you’re thinking, you sycophant. That’s what you’re here for, you know? The company boys want to sell this, this godmachine. Stop me from keeping what’s mine, my newborn. They took the precursors, they took them, stole them, sold them, the unattractive parasites. They’ll suck this up, engorge themselves. They’re not studying like me, they wouldn’t get it. They don’t have the soul of an emperor, like me! The plebians, the proletariat, they’ll play with their puds and take nasty drugs and they’ll die and they’ll do it over and over again. Because that’s what they do. Their genome is below me, below my machine’s storage. Do you get it…? Of course you wouldn’t! So turn around! Leave! …Go! Genome storage? I turn around, at the server blocks. Frederik shouts no. I punch the blocks, then again, and again, until they are sparking scrap. I turn back. Frederik is grabbing various things off the shelves, frustrated. You just ruined your own life, you- you ignoramus! Ah! He tries to walk past me to the door. He seems to have no idea what’s about to happen. If there are consequences, they’re not really on my mind. There are few I can think of who I have enjoyed seeing dead more than this man. — I have been wandering this concrete complex for some time now. I cannot find the exit. The narrow halls are smelless. Intermittently, the lights dim, as though it were nighttime, and I hear voices, probably bioslaves, in distant places, howling and crashing into things. The marching of monkeys sounds behind me like I am their new, tyrant leader. I forget whether or not I can starve, but the monkeys definitely don’t. It simply may not end, a hallucinogenic event, the whole thing. My mission complete, I am set back to zero. I have not been not in debt for so long. Will I just be some desk jockey? I’ll be Lars Jermovich. I am expired Lars, past his best by. No death, no deadline. I should maybe consider having some fun. I ponder whether Lars was anywhere close to pleasured or fulfilled or at least angry. It’s amusing. Maybe I’ve got bigger fish to fry. Then, the mahogany door. At the end of the hall. The office floor. An escape to the office floor. I give what I've got left running directly into it. A penultimate attack. They break and splinter effortlessly. The gates of destiny fling open, and once again you’re left standing on pulsating nothingness. A strobing headache of the soul. It’s a long way down.