The next day I was alerted to our schedule. The night shift, 18:00 to 06:00. We had 3 days, plus that day to get ourselves nocturnal. Luckily for me, I had decided to start checking the system settings for my internal computer, and had found an experimental setting, called, “sleep acceleration.” Only needing to sleep 4 hours made it simple to swap to nights.
On Monday, the first real day of work, I set off at 5, leaving me an hour to get to work. I hopped on a train to downtown, watching the sun set as I went. I got to the OCP building with about 25 minutes to spare.
I made my way in through the security entrance, and made my way to the armory locker room. I got into my kit as quickly as I could, but that damned back plate took a bit of finagling to get on. I swear, getting those back plate sockets alligned required a squire, but my damned
liege wouldn't provide one. After a few more attempts, I managed to get everything alligned and slammed my back into a locker, where a satisfying “click”, could be heard through the slamming metal.
Once I was finished getting my gear on, I went and drank some water out of the sink. Walking back into the armory, I caught another glace of myself, and I decided I was an up-armored hornet, since it sounded cooler. I got back into the armory, and grabbed my equipment, seeing Alex, James, and Max trickle in behind me.
At 6, Daniels entered the room, and ushered us to follow him for a the evening's briefing. We got to a small room, screen on one wall, with seats looking towards it. The four of us filed in and sat down, where I found out that the seat is a bit awkward in the armor.
Daniels flicked the lights and turned on the screen. With a flick of the wrist, a face entered view. A notification popped up.
“This is Brian Callahan, goes by Tycho. The suits figured, for a first night out, to have you track down this dealer and make him play nice with the company. He's smuggled materials into the city for the company and recently refused to continue. The company wants to know why. Afterwards, they want him roughed up. Don't kill him, obviously, but make sure he knows who runs Chicago.”
The nonchalance with which Daniels just told us to track someone down, then, “rough him up”, seemed insane. This screamed illegal in my mind, but I knew that the company had complete authority in the area. The company told me this.
Daniels changed the slide. The new slide was a map of the north side, New Tokyo.
“Reportedly, Tycho is holed up in the North side, from what our intel team has gathered last week.”
“Sir, how are we supposed to find him? We're looking of a needle in a stack of needles”, asked Max.
“Glad you asked, Clarke. We have a couple of places he stays listed in a dossier that will be sent out to you. Start there, gather some information at those locations. There should be something at one of the locations to get you started.”
Tycho looked somewhere between 28 and 35, about 160 to 170 cm, 75kg. The picture showed him with swept back black hair. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but there several thin lines moving across his face to indicate some level of cybernetics, if I had to guess based on looking in a mirror. Besides his face, his arms were exposed to show cybernetic tattoos, glowing just under the skin.
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“Alright, if you're ready to go, follow me. We'll get you a squad car, and get you on your way.
Daniels led us to the garage. It was a large, open room with around 200 parking spots, a third being inhabited by the OCP cruisers. They were black SUV's with a lightbar on top, a bull bar in the front, and “OCPolice” emblazened on the side. In the back of the garage was 8 car lifts with mechanics working on vehicles in differing states of disrepair. Daniels got the attention of one of the mechanics, who checked out a car for us.
Daniels tossed the keys towards us, and Alex rushed to catch them, saying, “I'm driving.”
I rolled my eyes, and let him have his fun.
We all piled into the SUV. The door was heavy, and thick, with laminated glass windows. OCP didn't want its investments shot while driving the beat. Alexander put the key into the ignition and turned it on. As he was pulling out of the spot, a notification popped onto my HUD.
“Alright, let's see where this Tycho Fella lives. Who know's, maybe we'll get lucky.”, said James.
“Yeah, lucky alright. One of the places we have to check is in New Tokyo”, replied Alex.
I oppened the file, and began pouring through the documents in the dossier, ignoring everyone else for a moment. Tycho had a history of smuggling for OCP and others. Reading through the other customers of his, there were several entries without any listed people. OCP didn't have complete information on the situation, and that made em jumpy. Maybe they were worried he'd found a new corporate sponsor for his activities.
“I found one safehouse in the documents. This one's in Glencoe, near the Botanic Gardens”, I heard Max say, snapping me out of the documents.
We headed out of the garage, and headed towards the freeway. Along the way we decided to head to the safehouse in New Tokyo. Even if we didn't find him there, at least we could take a minute to get something good for dinner.
New Tokyo was built over what used to be Skokie, by a group of Japanese investors who wanted to bring a taste of Japan over here after the war. After some negotiations between OCP and them, They quickly turned it from a suburb into a second downtown region. The place was the center for nightlife and was where my favorite bar in college was.
Another, major part of how it changed the city was introducing it to cybernetics. Japanese companies imported untold amounts of the gear into the US after the war to help re-integrate wounded soldiers back to civilian life. It seems with every war, there are new ways to rebuild broken people, and it seemed Japan developed the tech shortly after the war. Some people think it was China, but they didn't want to export that to the US.
Cybernetics are also OCP got as powerful as it was. They were the first company to start copying Japanese designs and eventually creating their own. It was the new pharmaceutical, and from what my parents and teachers said growing up, the biggest thing since penicillin. Their biggest hit was the cybernetic pancreas, curing diabetes for those who could afford it, and if you couldn't, OCP had a generous payment plan.
At least that's what the ads said.
With the new found success, OCP started gaining more and more control of the city, bringing us to where we are now. Four brand new security officers rolling north to the nicest part of town, outside of the parks near central station of course. All to find and figure out why a smuggler stopped working with the company, then beat the living daylights of out him.
I stared outside at the city. The sun was beginning to set, and the orange sky grew dark as we pulled out of the heart of downtown and joined the northbound traffic on I-90.
