Time on the job started to fly by, with days rolling into weeks. They shuffled us around a bunch, with some days having us walking patrols, while others we were patroling the city in squad cars. All the same, it was significantly less intense than that first day, but we were still kept on our toes.

  Before we knew it, it was early May, when that shipment was supposed to arrive. The problem was that a shelving unit fell on a dock worker, causing the Longshoreman's Union to strike. The company tried to diffuse the situation, putting out puff pieces about understanding the workers' concerns about safety measures, and television interviews on how OCP affected the local economy. The workers didn't buy it for a minute, which makes sense, since the company kept saying safety started with them. Now I wonder if it wasn't planned, as OCP was wanting to eliminate the health insurance benefits for union members.

  I actually heard rumors that company executives had been saying that the workers were just whining and clambering to snap up any benefit they could. I imagine it hurt the bottom line.

  Something unbeknownst to us was that since we worked at OCP, we could get cybernetics at cost, giving us access to insanely expensive pieces of tech for pennies on the dollar. Now, of course there were restrictions on what we could buy, based on job roles. Nobody want's to work in an office where someone could have a holdout pistol installed in their arm that cant be detected by most systems. We learned those lessons a century ago. That said, we were in security, and that meant we had the ability to get damned near anything we wanted, as long as we had the cash.

  With this knowledge, we all got upgrades to our cybernetics past the initial suite. Max having noticed my being shot, was worried about if Tycho would have penetrated my armor. He ended up replacing his left forearm and hand, getting injectors installed into his fingers for quick clotting serum, anesthetics, and an experimental medicine that was reported to quicken the healing process. Something just enough to stabilize you if you were truly wounded, but there were risks. The drug sounded like a cancer on a leash.

  Alex, on the other hand, had a much more simple piece of equipment installed. He had a pneumatic dart gun installed into his forearm. With a 10 round magazine, and had a fast acting tranquilizer, it could incapacitate anyone within about 10 meters. Very handy in a pinch, and due to the use of pneumatics over a powder charge, didn't require a metal barrel. It was easier to hide, while providing a useful less lethall option from range.

  Both James and I had augmented our eyes further than initially, with a full spectrum visualization upgrade. We were now able to see in IR, night vision, thermal, electromagnetic, and for some reason, ultraviolet. Our faces now had more cuts and wires, running up from the eyes and through our foreheads, and ended somewhere within the hairline. Our eyes themselves no longer had irises, as On top of this, our eyes no longer had so much of whites, as they did golds, as there were so many gold wires. Truly surreal to have golden sclera.

  Due to the nature of our surgeries, James and I returned to work much faster than Alex and Max. We only had one week recoveries, and it wasn't that fun to be blind for a week as the eyes healed. They wanted to run diagnostics before turning them back on. Alex took two weeks to recover, and Max had three.

  It was now late May, and right after clocking into our shift one night, we were taken by Dcaniels for another “special briefing”. We were once again in that small briefing room where we were told about Tycho. This time there were diagrams showing the port layout in south Chicago. There were a lot of warehouses and stacked containers, with a special designation on one of the warehouses. Looks like a lot of angles to cover.

  “Alright, officers, we received intel this afternoon about what the dock worker’s union is doing. They’ve voted for a general strike come Monday. That gives us 6 days to solve their issues with the company and working conditions”, Daniels chuckled after finishing his sentence.

  “What exactly do they want us to do about it? Give a safety briefing?”, James sarcastically asked.

  “No, but that might have helped. They want us to kill the union president. Here is dock 17, the location of your target.”, Daniels said, pointing toward the designated building, before switching to the next slide.

  “The union president is this man, Vernan Roost.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Vernan was tall, sitting roughly 190 to 200 cm. His skin was sun baked and almost leathery. The weight estimate for him sat at 100kg, without his arms. He invested in replacing his arms with quick swap mounts, but we'd yet to see anything beyond cybernetic arms.

  “Vernan Roost here is the one who called for the strikes, and he has been a thorn in OCP’s side for years. The company just wants him taken out so we can install a bit more of a… sympathetic president.”

  Daniels flipped to the next slide revealing what else Vernan could swap his arms out for. There were two pictures on the slide. One picture showed Vernan with fork clamps, for lifting heavy materials, and the second showed something a bit more sinister. He had two heavy weapon mounts, each with old .50 cal. heavy machine guns attached at the shoulder.

  “As shown here, it seems Mr. Roost has a couple of machine guns at home, and we fear he intends on using them. Like you, he is heavily modified. We don't have an extensive list of every cybernetic in his body, but from what we've seen, he can take quite a bit of damage. This is especially dangerous due to his ability to use precise, extended fire, making getting any good hits on him difficult at anything but longer ranges.”, Daniels explained.

  “Now the good news is that we have something better than your pistols for this. You will be issued the OCP-SR, chambered in .277 caseless. Don't worry about ear protection, it's integrally supressed, and you'll be given subsonic ammunition. We use a copper ballistic tip with a tungsten penetrator, and it should be enough to take Vernan down. Be careful, as he’s with the rest of his peers. Separation is the name of the game. Get him alone, and if you can, avoid publicly starting anything.”

  As we listened, Daniels placed another memory shard onto the table in the briefing room, one for each of us.

  “For how to use the OCP-SR, we again have training chips. Please insert them now.”

  I once again placed the chip inside of the slot held at the base of my neck. Thousands of false memories again, flooded my mind showing me pasts that both were and weren’t mine. The fear, anger, hatred, frustration, all boiling inside of me. I saw shooting drills, more breach and clears, malfunction clearing, maintenance procedures, and more. Luckily it was much less information than the initial training, and I felt significantly better than the initial training.

  “The company is going to insert you into the dockyard via a boat with an electric trolling motor. It's simply easier to bring you in that way rather than the front door. The suits are worried about public opinion on this, so make sure to keep this job as quiet as possible. To assist with ensuring this happens, your rifles have been fitted with suppressors and subsonic ammunition. Be warned though, people close enough will be able to hear your shots, but that's better than nothing.”

  “So OCP want's us to put into the docks with a low powered motorboat, sneak around the docks and warehouses in order to find the union president, then assassinate him? I'm getting that right?”, asked Alex, exasperated at the task at hand.

  “Yes, that's the long and short of it”, replied Daniels.

  “How are we even supposed to find him? The dockyards in South Chicago are huge, not to mention all the warehouses”, added Max.

  “We have the location of the warehouse where we believe the union members who stay overnight are located. The union has been keeping a few members within the docks at all times. The suits have stated that if more members other than the Vernan need to be taken out, that's fine. They just don't want a public bloodbath. Also, OCP has had a drone team watching the facility since the strike began. You won't be relying on the luck it took to find Tycho, I assure you.”

  The fact we'd have a team helping us get to Vernan was reassuring at the very least.

  “If there are no more questions, go get some rest. You all step off at 10, so you have 3 hours to yourselves. There's some bunks down the hall.” Daniels said, finishing the brief.

  I stood up and went to the bunks find a place to sleep. I had a feeling we were about to have a long fucking night. The lights from the hall leaked through the door window, making it hard to sleep. Eventually I relented, and turned my eyes off, allowing me to finally fall asleep.