vexikron, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

It is the year 2038.

Adam Jensen, formerly a conspiracy busting mercenary badass, sits in a run down motel room in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.

He didn’t check in with much baggage, excepting a decade of extreme emotional and physical trauma. After he threw in the towel, decided to /really/ retire, he figured he would be able to live off of occasional PI work, and hell, maybe just crawling through some vent shafts until he got somewhere with a hidden cache he could sell to some idiot on the street, or just look for an ATM to … reroute funds to his account through.

Lying on a bed that squeaks everytime he shifts his massive, nearly 400 pound augmented body in a vain attempt to find a position that allows him to drift into sleep… he decides maybe a drink will help.

He sits up. Creak. He yawns as he reaches toward the night stand table, cluttered with credsticks, EMP grenades, a pistol, and some strange looking prototype for a dual purpose, wall mountable, but also throwable explosive.

LAM? Was that the acronym they went with? Not important in the long run, just a souvenir from his last and final corporate espionage contract.

He blinks a few times and waits for his once bleeding edge, but now ancient occular implants to resolve his last remaining bottle of cognac.

As he reaches to take a pull, straight from the bottle… darkness. Moments later his vision of the cluttered nightstand table is replaced by a 600 x 480 jpeg, blown up to encompass the entirety of his approximately 8K total field of view and resolution.

It is an image… of text. Very low resolution… Papyrus font. It states that his occular implants will no longer be receiving any software updates, and that his implants are now out of warranty, and non compliant with a recently passed consumer safety law, and as such must be shut down for his protection.

Startled by the darkness, then abrupt disclaimer, then darkness again, Jensen fumbles while reaching for his drink. How… how is there an audio message thanking him for his purchase of the wrong model of occular implants… playing through his infolink? Shouldnt those sub systems be firewalled?

This is the last thought that ever passes through Jensen’s mind.

In blindness, as the wrong corporate sound file played through the space between his ears, Jensen never realized he had knocked the prototype LAM off of the nightstand, which armed itself, beeped several times, and then exploded.

-=====-

Downstairs, a 3 year old Sandra Renton screams when one of her father’s hotel rooms explodes, triggering fire suppression systems before the power goes out.

She stumbles out of the lobby out on to the street. A minute later her exasperated father, crying out for Sandra, finds her outside bawling. He embraces her and thanks God that she is alright.

While he was reaching down to grab his traumatized daughter, he noticed she was standing in a pile of … broken glass?

Embracing his only child close to his heart, he looks up at the front entrance to the motel lobby.

It takes him a few moments to breathe deeply, more slowly, and eventually calm down enough to realize what has occured: The letters ‘H’, ‘i’, and ‘l’ were knocked off the wall by the explosion of Jensen’s suite, leaving the neon sign advertising the name of the hotel to now read only as ‘ton’. Sandra just happened to come to be standing in the debris field.

“What a shame,” he sighs … “what a shame.”

-{====}-

Author’s notes:

Sure, sure, you’ve heard about Chekov’s gun…

… but what about Jensen’s Lightweight Attack Munition?

=P