The metal knob on the door creaked as it turned.  When the door was pushed open, Cipher stood in the doorway. He looked out of breath and slightly dishevelled, as though he had run the entire way here.  He greeted me with a tired nod.

“Hey Badger, you make it here alright?” He asked

“Yeah, I managed to collect a bounty earlier, paid decently,” I informed him. 

“Good to hear.”

As he spoke, he came into the room and closed the door, locking it for good measure.  He made his way over to the desk with the computer on it and powered it up.  The computer whirred to life, making a few digital beeping noises as it went through its startup sequence. When the monitor turned on and the holographic keyboard appeared, Cipher put in his login information and began to pull up some images on the screen.  The light from the screen lit up the dark, dingy walls of the room with a faint white glow. When he had everything that he wanted to show me, he turned the monitor 90 degrees so that I could see it and began to speak again. 

“So,” he began, “I did some digging on Paul Rodriguez like you asked, and I found a few notable things.  Firstly, he worked as a mercenary during the South American Crisis.  He was pretty good at what he did too, some of the reports I read said he had something close to eighty confirmed kills, and his squadron had over six hundred.”

“Damn, so he’s got military training,” I lamented,  “That’d make it difficult to fight him even without whatever tech he has.”

“Yeah, and what’s more, he did a bit of bounty-hunting work too.  Completed sixteen bounties over the span of five months then stopped doing it all together.  That was two years ago. Seems like he almost exclusively did kill jobs.  Except for one.  The last job that he did.”

Cipher’s tone of voice caught my attention.  

“And what was the other one?” I asked.

“It was a snatch-and-grab mission.  From Blackthorn.”

We both went silent for a second, realizing the gravity of what he had just said.  I started to put the pieces together of the mess that I had gotten myself into.  

“So he went for a snatch and grab against Blackthorn, then disappeared for two years?” I asked, confirming what he had just said.

“Yeah, and that brings me to some bigger problems.  I traced the job that you were given to find out who put it out there.  Blackthorn put the job out. They’ve been a central player in this entire ordeal.”

I sat back in the chair in shock.  Blackthorn was the reason I had lost my arm.  They were the ones who had made Rodriguez into what he was.  I let out an audible gasp and reached into my pocket, retrieving Trent Freeman’s suicide note.  I put it on the table for Cipher to read.

“I found this at the job that I took.  I went after some guy named Trent who had killed his entire family and found him in his car.  He had shot himself in the head and was holding onto this note.”

Cipher read the note aloud, his eyes widening as the words escaped his lips. He looked back and forth from me to the note, then to his computer, then back to me.  The tension in the air was palpable as we both came to the same conclusion.

Blackthorn was running illegal human tests on prototype technologies and then letting them roam free to test them in action.  The idea was so disturbing.  A company with enough money and assets to build a small army was creating technology that would turn their mercenaries into superhumans that would kill anyone around them at the push of a button. 

“This is bad,” Cipher said after what felt like an eternity of dead silence, “I can only see them doing two things with this kind of tech. Either A, They’re planning on selling this stuff to the highest bidder and getting filthy rich off the imbalance of power that they’re creating, or B, they’re building their own army.  Either one of those scenarios is incredibly bad, especially the second. Not only are they one of the companies that pay off the government, so there’s no way that they’re going to get investigated for this, but they can afford the best mercenaries on planet Earth.  And I’m sure that if they offer enough money, the mercenaries they hire would be willing to take on this tech.”

Cipher put his hands on his head and leaned down, elbows on the cold metal desk.  I looked at him and asked a question I knew he didn’t have the answer to.

“What am I supposed to do?  I can’t just walk away from this now that I know what’s going on, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” I said, the weight of this knowledge crushing me.

“You can’t take on Blackthorn alone,” Cipher reminded me, “They’ll eat you alive.”

“But I can’t just sit on my ass and do nothing while they do this!” I said, a bit more passionately than I had intended, “They’re creating technology that could change warfare as we know it, and if they’re creating an army, nobody will stand a chance against this type of shit.  Imagine Blackthorn choosing one of the military factions and backing them with this tech, they could begin another war!”

“That’s what they’ve always been doing!” Cipher shot back. “They’re all like that! Why do you think I stopped being a Cogger?  I know some of the evil shit that they do.  There were rumours when I was working at Apex about some of the shit that they did too.  It’s unfortunate, but not surprising.”

I sat in silence for a moment, stewing over this.  Deep down, I knew he was right.  They’re above the law, there’s nothing that can stop them from doing what they want to do. But I needed to do something.  I wasn’t lying when I said I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. 

The silence was broken, but this time it wasn’t by either of us talking, but by the sound of a gunshot.  It was faint enough that it didn’t sound like it was in The Hollow, but close enough to be outside.

“What’s going on out there?” I asked Cipher.

He clicked a few keys on his keyboard and pulled up the security cameras that showed outside the building.  Two men in suits were walking towards the entrance, and the man who had led me to Cipher’s back room was lying in a pool of his own blood.  The shot had been fired by one of the suited men, who was still holding his handgun as he trudged inside.

“Shit, they found me,” Cipher spat.

“Get out of here, I’ll handle them.  Go find somewhere safe to hide out for the time being.”

He opened one of the rusty drawers on the desk and retrieved two items.  They were old cell phones from the era before the war.  He handed me one of them and pocketed the other.

“If you need me, hit me on this.  These can’t be tracked, they’re not on the grid at all.”

“Thank god for old-era tech.  Be safe,” I said.

“Will do.  Good luck.”

With that, he shot up from the chair and ran out the door, turning right towards the back exit.  I quickly checked the security cameras to make sure that the two men I saw were the only ones that had come, then also exited the room, gun drawn and cocked.  Something inside me told me that they were going to kill anyone who resisted, so I had to make sure nobody else died.  The image of my mother telling me to make a name for myself flashed through my head.  I was gonna make her proud by fighting for what I thought was right.

I started this fight, and now I’m gonna finish it, I thought to myself as I ran to the front of the room to confront the suited men.