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RP: Section 6 That's the Geist of it

Jack Pine

Well-Known Member
//188604// Section 6// lab 2b - temporary surgical ward// 1500

Jack sat on the hospital bed waiting for Beaumont to show up for the surgery as well as Thorn. Sarah now stood chastizing him, calling him stupid and foolish.

"I still don't see why you're so worked up about this. The operation only has a small chance to fail, and I'm confident in Beaumont's abilities. Regardless I haven't told Isabelle what we're doing here, so lets chalk it up to a surprise later." Jack said both irritated and worried himself.

"Worked up!? I have watched almost die a couple times buddy. For someone who's be so looking forward to having a sister, you sure worry her to the brink of death. So stop this." Sarah continued with a rush, leaving her breathing fast as she didn't stop for punctuation. She gave a half grunt-half growl of frustration before charging out of the lab to wait and watch outside through the window in the wall for observers.

The room was sterile white, with various medical equipment brought from Beaumonts room. A bright surgical lamp over head leaving Jack alone in the room to caste a solitary shadow.

Two glowing data slates and fingers flying across both, the door opened with a slight bump of Thorn's hip. "Okay, so I tightened some of the safety limiters on the install to try to make it less painful and-- Sarah!"

A surprised look up from the tablet in her hand and she flushed slightly. "Hi! I was honestly kind of expecting you to not want to see this one. Jack, It's not as bad as it would have been, but this is gonna suck. Beaumont, cameras are rolling."

The cyborg enters with his hands in his pockets, a cigarette clenched between his teeth. True, not the best sort of thing to have present while preparing for operation, but it always eased his nerves back when he had a body, and the ritual persisted even when he became cybernetic. He pinches the end to put it out before tossing it into a bin nearby. With a sigh, he turns to face the people observing through the glass pane. To his side lay the implant, placed neatly upon a sterile sheet beside a set of scalpels, scissors, a syringe of anesthetic, and a pair of calipers.

He washes his hands in a makeshift basin beside the table before pulling on a pair of rubber gloves. "So the operation will go as follows." He announces. "After applying a local anesthetic to his neck, I will make an incision just below the C7 Vertebrae to access where the spinal chord leaves the neck and enters the torso. The presence of the implant will cause every nerve, even those where the anesthetic was applied, to become active as a result of the various nanos within the implant destroying the nerves and replacing them with the interface devices that compose Geist." For somebody with a body entirely of metal, the very thought makes him shudder. To think that somebody would undergo this for the sake of receiving an internalized interface.

He looks over to Jack and nods. "I will now begin the operation by injecting the Anesthetic. If you could please remain still." He grits his teeth behind his mask and takes a deep breath. His hands may not waver, but his will certainly does. he lowers his hand while the metal needle proceeds to pierce the flesh of his back, burrowing in before he presses the plunger down to inject the serum inside.

Jack waited until the injection was finished before removing his shirt, revealing his scarred torso and the tattoo on his back. A crimson Sword pointing down with a large pair of black wings detailed in white that took up the majority of his back. Jack layed down and waited for Beaumont to strap him down.

"Alright, let's get this over with. I already got chewed out by the sister, don't suppose you wanna weigh in doc?" Jack said with a weak grin.

A short distance away, finishing a quick update to her notes and chacking the recording equipment one more time, a very short brunette was nervous. A few more swips of her finger and she copied over the first segment of data, to be spliced with the rest every three minutes on the update cycle. "Don't worry, Sarah." She addressed the taller of the couple.

"Beaumont's not dumb enough to let this go sideways. Besides, I managed to sneak an AI into the monitoring system. Things go weird, at all, the monitors'll go nuts and give Beaumont time to correct."

"Doesn't mean I still think he's an idiot for doing this shit. Who in their right mind would be willing to undergo such pain to get...what?.....a wifi hub in their head. We talk like we should, there is so much he won't tell me about the years before. Everytime I ask he just avoids the question, angerily if I persist. Something happened to him, and I don't even know what." Sarah said still frustrated but changing to sad.

"[Begin phase one operation]" the lights in the surgical ward dimmed with the surgery lamp adjusting automatically being the only exception.

With the mask over his face, he would look cold and distant, the light reflecting off of his mask giving him an almost... engelic appearance. With cold, harsh shadows trailing across his lab coat. "I'll admit I have nothing to add, Jack. Just... don't die." He takes Jack's wrists and clamps them into the table, followed by his ankles, and then his torso, ensuring every part of his body is set snugly within the embrace of the operation table. He had connected the systems of the table to that of his internal computer, allowing his mind to rotate the it on its various scervos and gyroscopes, flipping jack over so that he's facedown with a plate shifting below him to support and distribute his weight.

Any second now, the Anesthetic would kick in. The very table contains a heart rate monitor built into the wrist clamp, allowing the monitor above to display his current status. His tool of choice is a laser scalpel. With it, any blood would be cauterized and some of the nerves killed to ease the pain suffered initially. the light slips through the skin like a tooth through a tender steak, with some blood even oosing out and onto his back.

He pulls the blade down ever so slowly, creating an incision about two inches in length - a little longer than the Geist itself before pulling out a pair of retractors to pull away the skin, flesh, and muscle, revealing the spine underneath.

"Don't worry I've felt worse. Don't worry I have too much to fix and too much I love to die now." Jack gave used to pain after five years of military service doing the devils work if there was even a devil to begin with.

"Oh, no, your brother's a complete dumbass for wanting to have his nervous system rewired while he's in it. But we couldn't talk him out of it. So here we are." The cameras were still working, and Thorn was growing nervous. Things were going too smoothly. At least her ship would have had something blow by now. But they had planned this down to the last quarter second. This was the plan... Mostly. She hadn't counted on Sarah being here. "He'll be fine. Promise. It's kind of one of those things where we know it will hurt, but we need to see how much. And apparently he does, too."

"He better make it, otherwise I won't be able to bitch slap him later." Sarah said watching as the operation progressed.

"[begin phase two]"

His hands would tremble if they weren't mechanical, his fingers clasping a pair of forceps which in turn carry the chip of the Geist Advanced interface. Its very shape and size make the tool look sinister. It reminds Beaumont of an insect. As though the many sharp prongs it contains would soon sprout into legs and antennae before clambering out of his grip and skittering along the laminated floor of the operating room.

He would set the device inside ever so carefully. , carefully sliding the prongs into the spinal cord before turning it and allowing the others to enter. It were as though he were placing batteries within the chamber of a toy. with a push of the foreceps, the last needles are put in place. He grits his teeth, knowing what is about to occur any second now.

Jack sucked in air at the last part giving a gasp as he was hit with a searing pain, "Alright seal me up and start the subroutines."

Thorn fought the instinct to grab a microphone and ask Jack how he was feeling. In stead, her monitoring subroutine accessed the Geist implant and activated it, pulling data for later neuromapping and testing, perhaps eventually making one of these painless. "Sarah, if you don't want to hear this, I suggest you shut off the room speakers, now."

He nods, grabbing a hold of a suture and thread, his targeting system marking out the perfect points for a clean, seamless patching job. The thread he uses makes use of special compounds allowing his immune system to destroy it once the wound is closed. He starts with the muscles, pulling them together around the spinal chord and tenderly bringing each side together once more. Once he knots it off, he begins to work on the same process for the skin. "Shitshitshit... let's hope the device doesn't go into full power while I'm doing this..."

A padding sound could be heard until Neera came into view, automatically hoping up to see throught the observation window, "Hey guys what cha doing? Oh hey is that Jac.......What are you doing to him?!" Neera began peppy but her ears and tail shot down with the sudden realization something was up. "What's going on here? Sarah why is Jack strapped to that bed?"

"It's fine Neera, he's getting a new thing, but you might not want to be here for this. It's not going to be pretty, or for the feint of heart." Sarah said sadly.

"Don't worry, Beaumont. The nanites are still spreading. They won't hit his optic nerve for another eight seconds."

"[final phase - activation startup - booting Geist]"

Thorn reached over and clicked off the speaker as data started flowing across her pad. A flick of her wrist opened it on the embedded LCD glass of the observation window. "See how the nanites are spreading to the optical cortex and integrating in the medulla oblongata? In a moment, they'll start spreading to sensory corteces and building a secondary sensory nervous input, one from the machines he will be able to access. This won't be a full rewiring, but just enough will change, and that sensory's going to be the worst of it. It's also about to build an output in his motor control, which might cause what will look like convulsions. I promise you he will be fine."

With a snip of some scissors, he finishes tying the last knot of the stitches. He steps back, allowing the table to rotate once more, allowing jack to be positioned upright. In this situation, you would not want him to froth at the mouth, vomit, etc, and wind up choking to death on any expelled bodily fluids. It were almost as though the man were suspended on the rack in front of him. To keep an eye on his condition while keeping the sight away from that of the crowd, he would stand on the far wall, and turn jack to face him. He doubts anyone would want to see what happens to him from here on. He swallows hard, preparing himself for what's to come. "Device in place. Prepared for response in three... two... one..."

One moment Jack was numb, his hearing crisp, the next his body felt like it was in an inferno and everything when quiet. At first he thought he heard a far away scream that began to move closer until he relized it was him. His vision faded in and out as his mind and body were racked with a tsunami of pain. Even with his obscure vision he could see faces and shapes around him as his eyes darted across the room, as he bucked wildly within his restraints. The vains running through his schlera became very visibly red with the rest of the eye, his irises taking on a faint glow as the pain traveled through his head to his eyes. He began to hear voices and hallucinations. Tears streamed from his eyes, even has his nose bled

[all whispering]
"You let them die"
"You know what you are"
"The child didn't deserve it, he had an empty gun"
"Murderer"
"Devil"
"You dare call yourselves angels"

One voice grew louder than the rest as faces became clear to him, their stares accusing him with hate filled eyes.

"Wake up jackie boy, you've got killing to do, your not going to paradise. Your already in HELL. ha ha ha."

The monitors and automatic lights in the room would begin to sputter and turn off and on sporadically, his bed beginning to spaz, rotating randomly. The ward doors would begin opening and closing as if on their own, the speakers letting loose with a squealing distortion. Anyone listening could here echos of the faint whispers from inside Jack's mind.

Thorn, for her part, was trying to stay on top of the data flow and isolate the camera systems from the interference, until her wrist mounted pad suddenly went nonresponsive, and she pressed her hand to the block of metal where her right ear should have been, trying to shake off the distortion in her hearing. "Drivers are working, his cerebral cortex is trying to integrate with the drivers, and we're getting memory fragments."

The data slate sitting on the observation window sill started showing flashes of Jack's memory as the applications flickered in and out, before it shut down completely, the processor overloaded just as Jack's brain. The window screen, however, was equipped with a far more powerful processor, and could render the images in full HD color.

The images flashed quickly but could still be made out, with all being from a first person perspective. A dark back street littered with trash and a smiling face of a blonde haired boy, A bloody battlefield strewn with dead that were both people and soldiers, A dead boy viewable past the smoking pistol barrel that trembled with the hand that held it, and man falling from a bullet hole to the head in the streets of vice from a week ago.

Sarah was panicking as she covered her ears, her fear felt by everyone in attendance as she heard the voices, and as Jack was acting like someone possessed. "Make it stop! Jack!!" she screamed.

Neera whined loudly as the distortion from the speakers caused great pain, but she was still unable to turn away from the horror show before her as she was stuck helpless in the hall.

For once, he was at a loss as to what to do. All control of the situation was forfeited to that... thing he had just placed inside of his boss. Whatever it was that threw everything in the room into a frenzy. Even Beaumont himself. His sight would flicker with images and his mind would fill with the sounds and thoughts and memories of Jack Pine at a breakneck pace. His head would feel tight, like he was wearing a helmet he could never take off. His knees quake, his body becomes limp, and he falls to the floor of the operating room. He couldn't take it. If he could tear his head off, he would. He wanted to scream, but he couldn't get a sound out.
Next thing he knows, the world turned black. He had passed out.

As the process finished itself, the memories and glitches stopped, but the pain did not. However it lessened enough to let Jack slump in his restraints unconscious. The bed had been turned towards the window with it oriented at a little bit of a downward angle, leaving him to hang limp in the clamps. His nose still bled slightly, the slow drip of blood the only remaining sound in the room.

"And I have control again." The systems rebooted as Thorn's fingers flew across keys, looking up occasionally to check the Geist's systems. "Looks like we had a minor error in sensory adaptation, but that's just gonna cause psychosematic pain for about an hour. Reccomend implanting this in a blank body, for now." Looking across the inputs, the Geist reported it was functioning normally. Then she saw Beaumont on the floor. "Doctor's out. Trying to interface with his cyberware from the main computer... Yeah, he's unconscious. Should be up in the next few minutes. After that, we'll scrub down and debrief. Sarah, could you help me untie him and get him on a proper bed?"

Thorn moved out of the observation room, via a door into the operating chamber, and ran to the suspended bed with Jack to try and force it into a more normal position. Pushing against the motors was proving ineffective with her mass, so she reached down to the foot, braced her shoes on the supports, and heaved in an ineffective rowing motion. "Little help?"

Sarah sat there frozen in what sermounted to despair and hopelessness. Never before had the deaths of other effected her this much. He just hung there, and she had not the courage to move. Thorn's plea snapped her out of it. "Yeah.....what do you need?", she said before getting off her knees and walking over to grip the side of the bed.

Neera ran in after Sarah feeling helpless, she figured Jack had to be alive, but he was in a bad way as well. She padded around the table until she found the emergency release handle, pulling it with her mouth causing the bed to move freely with a hiss.

He lay crumpled in the corner of the room. The images had stopped, but the headache would persist. It felt like tinnitis, his head stuffy and his ears ringing. He doesn't bother to move while his systems enter a soft reboot state, drawing information from every corner of his body to ensure minimal damage had been done to what few organs of his remain. There's the occasional errant twitch here or there for a few moments, and all he could see is a spinning hourglass while diagnostics tests fly behind it in brilliant green before a black background.

He groans while the world fades into view from black, raising a hand to his mask. He uses a hand on the wall to guide himself up to his feet before turning to look to the group that had gathered around the operating table

Of course, when the strain Thorn was putting on the operating table was released by the emergency lever, a sharp clang sounded as it impacted Thorn's jaw with not insignificant force and knocked her flat. But the bed stayed level, and she shook it off like so many other injuries in her past. "Sarah, could you grab me that roller bed while I unstrap Jack? We'll move him somewhere a little less disorienting for recovery. Beaumont awake yet?"

Sarah did as she was told, not sure what else to do.

Neera watched still helpless as the others moved to help the unconcious Jack.

He steps up, a little wobbly in footing. "Yea. I'm up." He grunts, placing his hands in his pockets. He could see Jack's sister wheeling up a cot while Thorn undoes each clamp. He draws a cigarette from his pocket before lifting his mask once more. "Looks like you guys have this handled from here on out." With a lighter drawn from his pocket, the cyborg turns on his heel. "I need to go get some air. If any of you need me, I'll be outside of the office having a smoke." With that, he proceeds to walk towards the exit.

With the cot wheeled up between the now unclamped Jack, Thorn climbed up and grabbed on, heaving Jack's unconscious body over... Or trying to. A string of incoherent curses spilled from her mouth as she tried a few times. Cursing her size wasn't helping, and she looked to Neera and Sarah for help, knowing this task was punching well above her weight. She knew Jack was going to be alright, from what the data indicated. The nosebleed had been a rather unusual side effect, and firmly reinforced her idea of putting the Geist interface into blank bodies. Hopefully the two much stronger beings in the room would be able to overcome their numbness and finish what she couldn't.

Sarah rolled Jack over onto the cot, "What now?"

Neera had put her front paws on the bed and whined as Jack was transferred over, "Anyone want to explain in English, what the Hell that horror show was?"

"Just some memory fragments. Jack had a rough life." Thorn calmed down as Jack's body moved under Sarah's strength. "Thank you, Neera. You found the release. I was a bit stressed to look for it."

Sliding off the cot after checking Jack's vitals, Thorn turned to Sarah and grabbed the cot handles. "Let's get him into a recovery room. We'll check function when he wakes up. C'mon, sweetheart, it's going to be okay. He'll wake up in an hour or so, and he'll be a little wigged. He's gonna need you and Neera there, calm. Can you do that for me?"

An hour had passed by and Jack lay in the recovery room, which was just his office with a cot in it and a drink out and poured.

Jack slowly got up to a sitting position to hold his head as the world slowly came to being around him. Colors seemed to be crisper and brighter, "Wha the hell happened I feel like I got slammed in the head with a gart?"

"Having taken a few garts to the head in my life, I guarantee you feel a good bit worse." Thorn sat in Jack's chair, a data slate open in front of her. "Good news, it worked. Bad news, we can't do that to a live host ever again. The process is impossible to run on an active mind without exactly that happening. Data's in your operating files for you to peruse when you're feeling better. I want you to rest. And for once, your sister agrees with me. Right, hon?"

Sarah walked over and plopped down onto the cot before leaning against him, "Do that again and I will blow your balls off in your sleep."

Neera lay in the corner, but stood when Jack awoke, "We need to talk about inter-office memos, bub. And something else when you have time."

Outside of the building, the Medic would stand for the past hour, one cigarette lit after another while his mind raced to comprehend what had just occurred. He knew the geist had intersystem interactions, but to hijack his vision and force... that onto him was horrifying to say the least. Way beyond the horrors he had witnessed in the past. The ember of a cigarette would begin burning into the filter while he reaches in to grab the next, only to find his box empty. He throws it on the ground before stomping out what little remains of his cig. With hands back in his coat, he turns to enter the building once more.

On his way towards his office, he would find Jack present in his room, already sitting up and somewhat recovered from before. He throws the door open. "Well well, somebody gets back up fast!" He chimes. "Gave us all a shock back there with that horror film shit. Thought I'd have to call a priest or something.''

"If you guys'll excuse me, I have to go bury my nose in a book and process the last two hours." Thorn hopped up from the desk and walked out of the room, leaving the file open on Jack's dataslate before leaving the room. Her credit chit was used to buy a pack of cigarettes from a vending machine near the exit about three minutes later.

"Film shit? What did you see?" Jack said suddenly worried.

"I'll admit, I have no idea what I saw exactly - or, more of what we all saw. The device went haywire. Thorn could probably elaborate more on the specifics if you ask her." He steps into the room, flopping into a chair and sighing. "The device tapped into everything from the monitors beside you to the metal holding my noggin. Knocked me out cold while everyone panicked and got you out of your restraints." He crosses his arms, shaking his head. "No matter how much you pay me, I'm never conducting an operation like that again. Too unsafe for both the patient and the surgeon."

A curl of smoke curled on the breeze as green eyes locked with an exterior camera, Is he watching this now? I know the device can. Her wonderings would have to wait as the ash was flicked from her fingers and her lips parted, releasing the grey cloud from her lungs. Just how wrong is what we just did? With nothing to interrupt her musings, she couldn't stop thinking about what could have gone wrong, and just how stupidly risky that procedure had been. Sure, they'd tested it, extensively, on Jack's backup bodies. But the actual live implantation test could have gone horrifically wrong. "There's a chance we couldn't have saved him if that had happened differently."

Jack looked at the datapad on his desk, he felt to tired to get up and get it though. He considered laying back down, but the strangest thing happened, he had the sensation of being able to reach and touch the pad without actually doing it physically. The files Thorn had mentioned pulled up in his vision, allowing him to scroll throught the data.

"Oh, now that is damn cool. I'm looking at the files on that pad right now.", Jack said looking for other devices as his HUD overlay activated and highlighted devices he could access.

He would watch Jack with a tilted head, scratching his chin in surprise at his enthusiasm with the new system. Damn right it better be cool. Almost killed the cyborg to install it.He lifts himself from his seat despite having just sat upon it. "Ring me if you need any assistance. I'm not sure how well your body will be taking that, since I wasn't a part of the research team behind it. So if anything goes awry, let me know imediately." With that, he turns towards the door and places his hands in his pockets.

As happy as he was to see that the operation was a success, such agony induced upon Jack was not something he had wished for. Upon arriving in his office, he pulls himself into his desk chair.

Furnishings adorn the whole room from various pinups and posters to a mini fridge placed beside his desk, all taken fresh from the medic's personal starship and moved in to spruce up the place. From said fridge, he draws a bottle of beer, twists the cap off with his hands, and then opens his mask to chug it down. Gonna take more than that, though.

He stares forward, head lowered, focused on a spot on the wall. For once, Beaumont felt despair.

It didn't take Thorn long to finish her cigarette and head back inside, to sit at her desk in the main lab and start writing her report. The clacking of keys drowned out her thoughts as she edited the data to make it more digestible to someone not so technically inclined, alongside trimming down design and production reports to show how easy it was to build them. Though her personal greivances were made clear, that it was to be installed as a pre-upload upgrade to a blank ST body, rather than implanted in a body with a host mind. The data from the last ten minutes of the procedure on Jack was enough to prove this hypothesis, at least for this model.

She was a scientist at heart, and couldn't let her emotions get the better of her, but at the same time, she felt that this would be a cruel and torturous way to improve someone's quality of life, no matter if the person it was installed on was anaesthetized or not. She couldn't bring herself to condone its use except as an upgrade module for a new body. ST was not a procedure she understood well enough to make any judgements on, but she felt she would need to be studying up on that. Fortunately, the implantation had been tested on several of Jack's blank spares, with great success, so it could easily be used for a body transferred soldier or pilot.

She hadn't been on the team to produce the device. Nor did she feel she would want to be involved with that project further. However, as the new head of R&D, it was part of her duty to write the report for Jack to send to the higher-ups.

"It is my knowledge that this device is ready for use in other beings. While my own views on the device deem it unfit for anything aside from the proposed blank ST body implant, one cannot deny that it was effective, based on preliminary reports, in the implantation into one Jack Pine, head of Section Six.

"Sincerely, Thorn Ironhart, Advanced Research and Development, Section Six."


A final press of a key, and she saved the file, e-mailed a copy to Beumont for his review, and moved for the exit, flipping the lights of her workstation off on her way to a public transport system, and her apartment in Nath Tower.

The floor lay littered with bottle after bottle of booze, all empty and lifeless. Beaumont himself had fallen asleep upon his computer desk, hand still clenching a glass that had contained whiskey, and yet its contents had long since poured along the tiles, the ice having melted away. He'd jump a little upon hearing the ring of a new message in his head, prompting him to look up upon his pc monitor and see that something had dropped into his inbox.

He groans, gazing upon the screen, the only light in the room casting heavy shadows along his mask and torso. It had been sent by Thorn. Guess she needed proofreading or something. A cautious hand glides along his jaw before his mask closes and his focus turns to read each meticulously selected word.

He notices his empty glass, groans, and sets it to the side before he places his hands on the keyboard - the tool, the technology that grants him the ability to communicate between he and the machine before him. Nothing complex. Nothing destructive or disruptive. Just the creation of sentences on the screen so that another may read them.

Makes him wonder what it was like during that time. When colonizing planets, living in cybernetic bodies, and placing chips inside of people's necks to let them throw machinery into a frenzy were all but a figment of the imagination.

"The implantation was a success." He would begin.

If you could call it a success. Jack was left unconscious and bleeding from the nose, people panicked while the entire operation room began to go berserk and Jack's table turned into a gyroscope. The small bar indicative of where he's typing would blink back at him. Eager to see what sort of drivel he would spit out. What sort of lies he would tell to those back in the R&D Department.

"However, due to psychological trauma in the patient, the device wreaked havoc..."

No... too dramatic... too honest.

"However, past psychological trauma experienced by the patient caused an influx of feedback within every piece of technology within a 50-foot radius. Because of the neural destruction and recreation for the sake of enhancement, any anesthetic was rendered useless. It is highly suggested that an inactive subject such as an ST is implanted as opposed to an active one for the sake of preventing undue pain and suffering."

Sincerely, Beaumont , Section Six Medical Staff.


He clicks the reply button to send it back to Thorn. His head drops to the desk once more with a loud clank followed by a sigh.

Jack was in the system watching the reports go back and forth, amazed and horrofied at his new abilities. "Well those pretty much hit the head of the nail. I just hope no one was really able to make out what those memories were."

[Thorn got a minute?]
[Beaumont get some sleep, I'll make it an order if I have to]
The text should be scrolling across their devices right about now.

Thorn heard a beep, and furrowed her brows, dismissing her blood sugar warning before Reading Jack's text. [I'm on the tram towards the house. What's up?]

[I think we should talk about what happened, there are things that require explaining]
[if you wanted dirt on your boss, now is the perfect time to get it]

[I'll come back. But that should be a private conversation. Unless you want everybody to know.]

[everyone there will be part of this, the only one not here yet other than you is beaumont but he didn't want to so I await]

[On my way.] The message preceeded her getting off the public transit and calling for an aircab. When it landed, her credit chit made the payment to drop her off in front of the lab buildings and she walked inside. "As much as I don't want dirt on my boss... What the fuck was that?"

"A past I would have like burried, but that seems impossible now. I have not live a very good life up until this point. I have......done things that I relive everyday. It's best we take this explanation in stages. What do you want to know first?" Jack said with his hands to his temples.

"I had some idea that you had been a soldier. But what war did you get yourself sucked into?" It hadn't been hard to notice how Jack moved, and the orderliness to his house. Even her own apartment had a bit of clutter that would drive a serviceman nuts. Even so, the image of a child and smoking gun had been rather disturbing.

"It wasn't a war, it was a slaughter justified as removing a rebel thread. Entire settlements of those who were associated with the actual rebel forces were targets given to us as well. Men, Women, and......Children. We believed in orders then, but command didn't care that they were civilians. They didn't care about us either. They sent us in under armed, and short handed. We were called the angels of retribution, we were just the demons of mass murder." Jack said as he lowered his head.

"Oh." Thorn deflated slightly, not quite sure how to handle the situatuion. "That's... I'm sorry you had to go through that."

"The worst part was I went with it so willingly. I was there commanding officer, and they're all dead. Most of them in that field being shelled you saw. I had to stand there for hours, watching as they were ground to nothing but puddles. I promised them I'd get them home, but there was nothing left to even put in a shoe box. That child was one of many. He came out with a gun pointed and I pulled the trigger without a thought, but his gun didn't even have a mag in it." Jack said tears rolling down his cheeks.

"Jack..." She wasn't sure what to do or how tohandle the situation, looking to Sarah for assistance. Her usual method of dealing with emotions was to bury them under a workload and forget about them. Now, she felt a deep seated desire to give her boss a hug and tell him it was okay, despite her knowing it wasn't. But the hug came nonetheless.

Thorn sat down next to Jack and wrapped her arms around his waist, drawing him in tight. "I know it's not much, and I'm no counselor, but I want to help."

Sarah did say anything as she didn't know what to say so she hugged him as well.

"I see there their faces every waking minute, all of them, and he there laughing. It's the same everytime I close my eyes, they're all there staring back with looks of hate, and he still laughs. The demon I know I truly am inside, the man I don't want to go back to being. I can't even kill myself, I've tried 25 times to date and everytime something gets in the way." Jack began to sob.

Sarah was shocked by this last confession, and it caused tears to well to her eyes, "Why haven't you said anything before? Why do you want to die? You need help, maybe we ca...."

"No! No one else needs to know about this, it's in the past. I am trying to atone, but I know I'm doomed to hell. This is my punishment, and I will bear it as I should. I am a monster on the inside, and I am fighting just to keep from being it. On VIce after I was shot, a man came running up to me shouting something about money, Before I knew what I had done, I had shot him, he was falling with a bullet hole in the head. I stood there with the smoking gun, just like before." Jack curled up holding on to his legs.

"Hey. I might not have much frame of reference, but..." Thorn pulled up the sleeve of her shirt, showing the datapad and specifically the deep scar running past it. "You're not alone. You did some bad things, but all I've ever seen is a good man trying to do good. Izzy, Sarah, they'll probably say the same thing."

Pulling her sleeve down, she felt more naked than normal without her suit. With a sobbing Jack, and the knowledges that had been revealed today, she felt especially vulnerable. "I know I might not be able to help much, but I want to help."

Jack put his head to his knees, "I've never had any family until I came to this planet. I've only had one person who ever had my back in the past and that was Zeke. Ever since our parents died in the third Elysian war. Me and Sarahs. I was placed in the orphanage system for a couple years that was already over populated from the war, then when Nepleslia separated, I was placed in one of theirs since it fell in their territory, but they never cared. When me and Zeke left at age ten, no one stopped us from walking out. We spent the next six years on the streets, and in those days if you wanted to stay out of the gangs you had to have a gun in hand, The things we did to survive, we thought joining the military at age sixteen would be our ticket out of there. The first year was great, the next went down hill, and the two I spent as an officer were hell. I wish I had a quitar again, I wish Zeke had my back again." Jack said as he continued sobbing, not holding back as he finished.

Another pull at Jack's shoulder in her hug and she let him go. "C'mon. Let's get you some rest. You're tired and hurting."

"Not when I know what waits for me in my sleep. And people wonder why I drink." Jack said getting up slowly and moving towards the liquor cabinet.

"I don't blame you. Frankly, I would, too. Hell, I'm surprised I don't, often. But you just went through a stressful procedure, had your memories hacked, and I can't actually get into the Geist to monitor, in stead I'm relying on hourly diagnostics yours is sending to my lab terminal." Thorn looked away, still unsure of her ability to handle the situation. "I don't blame you. All I've ever seen you do is try to be a good man, and you're doing a decent job of it, so I have a hard time believing you when you say you're some kind of demon or monster. I just don't see it."

"A good man doesn't slaughter hundreds of men, women, and children who wanted nothing to do with the conflict! There is always the chance I could change back, and I have no idea if there is any way of coming out of that for a second time." Jack snapped now gripping a large Bourbon bottle.

"No. No, he doesn't. Not anymore."

"But there is always the chance he could come back and that scares me, to know what I'm capable of. Or where his loyalties might lie either."

"Well, it was you. Not much I can say to change that. There's no disputing that. But right now, your loyalties lie with your family. With Amit, Sarah, and your very pregnant wife, Isabelle. Point is, you know that if that you comes back, it's for a reason, and it's probably to save the asses of your family. I think you know better now than to kill kids."

She was starting to get a little flustered, now, and stood up, moving to the desk. "I'm sorry, I don't know what else to say. You do your best to be a good man now, and the future will come. Maybe you'll come to terms with what happened." She shrugged, then lied, in part. "I've come to terms with my fourteen years learning loyalty by beatings and electrocution for overperforming, and with having the idea that my body is my own violated over and over, just to see what someone thought was useful. So pour your drink, and I'd like to ask for one, myself. Little more of both of us shared today than I'm comfortable with sober."

She immediately remembered Sarah in the room and looked away, her face reddening slightly. She hadn't meant to blurt that out, and certainly didn't want Sarah to know. "I already said I don't blame you."

Sarah scooted over to Thorn and brought her close with an arm around the smaller woman, "I won't let anyone touch you like that again, if anything I would offer my body to you."

Jack poured two glasses and he offered each of the girls one, before pouring a third for himself, but did not say anything further as he took a seat in his desk chair.

Leaning into Sarah, she felt she had one more point to make, but bit it back, reaching for a glass. "I'm sorry for what happened. And for opening up inapporpriately like that. I think everyone would agree with me that we'll keep that from happening again."

"Does it really matter, we're all family of a sense here, It will happen on its own sooner or later." Jack said after taking a long drink.

"All the more reason to know what's going on in each other's heads." Thorn held up her glass for a moment, before drawing it back and taking a healthy swig.

Jack emptied the glass and after looking at it for a moment, set it down, "Well I need to get to work, A lot of it that can now be done with ease." he said grabbing his leather coat from the stand in the corner.

"I was actually thinking of modifying a Geist for long range Soul Transfer capability. I'd offer to use it on myself, but three things keep that from happening. One, I'm not getting any more cyberware. Ever. Two, I'm not getting a soul transfer. And three, we don't implant those in live bodies." She finished her glass and looked up to the other two. "Otherwise, theoretically viable. I mean, ST is just a downloaded and applied neuromap, if I read the tech breif right."

"Right up a plan and we can run it as a firmware update." Jack said befor exiting the office.

"Not a problem, sir. I'll get the programming boys working on it and I'll have a brief ready in the morning." A quick nod and she realized she needed to go home and sleep.
 
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