<div style="text-align: center"><span style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua'"><span style="font-size: 26px">Galaxies, Machines, and Being Human</span></span><br/>
_____________________________________________________________________________________________​</div><br/><br/>It was a pop song. It was<i>always</i>a damn pop song, replaying over and over and over again in Gabriel Warren’s head, trite and asinine lyrics that he could hardly recall stuck in a sickly loop with a bouncy and predictable beat to back it. He blamed Tritan’s Square, a vibrant and burning neon market district that he often passed through in order to reach the 6th District Dreamer base - the main base. They had speakers like canons, belting out repetitive and cretinous music day and night that nonetheless managed to bury itself in people’s minds and poison their vocal chords. It made Tritan one sick fuck of a man, who absolutely owned the golden suite at the top of his frigid, metal tower, undoubtedly soundproofed to the tragedy outside. Though he’d be even worse of a monster if he actually<i>enjoyed</i>the wretched din. So it was for that that Gabriel was humming quietly to himself, his fingers tinkering with the inset knobs on his compacted rifle, until it slowly unhinged and rearranged like clockwork to form a sleek devil of a gun. He retrieved the long silencer that had been clipped to his waist, fastening it onto the barrel with deft surety. Guns of the day were already quiet, with the way they were designed from within, expelling less gas than those of past creations, but the extra padding absolutely made a difference, lowering the shock of the sound to a mere fifteen decibels.<br/><br/>Three metal-capped cables slithered from Gabriel’s wrist, two ends spinning around to expose prongs, the third remaining flat and circular, and they inserted themselves into the ports on his rifle in a pyramid formation. A new display appeared within his visor, the eye of the gun - a complex view of the gun’s digital visage. A building awaited perpendicular to the one that he was perched upon, the haphazardly crossed levels of it squatting over a noisy and busy road below. It was so choked with people down there that vehicles could hardly so much as move a meter an hour, so he’d foreseen the circumstance and parked his bike a few blocks over. An ugly metal heap came into view on the top floor of the place he’d been scanning, lurching off the side of the roof, unguarded, with a sharp, blue light blinking off of an antenna. It was a self-made disruptor, hobbled together with incredibly, embarrassingly shoddy work; Gabriel half expected it to burst into flames beneath its own abject ineptitude, but it didn’t, and he couldn’t afford not to be careful.<br/><br/>One shot was all it took, a weighted bullet buried deep into the scrap, which now sparked and fizzled. It had uttered hardly more than a crunching ‘thump’ when the projectile had been embedded, and its little blue light went dead. With a practiced speed, the silencer was replaced, the cables retracted, the rifle was compacted and returned to his back, and Gabriel was flitting to the edge of the roof, where the two buildings almost kissed. He dexterously leapt to the other, catching himself on the jut of a metal beam that errantly offered itself out like a helping hand, and was crawling up the side to the ugly, peeling balustrade, beneath the dead disruptor. Someone had come out onto the terrace, perhaps to investigate the noise, perhaps in search of the bathroom - he wasn’t going to question it either way. They had turned to the wrong direction, exposing to him their back, a prominent shoulder pauldron with a scarlet spray-painted sigil to bare. He didn’t know why he thought it was funny that it looked like a wing.<br/><br/>Lifting his wrist, Gabriel signed a symbol onto it with his finger, the threads alighting beneath it, and the suit quickly catalyzed, cloaking with the scenery. Just like that, he vanished, with hardly any blur or slip of the form to mark him. Using soft, quick steps, without any measure of hesitation, of depthful thought, he sidled up behind the man. No chatting, no one-liners, no smarmy bragging - he just lifted his hands and violently snapped his neck, lowering the fresh corpse to the ground as silent as a breath.<br/><br/>For a moment, he paused, milky eyes flicking in a series of movements so that the mod in his visor changed, exhibiting a dark world, with a myriad of lines reverberating in fast or slow succession. The visor adapted, muting out excess noise of the sonar, the high-pitched hum it released so quiet, Gabriel could hardly hear it unless he stopped breathing. Rhythmic readings, paced and gentle, the outer lines of their waves growing closer. Steps, he recognized, unalerted, ignorant. The image changed back to standard. Still cloaked, he dodged into the room that the man had come from before, its door cracked. Spinning around the corner, he grabbed the goon that he had run into, her gasp releasing the exact moment that she met the same fate as her companion. He realized at once that there was someone else in the room, a man who had been sitting still, and was now jumping up, aghast, hand fumbling for a weapon. Gabriel’s cloak released, giving the generator along his spine, which was heated, a moment’s reprieve. He grabbed the gun on the hip of the body that he held and he fired, making a damn bloody mess across a busy poker table.<br/><br/>Gabriel quirked his lips, dropped the body, felt utterly disappointed. Even more so for allowing a stupid song to be stuck in his head. He liked clean jobs, ones done carefully, precisely. Didn’t like, either, that the gun had been as loud as it had. He flipped through the modes on his visor again, listened with the patience and stillness of a statue. Nothing as of yet. With more caution considering the mishandle, he toed open the door to the next room, peering within, swapping through modes with precise wariness. A portable computer was sprawled out, its screens glimmering and flashing with computational data as it calculated and thought. There was no one inside and he snorted derisively for it. The mercenaries had left three thugs and a shitty disruptor - which would have<i>maybe</i>kept his suit from stealthing - to watch over their prize. It made Gabriel wonder if they didn’t know the value of their information. Not yet, anyway. They’d know once it was gone.<br/><br/>He approached the computer, tenderly checking it for ports, and thanked its maker when he found them. The cables on his wrist released again, exposing their prongs and inserting themselves into the side of the main case. Its screen appeared before him, its data unfurling like a goddamned flower in the sun. He directed it through his interface and began downloading to the empty chip that he had inserted earlier into his visor. It was a waterfall of information, some of it the cleverly disguised weaknesses and hierarchy of the Silver Dreamers. Some of it their suppliers. The rest, he hadn’t been briefed on - not that it mattered. A paycheck was a paycheck and he was only being paid to do one thing at present.<br/><br/>Gabriel hummed quietly to himself, keeping his eyes on the door, his back leaning against the table as the computer’s lifeblood poured through his wrist. When it had been sufficiently copied, he had his connectors begin the corruption and destruction of what was left behind.<i>That</i>was when the internal alarm went off. Though the computer could do little to stop the viruses he bombarded it with, it did pop up with a plethora of little red warnings, backed by an annoying, blotchy siren, and the voices quickly raised from downstairs. “Ah…” He noted quietly. ‘<i>They were just on lunch break,</i>’ he thought, snorted derisively. They were in for a rude awakening, and the small-town mercenaries hoping to make a name for themselves would immediately plummet to the depths of the planet. For a moment, he was still stuck there, waiting to check and make sure that all of the data had been killed, and he actively worked to keep from tapping his foot impatiently, watching via sonar the impending and thickening steps of his adversaries through the door.<br/><br/>By the time they reached it, Gabriel was gone, his body cloaked - its generator warm and clearly upset against his back - and his wrists raw from suddenly breaking the connection. He’d been able to do the check, though, and that was what mattered. Their files were empty, and they’d be out of a job on Wesperion III, if they survived their employer’s wrath. That, he figured, would be in the data too, who had hired them - but he wasn’t a digger, just a retriever. He wasn’t that curious, and he wasn’t being paid for more than what he'd done. Either way, he knew just how valuable the information on it was, and his own boss would be exceedingly pleased to find it returned and purged.<br/><br/>Down the roof and into the swell of the crowd. Gabriel’s cloak disengaged and he sighed with self-serving pleasure. Despite the brains he’d left on the wall with the one poor sap, he’d finished in good time with good manners. It didn’t take much longer to find his bike several blocks away, a dark, mechanical beast of a machine, and take it back to District 6. By the time that he was seated on it, he was permanently in the wind. This time, he didn’t go through Tritan’s Square. He went around.<br/><br/>“Warren,” a voice greeted Gabriel as he ascended to the base’s third level, a pittance number in the face of how high the tower rose. Even Triton would have a mind enough to feel a little jealous, if better for its elegance. The voice was rough, but feminine, accented with a little bit of fry. A young woman was seated at a desk, a holo board behind her, a smattering of Dreamers around her. Most were moving - quickly - with papers or files or datapads, through doors at her sides. When one left, another replaced them.<br/><br/>“Montaz,” he replied, baring his teeth in a devilish grin.<br/><br/>“You took longer than I expected,” she said, voice serious, though she was consumed by the screen in front of her, and had given him little more than a flicker of her eyes.<br/><br/>Gabriel reached up and pressed the side of his visor. From a slit popped a small chip; he pulled it from its slot and offered it to Montaz, whose fingers finally paused their incessant tapping on the keyboard. “I was enjoying myself,” he retorted, shrugging.<br/><br/>“When do you not?” She asked, shaking her head. She slipped the chip into a sleek, black envelope, then she handed it back to Gabriel, whose brow - even though unseen - tilted in question. “Mr. Stirling wants it handed to him directly. And he wants to see you, which means you’re taking that to him. New job, I think. Too fancy for the rest of us small fry to even give out so much as a data pad,” she scoffed, turning back to her screen, clearly meaning it all as an insult.<br/><br/>A sigh caught itself in Gabriel’s throat, but he shrugged his shoulders anyway and flicked a half-assed salute in Montaz’ direction. “You got it, bosswoman,” he said, ignoring her eyeroll of disgust and taking his leave before the tapping of the keyboard bored into his head. At least the song was no longer stuck in his head.<br/><br/>Gabriel took the elevator most of the way up, and then approached the ‘special’ elevator, dedicated to the topmost levels, where the important people were roomed or housed or congregated. Whatever the fuck rich gang members did on the top floor of their towers. The two Dreamers guarding it eyed him with something bred of reverence and dislike, but they allowed him passage. He stepped from the doors when they slid open onto golden floors, twined with liquid silver and dark, bruised cobalt. In tapestries, in paintings, in the little details of the molding against the floor. He’d been up here many times before and he didn’t whistle like he did the first several times, only gripped the little, black envelope and proceeded towards the ominous, onyx double-door at the end of the hall, presenting itself both like a glittering jewel and a salivating maw. The door handle turned of its own accord beneath his palm and, startled by it, he’d hardly time to react as someone exited the room into him.<br/><div style="text-align: center"><br/>
<a class="username" data-user-id="101" data-username="@Lady Scarlet" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/101/">@Lady Scarlet</a>​</div>