The Siren's Code

Jay's return

Heading down the familiar coastline, white lines of sand dividing the green jungle from the blue sea, headlands like sleeping crocodiles reaching out to the small islands dotted along the way Jay was looking forward to coming home. While the Firefly was on autonomous mode he caught up on his communications and read the posts Bear flagged for him from his hacker community. The usual stuff – unease of governments as Disinformation Labs were becoming more prolific, ethics regulation of AI – but a couple of leaks about a new neuro-hacking project named Qualia piqued his interest. Human augmentation was not unheard of, but something about this caught his eye, perhaps that the augmentations stated were not dissimilar to his own abilities.

The Military Augmentation Testing (MAT) arm of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, (DARPA) carried out neuro-hacking on him and soldiers like him, but the leaks seemed to be highlighting the failure of this particular project, 'Race for brain space still in the starting blocks' was one claim, 'Soldiers not ready for neural augmentation' another, and more worryingly 'Brain dead zombies not super warriors'.

It was twenty minutes until touch down on Isla de Blanca, Jay flicked controls to manual enjoying the mental and manual dexterity of landing the e-craft on home soil. After the best part of two months carrying out due diligence on a mission that hadn't gone quite to plan, he had as much intel as he was going to get. He knew a gang war was imminent, he knew who the honchos he needed to bring to the US government for the reward were, but perplexingly they were still hitting a brick wall when it came to locating the epicentre.

Following the state of Mexican Cartels is a time consuming hobby, look it up on Wiki if you care, but since the Sinaloa Cartel was all but beheaded in the early twenty-first century with a joint effort from the US DEA and Mexican Military. Now, like Medusa rising from the waves, there were close to four hundred interconnected gangs, still not the issue, but the cream of this network were joining forces to create an Alpha Cartel with the most coverage and power, creating next-gen El Chapos capable of controlling governments. This news had created two opportunities for Jay, firstly cartel bosses have very long memories and keep even longer grudges, his escapades of eliminating two of their bottom feeders some years prior could be eradicated. Tidiness always meant safety to the few people that mattered in his life. Secondly the US were upping their bounty to silly money in the realm of fifteen million dollars on a couple of the top most wanted names and people like Jay were being roped in to be party to the jackpot. To be honest his track record, and bank balance, were testimony to the fact that he was the man for the job.

But recon had been slow, word on the street was all but muted, and people in fancy offices were getting itchy feet, so his team had concocted a plan for Jay to be taken hostage to gather deeper intelligence. The issue was that the cartel they had chosen to infiltrate was stronger and better equipped than they had estimated. Jay being popped in the end came by happenstance, a chance meeting with a lively English girl in a bar in Mexico City frequented by the high net worth sci-tech crowd. Her agenda seemed somewhat unclear but involved befriending the most shifty looking guys in the bar and happily swigging their drinks. Quite impressive – not something he would advise if he were a parent giving his daughter a parting 'be safe' talk, while waving her off on her travels, but then he wouldn't be a parent, and she turned out to be just what he needed.

Whilst she was gratifyingly distracting to the thugs squeezing into the booth, persuading them to do shots of tequila, making them laugh, he took in the situation as he always did. He thought to begin with the elfin girl must have been under cover, he waited for the mischievousness dancing across her face to reveal her reasons, but it didn't. Instead her hand moved to a pendant around her neck that she rubbed between thumb and forefinger perhaps for comfort as she realised what she might have got herself into. He lingered on it for a moment, a circular disk like a molten coin or hand shaped shell in pale gold, not unattractive.