The Siren's Code

No rest for the wicked

Lying on his back with her head in the crook of his shoulder, he felt her turn into the foetal position taking his arm with her. Jay was struck by how right it felt but fought the urge to role towards her and wrap his other arm tight around her, why he's not sure, close but not emotionally close, was that what this had boiled down to?

He was staring at a post-it on the slanted ceiling lit by the moonlight through the window.

'TO JUDGE TRIVIALITY IS TO TRIFLE WITH CREATIVITY.'

Patting his hand on the floor next to the bed he picked up a sharpie, crossing out 'creativity' and replacing it with 'humanity'. Catching a few hours before being jolted awake by Pavlov. He could feel from the weight balance of her body that she was in deep sleep as he extracted himself and headed home. An uneasy feeling of detachment bugged him as he walked up the track past the bougainvillaea to his house. Snapshots of the previous day invading his thoughts, a shared smile, brief kiss, riding on the waves of emotion.

It was four am, Jay confirmed the mission code on his phad and on auto pilot packed his stuff and headed out to the helipad where the Firefly was waiting. As the craft headed out it checked him over for health, toxins, physical and mental capacity and he expects an ever growing list of tests. He had never failed yet, but Seven's comment about his AI Psych Report bothered him. The missions were pretty surgical these days, within thirty minutes of arriving the men, dictated by the inflight check up, were pricked with the correct intravenous cocktail of protein, carbs, toxin neutralisation and DCS to be on high alert for at least forty-eight hours, long enough to do most in and out hostage operations.

Gene-mods may be the next thing, but right now it was bioelectronics and a whole new category of electroceuticals from brain computer interfaces to neuroprosthetics, implants, regulators, electrical stimulation and now neural code augmenting our natural abilities – instructions to increase the body's capacity or in most cases just use the parts of it that thanks to our generally cushy lives had stopped being used.

"Morning Six." Jay said as he came through the door, Six was quiet but sharp, they were never briefed on route as they then would become sitting ducks, or flying geese depending how you looked at it.

"Your thoughts?"

"It's another of your favourites Sir."

"SVK?"

The Si-Valley Kidnappings were becoming quite common, a sad product of parenting plain and simple, maybe Bear's idea of taking youths out into the wilderness for a month and giving them a grounding in real life again wasn't such a bad idea. As Silicon Valley reached its peak and those cocooned within it realised they had changed the world, but possibly not for the better, as they watched the harm that social media, surveillance, IOT, AI and the always on culture was doing. They were speaking up, zoning out, dropping off and basically trying to counterbalance this in their own life with a back to nature approach. It certainly helped places like Remi's hotel and the PermaCycle movement boom, but the rest of the world were not listening, they were hooked like a drug on what these people had created.

As this Silicon Valley set got a little older they started to have children, realising if they could not stop the world they would at least stop their children, so took devices out of the house, sent their kids to schools with a no device policy and exhausted them with 'experiences'. However, as with everything this had knock on consequences. These children only mixed in the Si-Valley offspring circles, as according to the parents, outside of these were the poor mortals too far gone to save from the devil they had initiated. These children grew up rich, with genius parents raising pent up genius children. They had the best free thinking education, with the helicopter approach to parenting of the early twenty-first century, these parents were pushy yet controlling.