It started about a week ago, with a girl.

Mandy.

Old as I am, I shouldn't be thinking about her the way I do, but she was like a breath of spring air in my dusty old office. It was something about her eyes--this distant fire, like she was the kind of dame who knew what she wanted and got it, world be damned.

She came into my office – Jack Fenix Investigation – wanting me to do a simple search and surveillance job. Normally I don’t really go for those, I prefer jobs with a little bit more meat to them, but times have been real lean lately, and sometimes you gotta take what you can get. Anyway, she wanted me to find her brother, guy by the name of Drake Collins. Seems he’d recently gotten a new job at some start-up cybernetics corporation called Prostheticore, and soon after he’d started acting real strange, and weirdest of all he eventually just up and vanished like a silent fart. So of course, here I am, as usual, slogging my way through the information world to find his shifty ass.

I hate this tech stuff. I remember when it was all on the streets, when it was tracking people down, bribing or lying or beating for info, getting what you needed with sweat and bloody knuckles. Then people start telling me, Jack, man, you losing your game. The hell I was.

Damn game game lost me, though. Pretty soon I was jacking terminals more often than contacts, punching code into Interweb instead of hitting the information blackmarket in the techie slums. Everything went Meta, and the next thing I know I’m an old fart with a hard drinking problem. Get off the streets, man, they tell me, you’re too old for that shit now. You can still do your job—all the info’s Meta. And so I go find this old black techie in the slums, goes by the name of Juggernaut, and he installs this thing in the back of my skull. Still itches like a bastard.

A lot of kids these days get TRUchips because they’re the new fad, and the only way to access TRUscape – the first completely immersive virtual reality universe, able to send information to all five senses. Big launch of TRUscape is in a couple days or something. I’m not too sure, I’ve never cared much for these fads. I got the implant because in my line of work, constant access to information is more valuable than all new computers money can buy – and nowadays, there’s a lot to buy.

Go on