Archive of Our Own

The Neurotumbler isn't the dive bar Jensen was mostly expecting. The façade is well-lit and well-maintained, and every one of the letters in the neon blue sign is lit-up and working. It's the kind of joint that caters to a decidedly middle-class clientele. They probably have a wine-list that fills a booklet, and smooth jazz night on Fridays.

It's not the biggest surprise Jensen's dealt with in the last 48 hours, but at least it's something to think about, other than what the fuck he's doing here at all.

The bar's interior is dimly but deliberately lit. Booths and decorative hanging features have been placed to break up the space and the sightlines within, the décor highlighted in electric blue and chrome over dark wood furnishings. Out of the corner of his eye, Jensen spots a security camera watching him come in. He takes a moment near the entrance while instinct and neural-augs compete to gage the layout of the unfamiliar space, tallying the entrances—icons in his vision highlighting kitchens, bathrooms, emergency exits—then another moment to commit the key points to memory the old-fashioned way too. This isn't the night to leave that kind of thing to chance.

Jensen's early, but the man he's looking for is already waiting for him at the bar. He's sitting with his back to the door, like he hasn't a care in the world. He's even wearing the same damn jacket Jensen remembers. Cocky asshole.

Not that 'cocky asshole' qualifies as new information. Either way, it's too late to back out now.

Jensen slides into the stool beside him and signals the bartender for a beer. He's in the mood for something stronger, but he has a nasty suspicion he's going to need every wit available tonight.

"Well, hello again, Adam," says an infuriatingly familiar voice. "I was starting to wonder if you were going to find the place."

Jensen bites back a retort. They both know he's half an hour early—that's probably the point. "Ballsy, leaving me your number like that," he says instead.

"I could say the same about you, coming out here alone. We both know how that worked out for you last time." The man leans an elbow on the counter, turning towards Jensen. "You did come alone?"

Jensen looks up at the ceiling, and wonders what the hell he's doing. "Would you believe me if I said 'yes'?"

A light shrug. "You might be surprised."

"Yeah." Jensen agrees. "It's been that kind of week."

"So," the man begins, significantly—and Jensen decides he's had enough, "I suppose you'll want to-"

"Yeah, we'll get to that," he cuts in. "Maybe. There's just one thing I need to hear from you first. And how you answer decides whether I walk out of here or stick around."

The other man leans an elbow on the counter. "I'm all ears, Adam."

"What you did to me back there," Jensen takes a deep breath. "Tell me it really happened."

Sarif's going to have to shell out for a new security turret when Jensen's done here today. There are tidier ways to disable them than wasting EMP grenades, but whoever's hacked their security is good, and Jensen doesn't trust that anything he disables is going to stay that way while his back is turned. Add that to the two security bots and one camera that may-or-may-not prove repairable, and... well, it's still probably less damage than they'd have been looking at had they just let the Detroit PD come charging in here, so that's probably a win (no cops shot dead by Sarif's own security bots: definitely a win). But the joys of corporate security are that everything you do comes with an associated cost-benefit analysis. Some days, Jensen actually misses SWAT.

Not many signs of the human perps behind this break-in so far. A single look-out—a man in a hand-altered cap with punched holes to line up with the computer ports in his skull—is still sleeping on the roof where Jensen left him with a tranq dart in the back of his neck. Either it's a smaller team than anticipated, or they're all holed up somewhere in the admin offices up ahead (or Jensen's too late, and they've all pulled out already). But then, why put human eyes on watch when you can just repurpose the ones already installed in the building? Why bring your own guns when you have the security bots to work with? These people clearly know where their strengths lie.

Through the wall of the Typhoon lab, Jensen finally lays eyes on a human target—body outlined in his Smart Vision's helpful yellow overlay, seated at the terminal. Apparently alone, but there's no sense taking chances. Jensen activates his sound dampening on his approach, opening the door as quietly as he can.

It goes smoothly enough to be anti-climactic. The figure with the yellow-outline resolves into a man in jeans and a jacket, long hair pulled back into a ponytail to expose a line of ports behind his ear, cables running to the terminal in front of him. He doesn't turn when Jensen comes in—he doesn't seem to have noticed the door opening at all.

Jensen cocks his gun with a pointedly-audible click. "Unplug, and put your hands where I can see them."

The man at the terminal freezes. Moving deliberately slow, he raises a hand and obediently begins to unplug the cables at the side of his head, one at a time.

Jensen holds his gun steady and wrestles with an instinct screaming at him that something's wrong here—this is too easy. Whoever this guy is, he's one cool customer—didn't even jump when Jensen appeared behind him.

Hands raised and cables discarded, the hacker slowly rotates in his computer chair to face Jensen properly. Jensen keeps his eyes trained on the man, but his attention wavers ever-so-slightly as he spots something sitting on the desk—a tiny electronic device with a cable leading to the computer. It's a portable spycam, pointed at the door. And that can only mean this guy watched him come in.

Shit.

The man in the chair has taken advantage of Jensen's momentary lapse in attention to look his captor up and down. "Well, hello, Adam," he says, conversationally. "So nice to finally meet you."

And while Jensen's still reeling from hearing his first name in a stranger's mouth, the man hits a button on something sitting beside his keyboard, and Jensen's world goes suddenly, horribly, black.

He doesn't lose consciousness; no, that would be too easy. Jensen's still there, he just can't see, can't hear—every augmented part of his body has shut down in tandem. His legs, whether through luck or engineering, collapse in stages. Jensen doesn't feel his knees hit the ground, but he feels the vertigo of the drop, the sudden stop, the sharp shock that jars upwards through his hips. His body tilts forwards—arms that should have lifted automatically to break his fall hang lifeless by his sides—but his shoulders must have connected with something on his way down, because Jensen can feel his body hanging forward between his arms as he slides towards the floor. But he can't feel anything touching his shoulders, or his knees—every limb has gone horrifyingly numb. The idea of sounds—someone moving nearby, maybe—reach him as a dull vibration through the floor: his ears feel like they're stuffed with cotton wool. And he still can't see.

It's at about this point that Jensen starts to panic.

Jensen never does lose consciousness, and that might be the worst part. At least inasmuch as 'never' is quantifiable without any means to mark the passage of time: it's damn hard to judge much of anything in the void.

"...lright, Jensen, your cochlear implants should be back online now. Nod if you can hear me."

Jensen twitches so violently that for a moment he sees stars. Ironic, considering he still can't see anything else.

"I'll take that as a 'yes'. No talking—your rebreather's still in life-support mode, and you won't have much manual control."

Jensen tries anyway; there's no stopping an impulse that's barely even voluntary. He only manages a faint wheeze.

"Easy there. I'm going to try to bring your eyes online next."

There are fingers touching the side of his head—fingers of the skin-covered variety, an increasingly alien sensation to Jensen these days. His head's resting on something, propped up at an angle—is it in someone's lap? Who's talking to him, a medic? That voice is horribly familiar.

It's only when Jensen's eyes flicker back into operation that it finally clicks. The 'rescuer' looking down at him has the same face he was looking into the moment his world shut down. Jensen's eyes widen; every muscle he still has any control over feels like it seizes at once in the need to get away. He tries to sit up, but nothing happens—his spine is mostly artificial, and it's not listening to him.

"Aaand I think we can say the eyes are working too." The fingers rub soothing circles in the side of Jensen's head. At least, they'd probably be soothing if they were attached to anyone else. "Relax, Adam. The worst is over. But we can't have you getting in the way before we're out of here."

Jensen mouths something, silently—it might have been, "the fuck?"

There's another voice, somewhere in the middle distance, but Jensen can't quite make it out. The terrorist with the ponytail looks back over his shoulder, "I do, thank you very much," he says, to someone well out of Jensen's view. "I don't want him panicking and freaking out like the last guy! Give me two minutes and I'm right behind you!"

He turns back to Jensen, that smug smile back again. "Can't stay, but I'm sure you'll manage without my company."

Jensen feels his head being eased off the man's lap, down onto the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he just barely makes out some small object being set down on the floor beside him, and then there are hands under his shoulder, rolling him carefully onto his side. His metal right arm is lifted and pushed in front of him, slack mechanical muscles offering no resistance at all. Duly delivered into something approximating the recovery position, Jensen finds himself looking at a small electronic timer, the digits counting down the seconds from 10:32.

"Don't worry, it's not a bomb," Jensen hears, just as he's coming up with something new to panic about, "but I thought you might appreciate knowing exactly how much longer you've got to wait before the paralysis wears off. Rest assured, we'll all be miles from here by then." A hand pats him lightly on the side of the face. "See you soon, Adam." With one last, faint caress, the hand withdraws. The sound of departing footsteps fades gradually away.

The timer says 09:54 now. Jensen watches the numbers tick slowly down, wondering what's really going to happen when they hit 00:00, and faintly horrified by the small part of him that misses the grounding touch of someone's hand on his cheek.

What follows might well be the longest ten minutes of his life. The timer is down to 00:21 when the SWAT team bursts in. He can move again by the time they find him, but the residual dizziness doesn't wear off until he reaches the hospital.

It's only later still, back at home, that he finds the card in his back pocket—one featuring the name of a bar, with a date and time. It's the sort of detail he should definitely have told his boss about, if not the police.

By the time he's declared fit for work again, Jensen's made up his mind to tell neither.

Back at the bar, the man with the ponytail tilts his head to the side. "Of course it happened. Why?" he asks, significantly. "Has someone been trying to make you doubt your own memory?"

Jensen breathes out, inexplicably relieved. Neither of them has even voiced what it was that happened to begin with, but why should they have to? They were both there. "They told me it wasn't possible. Not the way I described it. They said I was hit by an EMP."

"Did it feel like an EMP?" The other man sips his drink through a straw. There's a little umbrella in it, and Jensen can't immediately articulate why that annoys him so much.

"No. And I've been hit by EMPs before, so I think I'd know." On the bar, Jensen's right hand clenches into a fist. "You shut me down. Every augment on my body."

"Everything that wasn't keeping you alive," the man corrects him, smoothly. He lifts his left hand onto the bar, fingers closed around something unseen. "If you've got doubts, Adam, it can all happen again—right here and now. Just say the word."

Jensen smiles humourlessly up at the ceiling. "Or make one wrong move?" God, a little part of him's actually tempted. That's how much those bastards made him doubt his own memory.

"I'd hope it's not going to come to that tonight," the man drawls. "You and I could just have a nice little conversation. You might even learn something to your advantage."

"Such as?"

"Where to begin? You've already discovered the people you work for aren't telling you the whole truth about all those nice upgrades they installed in your body. That's to be expected: most of them probably don't know better themselves. But I'm sorry to say that's only the beginning of what they've been keeping from you."

"Fuck." Something clicks in Jensen's head. "That's what this is? You're trying to recruit me."

"Well, yes, Adam, why did you think we called you out here? This isn't just how I meet people, you know."

Part of Jensen's starting to think it actually might be, but he keeps that to himself. The fact is he should have seen this coming: apparently all you have to do is knock him cold and then make him doubt his own memory to throw him completely off his game. "Fine. Why not? I'll hear you out. Not like I had plans tonight anyway."

"Pleased to hear it," says Jensen's new friend. "Shall we take this somewhere more private?"

Jensen frowns. "How much more private?"

The other man raises an eyebrow and gestures over a shoulder. "I was thinking a booth, maybe?"

"Oh." Jensen's agreed to listen, but like hell is he leaving here with this guy. He's already had it rubbed in how outclassed he is. "Fine."

The man slips off his stool, unfinished drink still in hand, moving towards the booth with a willingness to turn his back on Jensen that is slightly unnerving.

"You can call me 'Frank'," he says, sitting down again.

"Uh-huh." Jensen assumes that's an alias. "You planning to be?"

"As much as I can be, when I don't know if you're on board yet." 'Frank' leans back, crossing one leg over another. "In case it comes up: we met online, this is our first real 'date'. I suggested the venue, obviously."

Jensen rolls his eyes. He's known Frank five minutes, and he already thinks he's a git. "You're not really my type."

"Sure I am. I have read your dating profile, Adam."

Jensen knows perfectly well he hasn't created one of those since he was a teenager. "Probably helps that you wrote it yourself?"

"He catches on!" Frank looks genuinely pleased.

Right. So somewhere out there on the web is a fake dating profile with Jensen's details—maybe even his photo—which has connected with this bastard. He wonders if laying all that backstory is really necessary, or if it's just how these sorts of techno-terrorist freaks get their kicks. Could go either way. "So how are you feeling about your chances of getting a second date?"

"Bit early to say." Frank sips his obnoxious drink. "But so you know, Adam, you're worth the trouble. Very much so. We made sure of that long before we made contact."

If that part sounds flirtier than really necessary, it's only about par for the course for this whole conversation. "Is this where I find out you staged that whole break-in just to get my attention?" Jensen's not sure he'd believe it, but it seems to be about where this conversation is going.

For once, he's off-track. "Hardly. Sarif's systems would have been worth our time without you. But I'd have been very disappointed if you hadn't made an appearance."

"Yeah, I'm getting that impression," says Jensen, already feeling tired. "Okay, look, I didn't agree to hear you out for the small talk."

"Of course not." Frank leans forward on the table, resting on his elbows. "You want to know how I did that to you, don't you? Simple: I activated your kill switch."

This doesn't strike Jensen as the kind of 'explanation' that explains much of anything. "You going to explain how you gave me a kill switch?"

"We didn't. There's one installed in every licensed augmentation sold in this country. Most other countries too. It's not widely known because they don't want you knowing that anyone with the right code can shut down any augmentation at any time, easy as the push of a button."

"Right. They being who? The government?"

"Sometimes." Frank sips his drink. "Not exclusively."

"Right, I missed the cyber-anarchists who hacked all their systems and stole all the codes."

"For starters, sure. Never trust your data to the government, Jensen. All the money in the world won't keep you secure when politicians are making the decisions. But it's not the cyber-anarchists of the world you should be really worried about."

"Oh, I suppose it's the shadowy figures behind the government?" Jensen's still rolling his eyes when he catches sight of Frank's expression. "What, really?"

"You're more than just a pretty face, Jensen, I'll give you that."

Jensen isn't feeling especially flattered. "Are you seriously going to sit here and tell me the Illuminati installed a kill switch in my head?"

"I didn't have to. But don't worry, Adam. I make it a rule never to bring up the Illuminati before a second date. For now, it doesn't matter who installed your kill switch. What matters is that you know it's there, and no-one but me has ever told you about it. Doesn't that raise a question or two?"

"Yeah." Jensen sighs. He wants to argue, but it feels futile to pretend this goddamn creep doesn't have a point. "You know that's why I'm here. Only I thought I was... I don't know, going to hear about some new security exploit in Sarif-tech or something."

"It's not exclusive to Sarif tech. Get me the serial numbers off any augmentation sold by any licensed manufacturer, and I'll have a shut-down code ready to run within the hour. Do you doubt me? I can demonstrate! Tell me, Jensen—is that woman in the blue dress still sitting at the bar?"

Jensen raises his eyes over Frank's shoulder. As promised, there's a woman at the bar not far from where they'd been sitting before, legs crossed on her stool and apparently in deep conversation with her companion. It's a very nice dress, cut at the shoulders to show off the sleek silver metal of her prosthetic right arm to best effect.

"Sure," he tells Frank, already worried by where this is going.

"That's a Tai Young brand augmentation—sold in the US as the Digitalis Mark III. The decorative gilt-work comes optional. She's also carrying a poorly-secured digital wallet with all her personal details. Lucky for her, that's her only augmentation, so it won't be quite so dramatic as you were if I shut it down for a few seconds." Frank raises the same hand which had held that device he'd threatened Jensen with at the bar, though its contents remain hidden between his fingers. "Shall I demonstrate?"

Jensen frowns at him. He's not keen to drag a stranger into this, even to prove a point. "Don't bother. For all I know, she's with you, and that's your signal to her to start acting."

"Well, you're no fun." Frank grumbles. "I hope you're not expecting to get to pick out a target yourself. It's not that easy to set this up."

"Sure, then I find out every other augmented person in this bar is someone you planted here too. I'll pass."

Frank whistles faintly. "Tough crowd."

"You don't need to convince me you can do this," Jensen tells him. "I've experienced the results. They were convincing. So how 'bout instead, you tell me what happened to the last guy."

Frank frowns. "You're going to have to give me more context than-"

"You said you didn't want me 'freaking out like the last guy'. While I was..." The rest of that sentence would be while I was lying there helpless with my head in your lap, but Jensen is so keen to voice that part. "...after you reactivated my eyes. So who was 'the last guy'? I'm not the first person you've shut down like that, am I?"

"You remembered that." Frank sounds faintly impressed. "If you're hoping for any incriminating details, I'm going to have to disappoint you. Suffice to say he wasn't as heavily augmented as you are, but his hardware did include a lumbar bypass chip—a relic of a past spinal injury. Add in cybernetic eyes and ears much like your own, and you'll see why having all his augments fail at once might have been... particularly distressing. Near-complete sensory deprivation would be a shock to anyone's system."

"That I can vouch for," says Jensen, with all the bite it deserves.

"I'm given to understand there are several forms of torture based around that very principle," says Frank, rather too conversationally for Jensen's tastes. "So for the record, no, I wasn't going to leave you immobile, blind and deaf longer than necessary. We've seen first-hand how badly people can react."

"You've seen it second-hand," Jensen corrects him, viciously. "Should really try it yourself sometime."

Frank just raises an eyebrow. "Looking for some turnabout, now—the chance to be on the other side of the experience? Sorry to disappoint, but my own augments don't make that possible. Sudden failure of a neural aug isn't pleasant, but a surprise deactivation of these," he taps the ports behind his ear, "isn't going to floor me. I've made sure of that."

"I'll bet you have." Jensen's getting really tired of Frank's face. 'Smug' seems to be about the only setting it comes with.

"We may both be augmented, but what that means for each of us is a very different thing," Frank tells him. "Ironic that in all the great augmentation debates of our time, no-one's talking about the real catch-22: the more parts of you they upgrade, the more vulnerable you become. All the highest-spec military-grade tech in the world becomes a liability the moment you know its kill switch code."

Jensen feels suddenly cold. He's been mentally circling much the same though since the moment he and Frank first met, but to have all laid out in plain English only underlines how vulnerable he really is. Long months have gone by since he woke up in hospital to discover that most of his body was no longer his own. Rehab was traumatic even on a steady diet of reassurances that he was in good hands, that his new body represented the best money could buy. All the months since have barely been time enough to recover and adjust to his new status quo, learning his body all over again, to begin to feel like he's back on solid ground. Now it turns out that any moment, that solid ground could be ripped away—his own legs pulled right out from under him. How's he supposed to deal with that?

"So," Jensen swigs his beer, trying to cover his lapse in equilibrium. "The last guy. He freaked out."

"If you want to be specific, he panicked and began to hyperventilate. We had to sedate him for his own safety."

It all sounds pretty rich to Jensen. "Surprised you didn't do the same to me."

"Oh, that wasn't an option," says Frank, too easily. "We needed you to remember the experience—clearly. We couldn't expect you to accept our invitation otherwise."

"And people ask me why I don't do blind dates," Jensen grumbles. "Look, I'm not ready to buy in on your whole conspiracy thing here. It doesn't make much difference to me whether this is a weakness you found or something 'they' put in on purpose." Jensen pauses, taking a deep breath. "What bothers me... is that neither of those things are supposed to be possible. At all."

Frank nods, pleased. "That's the party line, isn't it? That human augmentation technology is founded on a system of failsafes that makes remote deactivation mechanically impossible. After all, no-one wants a pacemaker that any rogue agent with the right code can switch off. There's a reason this is the best-kept secret in all of augmentation technology. Most likely the people who told you it was impossible don't know any better themselves."

"So how do you know about it then? Because if this is as well-kept a secret as you say..."

"Good question! But not the one you're getting an answer to on our first date. What you should be more concerned about now, Adam, is what else they've been keeping from you."

Jensen's not greatly keen to find out. "Is this where I hear about the aliens and the lizard people?"

Frank gives him another of those too-punchable smiles. "How long has it been since you were augmented? Nine months, give or take?"

Jensen shrugs; it's close enough.

"Because this," Frank goes on, "is where I ask just how much neuropozine you're taking since you woke up with all those new attachments. I have reason to believe it's an unusually low dose."

Jensen sits back, confused by the non-sequitur. He doesn't like where this seems to be going. "Sounds like you know the answer to that already."

"Something in the vicinity of none at all?" Frank gives him a significant look. "Well, Adam? Do you have any idea how many augmented people there are out there who don't need neuropozine?"

"So I'm in the lucky 1% or whatever, that doesn't-"

"Oh, it's much less than 1%, Adam. Try one person."

Jensen stares at him. "And no-one bothered to tell me this because...? Come on, I wouldn't be working security if that was true, they'd be writing papers on me or something."

"They already are. They just don't have your name on them, because if they acknowledged their source, they'd have to ask your permission. And you'd have the right to say no, maybe shop around for a better offer. They can't have their star subject doing that." Frank twirls his straw. "Look it up when you go home tonight. No-one gets augmented without neuropozine, and whoever finds a way to change that is on track for too big a payday to let a little matter of ethics get in the way."

"Right," says Jensen, vaguely. It doesn't help that this is something he has wondered about before. If he hasn't lost any sleep over it, it's only because he's been comfortable assuming his doctors would have told him if there was something to worry about. All of a sudden he's feeling a lot less comfortable with that assumption.

"It gets worse," says Frank. "Let me tell you a little story, Adam. Our hero is maybe the one guy on the entire planet who was truly born to be augmented. Now, by sheer coincidence, this guy gets offered a job working security for a major augmentation manufacturer. They offer to augment him on his very first day, but he's not quite ready to give an arm and a leg for his new job just yet. Bit of a waste of potential, but it's not like they've told him the real reason they're so keen to fill him full of bells and whistles."

"I'm sorry," says Jensen, "are you saying they knew before they even hired me?"

Frank ignores him. "But what do you know, he hasn't been working this new job for more than a couple of months before there's a catastrophic break in that puts him in hospital. And thanks to an interesting little clause in his contract, now he's in a coma, the choice of whether or not he wants to be augmented gets taken out of his hands. Doesn't that strike you as just a little convenient?"

It's enough to make Jensen wish he was hearing about lizard people. He stares at Frank in disbelief. "Are you seriously suggesting Sarif's people staged that break in just so they could put me in hospital?"

"I'm not 'suggesting' anything. I'm just drawing your attention to what seems to be an unlikely string of coincidences. They've got your genetic samples either way, but how much more valuable would those insights be, knowing they've also field-tested the source? And while we're talking about your little hospital stay... tell me, Jensen, just how bad was the damage when they brought you in?"

Jensen lets out a short, angry sigh. This is roughly the last subject he wants to go into right now. "You know how much of me is augmented, Frank."

"Interesting that you should put it that way," says Frank, fishing something out of his jacket pocket without missing a beat. "Because some of the files we retrieved before you interrupted me tell a different story." He proffers a small palm pilot device, screen already open to an email client.

Jensen reaches for it grudgingly, as if half expecting it to bite.

"Go on, take a look," Frank encourages him.

The tiny screen shows a series of emails, including a medical report with Jensen's name on it. Frowning, Jensen scrolls through it. It's a lot shorter than he might have expected.

Several minutes have gone by in silence before Jensen remembers where he is, or that he doesn't have any good reason to trust the man who handed this to him. By the time he looks up, his frown has devolved into a glare. "You don't expect me to believe this is genuine, do you?"

"Of course not, Adam. I expect you to go into work tomorrow and make all the inquiries you need to prove that it's genuine. It's your medical report: legally they can't keep it from you. If you're not up to confronting your boss about it, there's at least one very concerned member of his legal team in that email chain who I guarantee will remember those documents in detail. You'll also find some documents on that device reporting that an... unusually large batch of new tissue samples from their unnamed 'Subject X' became available at an interesting point in the timeline of your surgeries." Frank looks far too pleased with himself for someone who just dropped this kind of bombshell. "And then, once you've had appropriate time to... process it all, you can give me a call, and we can see about finding an appropriate venue for our second date."

Jensen's still going back over that bit about Sarif's legal team when he realises he's just, what, been dismissed? "Wait, that's it? You drop this on me and now we're done here?"

Across from him, Frank is draining the last drops of his drink through his straw. "I think I've given you more than enough food for thought for one night. Don't you agree?"

Jensen begs to differ. "And after all that, I'm supposed to just let you stand up and walk out of here?"

"Careful, Jensen." Frank produces his last name like a knife, even as he raises the hand with its unseen device, fingers still closed around it. "I don't need to remind you what could happen if you try to stop me, do I?"

A dangerous part of Jensen wants to tell him to go right ahead: push that button, shut him down, right here, right now. Wipe out that last little bit of doubt in his head that it really did go down the way he remembers. Maybe he could use the reminder that he's meeting with the same bastard who thinks the best way to get Jensen's attention is to make him helpless—to put his hands on Jensen's face and body while he couldn't move a muscle, to make a show of reactivating him, one sense at a time. God, Frank could've done anything to Jensen while he was like that. And he's just supposed to forgive all that, after all the new shit that's just been dropped in his lap? (And that's to say nothing of that part of Jensen that can't quite get over its disappointment that Frank hadn't done anything else to him...)

"Look," Jensen manages, "I don't have the first idea who you are, who you're working for..."

"You don't," agrees Frank. "I think that's for the best for the time being."

"And that's your complete pitch?" Jensen scoffs. "You turn me into a fucking vegetable the moment we met, and now I'm supposed to turn around and be grateful when you come here and tell me, what, that I never even needed all those fucking augmentations at all?"

Frank just looks at him, the faintest glimmer of surprise melting too quickly into a far too knowing look. "You're not used to being made helpless, are you, Jensen?" he asks. "Considering what you've been through, the impulse to lash out is very natural. Borish and predictable, but understandable. But we're not your real enemies here. We're not even the real people who put you in this position. As of now, we're the only ones being honest with you about just what that position really entails. No, you don't have any good reason to trust us yet, that's why I'm giving you the chance to go home and verify that what I've told you so far is true. We can take it from there."

"Jesus," Jensen mutters. "You make for a hell of a first date, Frank."

Frank gives him another of those smug smiles. "Were you hoping I was going to invite you home with me? I'm not the type of girl to put out that easily, Adam."

"Really?" Jensen scoffs, before he can think better of it. "Because you strike me as exactly the type to go straight for the handcuffs and blindfold."

A beat goes by in silence as Jensen watches Frank's eyebrows twitch, and wishes he could take that comment back. He's not sure exactly how many times two people can refer to a meeting as a date before it officially crosses the line into flirting, but he's pretty sure they crossed that line a while ago.

Frank seems to think so too. "What for?" he says, after only slightly too long for comfort. "I think we both know that with you, I wouldn't need those kinds of accessories. If that's what you're into, of course."

"And if I'm not into it?" Jensen bites back.

Unruffled, Frank just shrugs. "You're the one who brought it up. I'm here to recruit you, Adam. Not to make you feel like you don't have the option to say no."

It's a nice sentiment, Jensen supposes. Or it might be, coming from someone else. "Doesn't feel like much of an option right now."

Frank can make even a shrug look aggravatingly smug. "I hate to be the one to tell you, but you're already in this deeper than you realise. A lot deeper. Maybe deep enough that you'd be happier keeping that blindfold on, not looking too hard at the world you've been dropped into. But I wouldn't turn down the one lifeline you've got."

"You might want to work on that metaphor," Jensen grouches. "It's getting a little mixed."

Frank tilts his head. "Last I checked, you were the one dragging this meeting out. For what, the pleasure of my company? And it has been a pleasure, don't worry—this has been a very enlightening chat. But unless you really are about to invite me home, I think we're done here for today. And I don't think either of us are quite ready to go that far."

Shit, thinks Jensen, too grateful for the limited privacy of his dark lenses. He's not actually tempted, is he? It's not like Frank's serious.

"How am I even supposed to contact you?" he asks quickly, mostly for something to say.

Frank nods at the palm pilot in Jensen's hands. "There are login details for your dating profile on that device. You can message me through that service." Leaving his glass on the table, he gets to his feet and makes to leave. At the edge of the booth, however, he hesitates, something speculative in his face that Jensen can't parse. Jensen knows where the exits are, he knows there's no good reason why Frank would need to take a step towards his side of the booth... and then there are fingers on the side of his face, startling in their familiarity, and Frank is tilting his head as Jensen swallows a gasp, delivering a brief, closed-mouth kiss to the side of his mouth.

"See you soon, Adam," Frank whispers to him, while Jensen's head spins. "I can see this is going to be quite the relationship."

Jensen's still sitting there staring stupidly after him long after the front door has swung shut behind Frank's retreating form. He doesn't look back on his way out.

Fuck, thinks Jensen, furious at himself. Seriously, what is wrong with him? It wasn't enough that the experience of being summarily switched-off went and switched something on in the most suggestible parts of his subconscious; did he have to come in here and be so fucking obvious about it? He doesn't like or trust Frank, and here he is, telegraphing the fact that an invitation home after that second 'date' could well be on the cards. He has a mountain of very serious homework to do when he gets home tonight, and it looks like he'll be starting with a long shower and an extended session with his shiny, new, augmented right hand, thinking about a cyber terrorist's fingers on his neck and face, while he can't move a muscle.

Well, in between picturing himself punching the smug smile right off Frank's face, at least. That's also pretty tempting.

You're already in this deeper than you realise, Frank had said. And all Jensen can do is wish that wasn't so very true.