Neon Rush {M/M} ❀

Ch.19.1 A Quiet Fault Line Ready to Quake

Damo claps her hands, "Isn't it perfect? I mean, I do have a machine brain so it was easy to analyse every Bionic Capital employee's face in their public database to find the best matches, but finding someone the same height as Gray?"

"Fuck you."

"It's as if they were designed to have their identities stolen."

Zef is only just catching up. He feels stupid trying to follow and process the implications of this master plan. Meanwhile, Gray and Damo are like two tumbleweeds caught in the tangled theatre of one another's ideas.

"My voice," says Gray.

"I've got an implant that can fix that if we get a good sample."

"They ain't American, why would they be here?"

"Scheduled for an international meeting at Neorleans HQ in about a week," Damo fires back.

"And how do we fool any of the biometric scans and security we have to go through? You can beat our faces to look like 'em, but we don't have their implants."

"Would you chill? Put your wadded panties in the wash and watch the spin cycle for a calming second? I've got all that figured out."

Zef finally finds his voice. "You want us to invade HQ dressed in drag, disguised as two international caps, in one week? Isn't that—"

"Batshit," Gray supplies.

"One flew over the cuckoo's nest?" Damo offers.

Zef says, "Suicidal."

"It's not without its risks," Damo admits. "But insofar as mission 'Destroy Rylan' is concerned, there's no risk-free option. This may be the convoluted approach, but it's better than punching her in the face."

"You don't gotta come." Gray, barely having eaten his pancakes, chews a toothpick contemplatively. "Better you don't."

Zef bristles. They've done this song and dance before. Both of them trying to keep the other out of danger in an argument that never amounts to more than posturing and slapping at each other like two snot-nosed middle schoolers. He's not sure about the plan, but he's sure he won't leave Gray to take it on alone.

"Screw that. Tell me how we're stealing some identities."

Damo gives them the rundown, complete with a slideshow featuring memes from a century ago. Every piece of the plan, laid out in extravagant detail only a machine mind could come up with so quickly.

Phase One: steal the identities of two Bionic Capital executives and attend an international conference in their stead.

Phase Two: infiltrate HQ under the false identities, destroy the data fort, retrieve Project Serenity, then cover their tracks by making it look like a CyberSuite hack.

Phase Three: attend a virtual masquerade where all the hotshot caps will be in attendance, and assassinate Rylan before she finds out her data fort's been fried.

Zef doesn't voice his opposition to the last, but it scrapes under the surface between them. A quiet faultline ready to quake.

~ * * * ~

Phase one of the heist takes them into a glittering shard of a hotel in the neon district of Neorleans on a hot, Friday afternoon. The lobby revolves around a six-story tiered fountain, the bottom filled with obsolete coins of copper and silver flashing like fish scales.

Zef and Gray's marks arrived early, clearly keen to treat the weekend before their conference as a holiday on the company's dime. Here, they'll eat, sleep and decompress from the jetlag of their cross-Atlantic flights.