Aaron was getting worried. 'Actual EVE' – he had started thinking of her as that, to differentiate from his own 'Virtual 3V3' had disappeared from the scans on schedule for the 30 minute shower period, but this time she failed to return. With a mix of curiosity and alarm, he searched the logs of the holding facility referred to as 'the basement' and often pronounced 'debasement' by The Enterprise – the rogue black ops organization, ...and his ex-employer.

They didn't see it that way when he unilaterally severed his contract. Had they realized how good he really was, they never would have hired him. They probably would have killed him so that no one could hire him.

He designed all their systems of surveillance and control. He knew better than anyone how powerful they were, and when he saw how his tools were being used – most sane people would say abused – he walked away and went underground.

Of course it wasn't as simple as it sounds, and he never sought revenge. No point in aggravating such a powerful enemy. His intention was merely to rebalance the ecosystem.

It was only when they went after him that it became personal, and this hostage business took it to a whole new level.

He protected himself and those close to him skillfully and effectively. He never thought to protect the Lady 3V3 because she never actually existed anyway. She was untouchable.

He never dreamed that they would mistake an innocent stranger and use her as a pawn. Or deliberately use an innocent stranger as a pawn. They were that evil but they weren't that creative. He was nearly certain that they believed that this actually was his partner, and therefore there was nothing they wouldn't do to her to get to him.

Since he singlehandedly coded all their ops systems, getting back in was not an issue. He had never been out.

The times they brought teams of contractors in to replace pieces of his code, the system spiraled into cascade failures. No doubt they told themselves that he had trip-wired the system to fail at interference. In truth, his code was just so lean and delicately balanced, that when a chunk of it was replaced by clumsy bloated contractor code, the fragile dependencies of his macrosystem quickly collapsed and collateral failures spread like shockwaves.

They had no choice but to keep his original system intact until they came up with a complete rewrite of the entire system, which he reckoned would take decades, years if they got AI assistance, and require hardware many orders of magnitude beyond their already vast – yet insanely efficient and codependent massively parallel network mesh. He never messed with their net. He was loath to deface his own work, Anyway, he didn't want to harm it. He just wanted to continue to use it. And since he understood its capabilities far better than those who hired him to build it, it was always far more useful to him than to the enemies who actually built it.

There was no clue in the system logs to explain the prolonged disappearance of Actual Eve. Scanning for anomalies, he did turn up requisitions for an atypical amount of med supplies including a lot of blood. Clearly the emergency surgery was in use, but unless there was a firefight and heavy casualties, that would never register an anomaly on a logscan. He searched for any instance of casualties and only came across one line. Prisoner remanded medsurg post incident.

The prisoner had to be Eve. But what incident? There were a lot of surgical supplies used, and the power monitors showed the surgery in use for over 8 hours. Personnel lists showed 18 med tech and related outside staff temporarily on premises. Something had happened. But until she got back on the grid – or god-forbid on the morgue log, he could only speculate.

I don't know how long I struggled to wake up, it seemed like a long time I tried to organize my thoughts. Who was I? Where was I? What was going on? Finally, slowly, things began to come into focus. And I instantly regretted my returning awareness. I tried to howl from the pain but all that came out was a hoarse rasp. I tried to writhe from the agony, but I felt as if I had been sewn down.

“Hey, she's coming to.” said a voice from somewhere.

“Isn't it too early?” said another.

“Fuck it. What's she gonna do about it?” said someone. A handful of voices laughed.

True. What could I do about it? I closed my eyes and tried to die.

Eventually I managed to at least pass out from the pain.

When the group escorting ...no, this time they were literally dragging Eve to her pen appeared on survnet, the motion detector bots woke Aaron immediately.

He quickly wondered why the Motion monitor triggered but the recog bot didn't.

Then he saw her.

She lay in the corner of her pen, propped like a ragdoll placed to face the camera.

The slits in her swollen face completely obscured her eyes, her face was so bruised and bloated he couldn't tell if she was conscious. Looking at her mangled bandaged body, he prayed that she wasn't.

What the hell had happened? What had they done to her?

Had she tried suicide? If they wanted her dead, she would be dead. They must have wanted her alive, but she had other plans.

She looked like she had been hit by a bus. She was bandaged like a mummy from her neck to her knees. The way her limbs splayed, he wondered if they were all broken. One thing was certain, none of them had been set. It was as if they had completely removed the bones from her limbs, leaving her limp as a ragdoll. Again, he would not put that past them, but he didn't really think they had, simply because they weren't that creative.

His heart ached for this poor girl. Still, there was nothing he could do at the moment, so he increased the sensitivity on the motion alarm, and returned to bed and a nightmare wracked sleep.

“You look like shit” Lynch laughed as he stuck his head into my tiny cell. I tried to turn my head toward him and failed. Any movement was excruciating. It even hurt to blink. Finally, I was able to muster the energy to get out one, whispered syllable,

“why?”

“....because we can.” the bastard laughed. “Get up, bitch.”

I still didn't move. I couldn't.

“I said get UP!” he motioned to the guards who stood to each side of me as I remained curled in the corner. “Kidneys and thighs only. Don't want to damage our fine work.” Then they began their kicks interlaced with screams of “UP!”

After about 5 minutes of this, they either realized this was not working or they just got bored. One of them reached down and grabbing a large rope of my hair, yanked me off the ground. As soon as he let go, I collapsed onto his feet.

“Oh Christ. This is pointless” he muttered as he again grabbed my hair and dragged my limp body from my cell.

Aaron watched this all as he fed the live videostream out to the others in the hangout.

Their gasps and sobs only reminded him how hard he himself had become in dealing with these guys. He was neither surprised or appalled. He had come to expect exactly this sort of thing from his old employers.

Once she disappeared off camera, dragged to the unmonitored interrogation wing, he addressed his colleagues.

“It's not clear that she is in any shape to travel.”

Many nods as people fought to regain control of their emotions.

“But it is clear that she can not stay any longer where she is. So we must act soon. Acting puts her at risk, but not acting guarantees that her fate will be worse.”

And with that, the plan was hatched.