Once upon a time, it was so easy to spot Sams at a glance. Animal ears and tails, crazy outfits and gear, crazy cars, you could just see them.

  Now, with the sheer amount of reversed Sam tech and Sam run clinics, the only way to pick a Sam out of a crowd easily is to either know every Sam in the city, or see who runs towards an Incursion when the alarms ring.

  -Vanguard Laser Lasso, overheard on a date with Vanguard Red Menace.

  Cody's overlay activates seamlessly as I descend the stairs to the next floor with an antithesis presence, which is on the 53rd floor. It takes everything I have to walk down the stairs. My legs feel like they are both asleep and waking up, my clothes are not dissipating heat fast enough and are rubbing me the wrong way. The echo of my steps ring in my ears.

  By the time I am at the stairway door, I am agitated, bordering on enraged as I use my Assault Swarm to rip the door to pieces. There are scattered groups of Threes, in clumps of fours to twelve, scavenging through residences and the food courts to the right of me. I send my swarms in a staggered pattern, two one hundred feet from me, one fifty, the other maintains its orbit around me seven feet from me. The Builder and Collection swarms I send above me to act as rudimentary surveillance. The only useful data they can give me is visual, but that is enough for me to focus on so I'm not feeling all of my body.

  Walking towards the food courts, the first group of Model Threes doesn't even realize they are in danger until the swarm is already consuming them. Three seconds after, they are nothing more than piles of gore and points for me. I continue to walk towards the food court, melting a couple groups of Threes and Fours without pausing, manipulating the swarms to always stay between me and them, never letting them within fifty feet of me, not that they get that close.

  Just before I invade the food court, though the Swarm I see two new models. Sitting in front of one of the sky bridges that connect the various building to each other, a much needed requirement here in this hellscape of a megacity, is a huge worm-like thing covered in tiny hairs with a massive pile of food stuffs, plants, and I see a few human bodies under it all. Interestingly enough, the plant that I recognized as a Model Eight is not protruding from the bridge, but rather from the wall of the mega building.

  The other thing I see is a hulking mass of bark and quills patrolling the court, a Model Five. Well, a variant of one. It's thinner than the Model Five I remember seeing in the RTS game, it's quills thinner as well, but also longer. The color is off as well, being a deep sickly green instead of the normal bone white.

  Now, I try to be a realist when dealing with the threats of the corporate space. Many PMCs have standardized gear within their company, so while it may take some time, you can figure out how strong their firepower is, how thick their armor, what hidden cards they may have in terms of tech or mobile armors. None of them are threats that you can simply look at and get an understanding of how dangerous they really are.

  That said, video game logic tends to work very well for the antithesis. That Model Five is thinner, but not emaciated, thus is probably weaker in armor and built for stealth. The quills are green, not white, so they are probably poisonous. Not great, but something I can work around.

  I pull in my swarms to a twenty foot distance. I send the Collection swarm forward and up, keeping them at ceiling height. I count thirty two Model Threes, six Model Fours, and one Five and Eight. The court itself is one hundred and seventy five feet in diameter, not including the Kitchens. A majority of the Threes are still rummaging in the pantry areas, and the Fours are placed near the outside edge of the court, away from the Eight. The Five is meandering in a clockwise pattern, currently closing in on the edge I am at.

  I take a deep breath and force one of the Assault swarms into a drill formation, and they condense into three foot long needles with drill-like wedges on their surface. They begin to rotate rapidly as I approach the food court, and once I get within ten feet of the court, I command two of the drills to launch themselves at the Five, and one to launch itself towards the nearest Four. Now, the drills are not very fast, just a bit faster than if I were running at full spring. But that's still Five miles per hour. And five pounds of anything spinning like a drill going that fast has quite a bit of kinetic energy behind it, so when the two drills slam into the Model Five, I can hear its bark-like armor splinter as they pierce deep into its body, ripping it apart.

  Then, before it has the chance to fling a single quill, the Assault Swarm begins blending it from the inside. It begins to jerk about, swaying on its trunk like feet, green blood and mashed guts pouring from the two holes in its Flank before the nanites burst forth like blades through its armor, cutting it to ribbons. The Four that is hit fairs no better, though it does go down much faster.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The antithesis reacts rapidly. The Fours begin to uproot themselves from their sentry position, while the Threes make a mad dash towards me. But to do so, they need to pass the corpse of the Model Five, which has most of a swarm inside it.

  Noticing that there are no antithesis behind me, I condense another swarm into drills and launch them at the remaining Fours and push all three swarms to intercept the Threes. The Fours are penetrated with ease, being blended like one of those synth kale smoothies I have seen some corpos drink. The Threes fall well before they reach forty feet from me, disintegrating into chunks and goo.

  The Eight doesn't notice. It just keeps eating the pile in front of it. I don't let it continue as I sick three of my swarms onto it.

  As I take a deep breath, Synaptic chimes in.

  You now have seven hundred and sixty five points! That is enough to purchase all of the Class I Catalogs as well as the items needed for your full body upgrade! Please note that, as you plan to undergo everything at once, there are two options available to you. You can either spend all your points in order to begin the procedure, which will inject you with numerous nanites that will, over the course of three days, fully replace everything with new Bionics. Of course, if that feels like that will take too long, you can instead opt to spend an additional two hundred points for a more intense instant procedure that will last for thirty minutes! Please note that if you choose the second option, pain blockers will be in effect, but all that will do will block the pain. You will not be able to be unconscious, you will not be able to move or speak, and you will feel everything else other than pain.

  I stop dead in my tracks. A three day wait while this feeling of wrongness pervades within my own body, or thirty minutes of what I can only imagine as torture beyond anything I can imagine while being unable to do anything about it. But be rid of this feeling and be in the best possible condition I can be.

  The answer was chosen before the question was asked, honestly. I still needed to hunt for a few more points to get armor and weapon catalogs, plus said armor and weapons. I needed to be rid of this hyper sensitivity and extreme dullness as soon as possible. I would go crazy if I just tried to endure it.

  “We continue the hunt.” I said. I assume Synaptic did not let the others know of my new options, as none of them chimed in with their opinion.

  There were no more antithesis on this floor, at least per Cody's overlay, meaning I had to descend another level or two. But before that, I decided to investigate the hole that the Model Eight was previously blocking with its girth.

  It was pitch black a few feet down, so the Collector Swarm I sent down was unable to provide me any visual data. It told me what materials were around it that it could harvest, concrete, steel, copper and fiber optic cables. I recalled the swarm before it got too deep.

  “Synaptic, you mentioned one of the types of swarms I could purchase was a Scout swarm. What kind of data would I receive from it?”

  Excellent question, Victor! The Class I Scout Swarm comes with a visual, audio, and thermal sensor suite at base, with olfactory, chemical analysts, and EMS upgrades available. The visual spectrum can detect from Gamma rays to Radio waves with built in night vision and able to penetrate particulate density of one gram per centimeter cubed up to one hundred feet. Audio can detect a minimum of five hertz from up to five miles away, or up to one hundred decibels from up to fifty miles away through many different objects and even determine where and how far the sound is. Thermal sensors are sensitive enough to discern up to the hundredth degree! All this for only seventy points! Her voice was soft, almost seductive in her sales pitch.

  “That is unimaginably more powerful than anything I have ever used or have heard of.” I say in awe. ”Please purchase one Scout swarm.”

  Understood!

  Purchased Class I Scout Swarm

  Points reduced to 695

  On the ground was a new box, and opening it was a new cube! This one was a dull orange and slightly smaller than the Assault Swarm in its standby mode.

  Connecting to it, the swarm diffused to fill my entire control radius of two hundred feet, and I was instantly inundated with a barge of new senses. Everything was crisper through the Swarm. Each and every spectrum of light available to me at once, or something I could switch between with a thought. Sounds were both muted but better defined, detectable without being overwhelming. I could hear the building shift in the wind, the vents that were in desperate need for lubricant creaking, the sounds of antithesis moving on in the floor below me. Thermals showed the root structure spanning the building, up the walls, through the floors, following along HVAC systems, water pipes, and electrical junctions.

  In horror, I realized the truth. The building was more plant than concrete. If I attempted to purge the hive, the whole building would come crashing down with it.

  “Oh Sands, what the fuck do I do now?”

  “What's up, Vic? What does your new swarm see?” Cody asks in a joking wizardry voice.

  I stay silent for two seconds, debating the pros and cons of telling them now. I decided to hold off.

  “Will tell you once my body upgrade is done. I'm going to go hunting on the next two available floors in order to get everything we need at once.” I finally responded.

  “Okay, Victor. Take your time,” Buddy says in his deep but gentle tone.

  I take a deep breath, now able to ignore the wrongness in my chest by focusing on the Scout Swarm, not really sure if I want to this time.