Digital Equipment Corporation

Dec awoke abruptly, as he usually did, sitting up in bed straight and fast. Some parts of his training never went away. He reached over and decocked the pistol he slept with, carefully thumbing the hammer to ride it down slowly and carefully. Once he was awake, that was it, there was no alarm-slapping or turning to the cold side of the pillow and grabbing a few extra minutes. Rise and shine. He reached over to his dump plate on a bedside table, placed his gun there and traded it for his Overwatch ring. It didn’t have an official name, since he didn’t have an official title. Dec and his team were essentially a black op. They didn’t even show up on the Splicer budget. Some clever nerd in accounting spread their budget out across office supplies and a hundred other mundane things, paid to all kinds of fake shell companies, eventually landing in Dec’s team’s phony consulting firm. The money was good but the action was lacking, most of the time. There’s that old question, who watches the watchers?

That’s where Dec and his team came in. They watched the watchers. Good thing too, because on more than one occasion, someone at Splicer would go off on a tangent, looking too closely at something or someone. For an organization that sells digital and physical defense, they needed rock solid people behind the scenes. That was true for the most part but again, once in a while a curious cat stumbled across something they shouldn’t. They would also abuse their powers of surveillance, which was a recurring theme so it must have been tempting for a lot of analysts. One time it was harmless. An ASE started collecting footage of some random woman, and as time went by, he studied the footage so carefully, he crafted a plan to date the woman. He already knew her habits, what she liked to eat, her routine, at least everything you could know as a sort of private investigator. Dec’s team was assigned to the ASE in question to make sure he didn’t take it too far. Physical contact was a big no no. After all, the Splicer Organization was basically an urban myth to most people. By the time the ASE made it to the woman, it would be too late, so they watched and waited, but more importantly, they warned him first.

Warnings are very effective, especially when you know more than the target; living and working in a shadow layer of the company had its advantages. The ASE decided to make his move on a Friday night, with an attempt to bump into the woman at the grocery store. As he crossed the threshold into the store, Dec and Sharp took one arm each, and led the ASE to an unpopular corner of the store. Five minutes later, the ASE got the picture and decided to leave. Apparently, he was so shaken up by the experience, he didn’t return to the office for a week, and even then, he tried to turn in his resignation letter. His manager ripped it up and pointed at his desk without saying a word. The ASE didn’t put up a fight. The message was delivered and received and he was welcome to continue working, minus that one thing.

“Dec, get out of your head”, he thought to himself. There were other things to do besides reminisce about his job, and he refused to let his mind wander too far. He had some rough years in the war, saw a lot of damage first-hand and among his group. The biggest problem with modern medicine and technology was just how much damage it could repair, and how quickly. He saw men missing a leg one day and back in action a week later on some custom-made carbon fiber replacement. In the old days, you were out of action and sent back home. Now, the battlefield could become home, with short stints in field hospitals just behind the lines to get stapled back together and doped up to your eyeballs. This led to a whole new form of PTSD, but they called it Extended Battlefield Trauma, because it dug deeper due to all the nonstop stress. They were still ironing out therapies to treat a lot of the vets, but most vets chose to deal with it the way generations before them had dealt with it. A group of friendly vets and plenty of liquor, on a regular basis. None of them were time bombs, but many of them had unimaginably deep mental wounds. From time to time, the Moderns would give them some new experimental brain drug designed to help rewire your brain and return you to “normal”, but at best, these new drugs just helped them cope and get by day to day. Life was still damaged.

“No seriously, GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD”, Dec muttered under his breath. Gotta go somewhere, gotta do something besides think. He cracked open his remote terminal and checked for messages. There was only one, and the title alone riled up Dec. It read, “Ghostbusters Needed Immediately”. He knew what came next. Either Res or someone on her team hadn’t gotten the message to stop digging into whatever this ghost footage was. Why was this such a problem? He was sure that Res got the message and didn’t need a reminder. He looked over her profile, and she seemed very risk-averse, preferring not to poke any bears or stir up any trouble. Even her teammate Sheepdog didn’t seem like much of a threat, but Dec couldn’t exactly apply more pressure, or these bloodhounds would just be convinced they were following the scent and never give it a rest. Dec decided to bump into Res again at the Meatspace bar where he would pass her some sort of secret note, leading to another face-to-face meeting. Since he was convinced that Res wasn’t pursuing the ghost anymore, she would have to be persuaded to get Sheepdog to drop the bone, if he was the one still hot on whatever this trail was. However, before any action was taken, Dec would have to run the idea up the flagpole and see what his Team Lead had to say about it. He already had contact with Res and he didn’t want to run her off. So he requested a meeting with his lead, and began plotting his next move.