Disclaimer: I own nothing but memories of a house I've never seen and a girl I've never met.

Darkchat loaded.

Rascal has logged in.

Dmart4 has logged in.

Dmart4: we need to meet

Rascal: what's the hurry?

Dmart4: darknet chatter is spiking

Dmart4: getting lots of talk about Blume's magnum opus getting rolled out soon

Dmart4: need to plan some field work

Rascal: urban legend shit

Rascal: bellwether?

Dmart4: yeah

Rascal: weve been through this before it's not possible it's just theoretical

Dmart4: hear me out

Dmart4: Blume's applied sciences division just got bought over wholesale

Rascal: who's the buyer

Dmart4: some virtual reality corporation in montreal

Dmart4: Abstergo Industries

Dmart4: transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of experimental prototypes

Dmart4: and there's one missing file. Blank. Like a black box. Locked behind a million layers of protection even I can't access.

Rascal: you think it's bellwether

Rascal: and you want me to crack the file for you

Dmart4: if this is real it's gonna be big

Rascal: ten k. No budging

Dmart4: done deal

Rascal: where do I find you

Dmart4: don't bother I'll find you. 4.30 pm this thursday. Keep sharp

Rascal: Class ends 3.00 pm. Will be at East Parkside after that

Dmart4: the security on the locked file is bloody ridiculous. Can you get it open?

Rascal: no

Rascal: but i know someone who can

Dmart4 has disconnected

Rascal has disconnected

People on the Darknet call it the Dead Pixel.

An eight hundred square foot blank spot along Route 95 of the Sierra Nevada, completely cut off from any and all electronic means of communication. No cell phone coverage, no fibre optic for a hundred miles. No power lines or network-enabled transformers of any sort, implying either a patch of useless desert, or a fully independent power source. No noise or 'talk' to and from the area, no radar cross-section. All satellite images hacked to show nothing more than a blank spot of desert—hence the name.

There's been speculation on what it is. The most popular theories are either a top-secret Blume research site or an apocalyptic bunker to house American persons-of-value when the nukes go off.

I know the truth, of course. This is my uncle's house. The humble abode of the paranoid recluse, Aiden Pearce. Former vigilante, legally deceased, has a sister and nephew that don't like him.

I park my car. The driveway is a barren dirt stretch occupied by a battered-up Kuruhawa Motorsport 450. The house is a simple one-storey brick building and it looks exactly like how a hermit's house would look—run down, shady, and hundreds of years old. I also know that the proximity sensors and cameras would have picked me up from miles away.

Which is why I'm wearing something familiar. A dark cap, a blue sweater, and a black shirt. They don't stock Raving Rabbid shirts my size anymore, but I'm hoping the message gets through. I've no doubt that at least one automated sniper rifle is trained on me right now—best to be recognisable.

I knock.

He opens.

The Chicago city vigilante himself. His hair's greying, and there're wrinkles on his face. Those wrinkles rise as his face goes blank with surprise.

"Jacks."

I nod.

Wordlessly, he steps aside to let me in. The living room looks like crap. One beaten-up sofa, littered with newspapers and food packets, and a foldable plastic table set in the middle of the hall.

He motions for me to sit. Aiden Pearce, the fearsome vigilante, the Fox, now hobbles rather than walks or runs. He shuffles painfully towards the sofa, gripping the walking stick so hard his knuckles turn white.

It's the price of the life he lived. All the action heroes you see, they've got the benefit of good physio and a stuntman double when things get too tough. The heroism, the firefights, the endless running and jumping and tackling and close-quarters combat—all that has a cost. Your body is never made to take that much punishment, and his was no different. Sixty years old is roughly the time when all your debts come calling for payment. Total hip replacement, osteoarthritis, Type 2 diabetes, anxiety attacks, and the costs just keep rolling up.

I glance over the table. A little mountain of medication sits unsteadily atop it. Old people crap. Vasotec for blood pressure, Riomet for diabetes. About three kinds of painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs. The high-speed chases and kicking bad guys in the balls can't have been good news for his joints. I'm wondering where he gets his medication. The nearest pharmacist is ninety miles out.

"Jacks. How've you been? It's been a while."

I nod. "Alright."

He nods listlessly. "Nicole—she alright?"

"Mum's fine."

"I miss her."

The feeling was mutual. But both of them know by now that a meeting was never going to happen.

I take off my cap, then the vest. The whole outfit makes me want to hurl. Too many damn memories. Of Lena. Of Chicago. Of the shit that I had to call a childhood—running from place to place, cheap motels and late nights running low on gas miles out from the nearest town.

Little boy me blamed Uncle Aiden for all my problems. Adult me knew better, and that's why I hated him more. I saw why he did what he did, and the reasons he had for the choices he made. I saw as he saw. I acquired the skills that he learned, entered the world that he once owned.

The big reason why I bloody absolutely hate Aiden Pearce is that I'm walking in his footsteps.

Aiden sighs. He knows he's not making much headway with small talk. PTSD counselling and behavioural therapy be damned, I never did get my chattiness back. Dr Mendez did her best, but there's only so much you can do before adolescence sets in stone the wounds of childhood. Words never appealed to me the same way as they did to others. I never knew how people could talk as a way of finding pleasure, of letting off steam. Words were just a tool to me—one I used only when I needed to.

By the way, pick up Yolanda Mendez's new book on post-ctOS Chicago. It's actually pretty good. The whole vigilante and DedSec fiasco has given her enough writing material to last a lifetime.

I talk anyway.

"I need help. A system key, scrambled encryption, Omnis-OS. Can you do it?"

He stares at me. Then nods. "Yeah. I guess."

"Needs to be clean. No Dedsec or Tripe-zee nonsense."

"I worked on it alone. One-time use, unique code. Can't be replicated."

I nod. "Good." I hand him a flash drive. He takes it. His fingers are trembling, but he manages to clasp them around the flash drive anyway.

"Huh. Didn't know anybody still used flash drives." He smirks, trying to catch my eye.

"Old school tech. Older is safer." I shrug.

He sighs. For a moment, I forget all about the vigilante. All I see is an old man in a run-down house, surrounded by debris. He's spent. The high-octane days are behind him, and the only enemies he fights every day are ailing health, desert bugs and trip hazards.

"Jacks. Look at me." I do.

He struggles with words for a moment.

"Jacks. Stop this. Stop all this that you're doing." He waves the flash drive. "I know what you're up to. I've been keeping track of you ever since the first report of 'Rascal' came up in LA."

"I thought this place is shut off from the internet." I bristle.

"I read the papers, Jacks."

"Oh."

"I've been in that world, Jacks. I can't let you go in there. You don't belong there. There are things—things that you should never have to experience." He stares straight into my eyes, and I can see an eyelid twitch.

I look at my shoes. Then at him.

I find my voice. And it's bitter and angry.

"Don't you tell me what I should or shouldn't do." I rise to my feet. "I don't do this for you, I don't do this for myself. I do this because thirteen years ago, my sister was killed over petty blackmail secrets between powerful men in a rotten city."

I turn away to face the window. "I do this because in junior high, I used to like a girl called Jenny Weismann, whose father shot her and her mother before putting the last round through his head—all because a fixer evaporated their life savings. I do this because I used to play basketball with a guy called Marcus Timmons, before Omnis Unity profiled the plastic model gun in his apartment and sent him away to prison for twenty years under Section Twelve of the Lefarge Act. I do this because every day under Omnis, I see the city go to shit, while millions of cameras capture its glorious descent into that same shit."

I begin pacing. I've never been this talkative before. Dr Mendez would have been proud.

"It's their ghosts I see, I talk to. Their shadows I chase. Because unlike you, I've got no illusions about fixing a city that's already broken. But I do what I do, because it's who I am—who I've become—who you've made me."

My uncle looks up at me, pained, and I wonder who he sees. Not a do-gooder, that's for sure. Do-gooders volunteer at homeless shelters and give generously to SPCA. Do-gooders live good, clean, healthy lives. Do-gooders are angels on earth, and when they die, people build statues.

Do-gooders don't hunt down the fixer responsible for the Weismann family's murder suicide and hack into his car's central controls to send him off a bridge at seventy miles an hour. Do-gooders don't blackmail city officials with terabytes of planted child pornography in order to get Marcus Timmons' case reopened. Do-gooders don't do what I do—to take a corrupt, rotten game, and play it seamlessly like I was born to embrace the same corruption. When I die, fixers take whatever pieces are left off my work and cannibalise it—and then the game goes on.

So who does he see in me? A vigilante? Himself, or his own creation? The perfect formula for a vigilante's genesis is right there, that's for sure. Tragic childhood. Early abandonment. Lack of social stability in the formative years. A simmering bitterness against the world. A feeling of being cheated by the system. Ah, I'm giving things away. I've read Dr Mendez's book, and part of me is pissed that she knows my uncle better than I ever did.

He sighs, hunching over.

"What about Nicole?"

I don't say anything.

"She—she doesn't know about this, does she? Jacks, studying civil engineering in the day, and breaking the law by night. What about her, then? Who protects her?"

I finger my phone absently. "She's safe. I've covered my tracks well. Not even the most hardcore fixer will be able to link me back to—"

"Jacks, I'm not talking about her safety, though that's important." Aiden raises a hand. "I'm talking about her. What will she say? What will happen to her when she finally finds out what you've become? When she finds out that you've re-entered the life she worked so hard to take you out of?"

He's quiet for a moment. His eyes, I just notice, aren't as bright as they used to be. Lack of spirit, perhaps. Or cataracts.

"Then she'll probably do what she's always done for the past thirteen years," I say, putting my phone back in my pocket. "Blame you."

I'm done talking.

"I need that system key. Get it done, I'll be out of your hair."

Aiden exhales deeply, and nods. He hobbles over to the old laptop. Really old school stuff, all clunky and '80s. Looks like nobody trusts the new stuff anymore.

"It'll take me twenty minutes to configure the network."

"I can wait."

"No, Jacks, I don't think you can. But wait anyway."

I allow myself a wan smile. "Guess I'm just like my uncle."

He gets to work, and so do I. I reach for my phone. There's no signal here, because my uncle isn't stupid. The whole house is designed like a bunker, complete with radar-proof, null-penetration film hidden inside the walls. But I don't mind being disconnected.

I open up the document manager and start working on my homework.

Every minute's precious, right?

Many thanks to glenarvon for leaving the first review! This story's just been a welcome distraction during a particularly busy dry spell. I'm still working on my Frozen fanfic Answering The Blizzard, and though Watch_Dogs and Frozen can't be less alike, elements from one fic tend to find their way into the other. Hope you leave a comment letting me know how you liked this story! And check out my other works if you've got the time.