Biotechnica Research Facility - Subsection Gamma
North Oak, Night City
January 15th, 2077 - 03:17
The needle went in clean.Desmond Hassan didn't scream—he'd learned months ago that screaming only made them increase the dosage. Instead, he bit down on the rubber guard they'd strapped across his mouth and tried to focus on anything other than the cold fire spreading through his cerebral cortex as the Animus 5.0 booted up.
"Neural pathways stabilizing," Dr. Reyes announced, her voice clinically detached as she monitored the holographic displays floating above Desmond's restraint chair. "Initiating memory sequence. Subject designation DH-Seven, trial run eighty-three. Ancestor: Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, genetic template Alpha."
No. Not again. Not him—
The laboratory dissolved.Desmond fell through centuries like a stone through water, his consciousness fragmenting as the Animus tore open genetic memories that had lain dormant in his DNA for nearly a thousand years. The restraint chair became sand-warm stone beneath his back. The fluorescent lights became the merciless Syrian sun. Dr. Reyes's sterile white coat became the flowing robes of Masyaf's fortress walls.
And Desmond Hassan—born 2050, twenty-seven years old, corporate lab rat and unwilling participant in Biotechnica's consciousness extraction program—ceased to exist.
Altaïr stood on the ramparts of Masyaf, surveying the valley below with eyes that had witnessed the fall of kingdoms. The year was 1191, and the Third Crusade raged across the Holy Land like a fever. But here, in this mountain fortress, the Assassin Brotherhood maintained its vigilance against a different enemy—the Templar Order, whose quest for control threatened the very concept of free will.
"Safety and peace, Altaïr," said a voice behind him.
He turned. Malik Al-Sayf stood there, his left arm ending in a stump—a wound Altaïr's arrogance had caused, back when pride had ruled his heart more than wisdom.
"Safety and peace, brother," Altaïr replied, the Arabic flowing from his tongue as naturally as breathing. "You bring news from Al Mualim?"
"The Mentor requests your presence. Another target has been identified."
The memory blurred, fast-forwarding through moments Desmond's genetic code deemed less significant. Training in the courtyard. A mission briefing. The weight of a hidden blade against his forearm—no, not his forearm, Altaïr's forearm, but where did one end and the other begin?
Damascus materialized around them. The souk's chaos—merchants hawking spices and silk, beggars crying for alms, guards patrolling with hands on sword hilts. Altaïr moved through the crowd like smoke, every gesture calculated, every footfall silent. His target: a Templar merchant who trafficked in artifacts of Those Who Came Before, the Isu precursors whose technology still haunted the world's hidden corners.
The kill was swift. Efficient. The hidden blade punched through the merchant's ribs and into his heart before the man even registered danger. As the target fell, gasping his final breaths, Altaïr cradled him—an act of mercy, or perhaps ritual—and listened to the dying confession.
"You... you think you fight for freedom..." Blood bubbled from the merchant's lips. "But you are slaves to your own philosophy... The Templar path offers true peace... Order from chaos..."
"Peace earned through the death of free will is no peace at all," Altaïr replied quietly.
The merchant's eyes glazed over. The Animus marked this moment—GENETIC MEMORY SEQUENCE ALPHA-83 COMPLETE—and began its brutal extraction process.
Desmond screamed.
The ancient world shattered like glass. He was yanked backward through time, his consciousness fragmenting across centuries—
—but the transition wasn't clean.
Something was wrong.
Usually the Animus released its subjects gradually, easing them back into their own identity. But this time, Altaïr's memories clung to him like oil, refusing to separate. Desmond could still feel the hidden blade's weight, still taste Damascus dust, still hear the merchant's dying words echoing in both Arabic and English—
"Subject experiencing cognitive bleed," Dr. Reyes's voice cut through the chaos. "Increase the separation protocol—"
"Do not listen to her false wisdom, brother," Altaïr's voice whispered in the back of Desmond's mind. "She seeks to chain your thoughts as the Templars sought to chain humanity."
That's not real. That's just residual memory bleed. Altaïr died eight hundred years ago—
"Death is not the end for those whose deeds echo through bloodlines."
"Neural integration at forty-two percent," Dr. Reyes continued, her tone shifting from clinical to concerned. "That's... that shouldn't be possible. He's not just remembering, he's integrating—"
Desmond's eyes snapped open.
The laboratory came back into focus—but wrong, all wrong. His vision overlaid the sterile facility with phantom images of ancient stone walls. Dr. Reyes's face flickered between modern human and something older, something that triggered instinctive recognition in the genetic memory centers of his brain. Templar.
"Subject is seizing—get the neuroinhibitors—"
Desmond's body moved without conscious thought. Muscle memory that wasn't his—wasn't it? Whose hands were these, really?—snapped the leather restraints with a twist and pull Altaïr had perfected in another lifetime. The rubber mouth guard flew across the room.
He was on his feet before Dr. Reyes could react.
"Subject DH-Seven, stand down!" She reached for the emergency alarm—
—but Desmond's hand was already at her throat, fingers positioned with lethal precision across the carotid artery. Not squeezing. Just... holding. The gesture of a man who had killed hundreds and knew exactly how much pressure was needed to render someone unconscious versus how much would end a life.
"My name," Desmond heard himself say in a voice that was simultaneously his and not-his, "is Desmond Hassan. Not a subject. Not a designation. And I'm leaving."
Dr. Reyes's eyes were wide with fear, but also... fascination? "The bleeding effect... it's unprecedented at this level. Your ancestor's combat abilities, his tactical thinking—you've absorbed them completely. Do you understand what this means? We could revolutionize consciousness transfer, personality imprinting—"
"You could turn people into programmable weapons." Desmond's grip tightened slightly. "I've lived Altaïr's memories. I know what the Templars did with their Apple of Eden, how they tried to enslave humanity's will. You think slapping a Biotechnica logo on the same philosophy makes it different?"
"The Templars were—" Dr. Reyes choked as Desmond adjusted his grip. "—that's conspiracy theory nonsense. We're conducting legitimate genetic research—"
"Then why are half your funding reports flagged with Abstergo Entertainment subsidiaries?" Desmond's other hand snatched the keycard from her lab coat pocket—another movement flowing from muscle memory he'd never personally trained. "I've had six months strapped to that chair. You think I didn't pay attention during the few moments of lucidity between sessions?"
He released her, shoving her back against the monitoring equipment. Dr. Reyes stumbled but didn't fall, her hand going to her bruised throat.
"You won't get out of this facility," she wheezed. "Militech Sandevistan guards at every checkpoint, biometric locks on all exits, and even if you somehow reach the street, you're tagged. Subdermal tracker, remember? We can follow you anywhere in Night City."
Desmond was already moving toward the door, his stolen keycard held ready. "Then I guess I'll need to find someone who can remove it."
The door hissed open. He stepped through—
—and immediately dove left as a Militech security guard opened fire with a Kang Tao smart-pistol. Bullets carved the air where Desmond's head had been a microsecond earlier, the weapon's targeting system trying to compensate for movements that Altaïr's eight-hundred-year-old combat instincts predicted before the AI could calculate firing solutions.
This is insane. I'm not a fighter. I'm a genetics researcher they kidnapped off the street six months ago—
But his body disagreed. It flowed through the corridor like water, each step calculated, every movement economical. The guard was well-trained, chrome'd up with military-grade reflex boosters—but he was fighting doctrine and training.
Desmond was fighting with eight centuries of accumulated murder-knowledge burned into his genetic code.
The hidden blade—no, he didn't have a hidden blade, that was Altaïr's weapon—but his hand moved as if he did, fingers positioned for the strike, and when he reached the guard, pure momentum became the weapon. An open-palm strike to the solar plexus. A knee to the liver. A chokehold that cut blood flow to the brain without collapsing the windpipe.The guard dropped, unconscious before he hit the polished floor.
"Alarms! Subsection Gamma, we have a breach—"
Red emergency lights strobed to life. Klaxons wailed. Desmond grabbed the fallen guard's pistol—Kang Tao A-22B Chao, fifteen-round magazine, smart-link targeting incompatible with non-Militech cyberware—and his genetic memories provided tactical analysis without conscious thought.
Three guards converging from the north corridor. Two more sealing the east exit. Vik's security footage showed a maintenance shaft in the southwest corner—accessible with Level 3 clearance, which Dr. Reyes's card should provide—
Wait.
How did I know that? I've never seen the facility's full layout. I've been restrained in that chair for six months straight.
But Altaïr's memories whispered the answer: You observed. Every guard rotation, every technician's movement, every security protocol mentioned in your presence. An Assassin's greatest weapon is information, and a prisoner's only power is attention.
Desmond ran.
The facility blurred past—corridors that seemed to twist and overlap with ancient strongholds, fluorescent lights that flickered between electric and torchlight. His brain was breaking, he realized distantly. The bleeding effect was supposed to fade after Animus sessions ended, but Dr. Reyes had pushed too hard, extracted too much, and now Altaïr's consciousness had rooted itself in Desmond's neural architecture like a virus.
I am not a virus, Altaïr's voice murmured. I am your blood. Your heritage. The proof that those who fight for freedom never truly die.
You're a ghost. A memory. You're not REAL—
A door exploded inward. A Militech heavy stepped through, chromed to the gills with subdermal armor and a Tsunami Nekomata sniper rifle reconfigured for close quarters. The kind of opponent that should have turned Desmond into a red smear.
But Altaïr had fought Templar knights in full armor. Had assassinated warlords surrounded by elite bodyguards. Had survived the treachery of his own mentor and rebuilt the Brotherhood from ashes.
Desmond's borrowed instincts saw the weakness: the Militech chrome was state-of-the-art, but the cyborg relied on targeting software that assumed rational enemy behavior. Linear movement. Predictable cover usage. Standard engagement protocols.
Altaïr knew nothing of protocols. He knew only the philosophy of the Brotherhood: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Desmond moved like a ghost given flesh. He was inside the Militech heavy's guard before the targeting computer could acquire, using the cyborg's own body as a shield against the other guards' fire. The Kang Tao pistol went into the exposed nerve cluster behind the cyborg's left knee—the one place Militech's budget-minded engineers always skimped on armor coverage.
The heavy dropped, servos screaming. Desmond rolled forward, came up running, Dr. Reyes's keycard flashing against the maintenance shaft's biometric lock—
—ACCESS GRANTED—
—and he was through, yanking the hatch shut behind him as bullets sparked off reinforced steel. The lock engaged with a heavy thunk. Thirty seconds until they overrode it, maybe less.
Desmond scrambled down the maintenance shaft, his hands and feet finding purchase on rungs that seemed to exist in two time periods simultaneously—a modern access tunnel and an ancient escape route from Masyaf. His vision swam. His head felt like someone was driving railroad spikes through his temples.
Can't stop. Keep moving. Just like Syria. Just like every other time the Templars were at your heels—
This ISN'T Syria. This is Night City, 2077, and I'm not a twelfth-century Assassin, I'm a twenty-seven-year-old man whose brain is literally dissolving from genetic memory bleed—
The shaft ended in a sub-basement. Desmond kicked open the maintenance hatch and fell more than climbed out, his coordination finally failing as the Animus chemicals warred with adrenaline in his bloodstream. He landed hard on concrete, gasping.
The sub-basement was old infrastructure—pre-Collapse construction, probably dating back to when Night City was still just an ambitious architect's dream. Water dripped from corroded pipes. Graffiti covered the walls: gang tags, political slogans, a faded poster advertising Militech's "Combat Implants for the Modern Warrior."
And standing in the shadows, backlit by emergency lighting, was a figure in a black hoodie with neon-blue circuit patterns traced across the fabric.
"Desmond Hassan?" the figure asked. Male voice, young—mid-thirties maybe. "Born March 13th, 2050. Kidnapped from your apartment in Heywood six months ago by a Biotechnica black ops team operating under the cover designation 'Project Animus.' Am I close?"
Desmond's hand tightened on the Kang Tao pistol. "Who are you?"
"Name's Aiden. Just Aiden ." The figure stepped forward, hands visible and empty. "And before you shoot me, you should know: I've been tracking Biotechnica's off-books research programs for eight months. When I realized they were experimenting with genetic memory extraction—basically weaponizing people's ancestral consciousness—I figured whoever they grabbed might want a way out."
"Why do you care?" Desmond kept the pistol trained on the stranger's center mass. Altaïr's paranoia—his paranoia? Where did one end and the other begin?—screamed that this was a trap.
"Because I've seen what happens when corporations get their hands on consciousness manipulation technology." Aiden's voice was flat, emotionless. "I've watched them turn people into programmable assets. I'm part of a network—DedSec—that fights that kind of thing. And right now, you're about thirty seconds away from having a Militech kill-squad kicking down that maintenance hatch. So: you want to keep running solo, or you want a network that can actually keep you hidden?"
Desmond's vision flickered. For a moment, Aiden's face overlapped with someone else's—a contact from Altaïr's memories, another fighter against Templar control, another soul who'd chosen the harder path because it was the right path.
Above them, heavy footsteps echoed through the shaft.
"Tick-tock," Aiden said quietly.
Desmond made the decision Altaïr would have made: trust the enemy of your enemy until you know which enemies are worse.
"Get me out of here."
Aiden's lips quirked in what might have been a smile. "Welcome to the Resistance. Now move—I've got a van in the north parking structure, but we need to disable your tracker first or this whole escape is pointless."
They ran.
Behind them, Militech breached the maintenance hatch. Ahead, Night City's neon labyrinth waited to swallow them both. And in Desmond's fractured mind, eight centuries of Assassins whispered their approval while his own consciousness screamed for mercy from the genetic invasion it could no longer resist.
The bleeding effect was supposed to fade.
It wasn't fading.
And somewhere in the corporate towers overhead, in databases Desmond hadn't known existed, his genetic profile was being flagged. Tagged. Categorized as both an asset and a threat by systems that spanned multiple corporations, multiple secret societies, multiple layers of conspiracy that made Biotechnica's Animus program look like a footnote.
The hunt was only beginning.