Lohan stood motionless in the center of the penthouse, ignoring the sound of the pool water overflowing, mingling with the blood of the dead guards on the apartment’s marble floor.
In his left hand, he held a small, translucent metal object, about the size of a fingernail: the holographic interface chip he had just ripped from Oscar’s eye.
The device was still warm, pulsing slightly with a residual charge of energy and stained with the man’s blood, who was now moaning pitifully in the corner of the pool.Lohan looked at the object and then at his cell phone, which was tucked into the pocket of his black overcoat.
His phone was an old model, with a cracked screen and processing power that Lohan now considered archaic. For someone who operated with a Parallel Processing Core capable of splitting consciousness into independent streams, using this old phone was becoming an increasingly heavy burden with every passing moment.
"To be honest... with a hologram like that in the real world, combined with my enhanced mental capacity and speed of thought, it’ll be like giving wings to a tiger." Lohan muttered thoughtfully, increasingly tempted to do just that.
The idea of implanting the chip in his own eye began to gain traction.
An ocular hologram would allow him to access data, maps, and messages in real time, superimposed over his vision, without having to look away during combat or be noticed in public.
This was the standard tool of the Upper Zone elite, like all the college students he saw constantly using sophisticated ocular interfaces.
However, there was a problem.
Lohan brought the chip closer, using Monocular Telescopic Vision to analyze the neural connection microcircuits. The device was caked in Oscar’s blood; as an addict of stimulants and hard drugs like Sleep Mist, he was a veritable soup of diseases that Lohan didn’t want to deal with.
"First, the cleaning..." Lohan thought.
He didn’t use a cloth or alcohol. Instead, he concentrated his biomass in the palm of his left hand, activating the Digestive Filter and Efficient Digestion in an extremely localized manner within the pores of his skin.Small filaments of bluish biomass sprouted from his dermis, wrapping around the chip as if they were microscopic cilia.
Lohan sensed the metallic and organic "taste," and with molecular precision, his body began breaking down Oscar’s blood cells and isolating the chemical impurities from the drug, absorbing them to be processed as low-quality biomass without allowing it to come into direct contact with his body.
In a few seconds, the chip gleamed with crystalline purity like a brand-new device, free of any trace of its former owner.
Now came the risky part: the implantation.
Normally, this procedure required a neuro-implant clinic, laser sterilization equipment, and a certified surgeon. How could Lohan explain at an official facility that his chip had been "expropriated" from a dead landlord? Even the underground clinics in the Lower Zone were a risk; members of gangs like the Asphyxia Gang might be monitoring those locations.
"I think that with my control over my body and biomass, I don’t need a surgeon..." Lohan reasoned, feeling the power of Slime within him.
Although he didn’t have total control over the human body as he had over the gelatinous body in Elysium, he was already able to control himself much more easily.
He closed his left eye and concentrated his mana in the orbital cavity.
Thanks to Structural Stability, his control over human cellular structure had reached a level impossible for people without special means to achieve.
He felt his biomass shift beneath the skin of his eyelid, making the tissue malleable and numbing the local nerves through controlled compression. He intended to use his own body to make the process painless.
Lohan positioned the small chip against the inner corner of his left eye. With a thought, he forced the tissues open, creating a perfect biological "socket" to accommodate the device.
The chip slid into the surgical slit Lohan had shaped. He felt a cold prick as the chip’s micro-connectors sought out his nerve endings, but instead of letting human biology react with inflammation, Lohan used the Natural Energy Core to emit pulses of vitality that forced immediate integration.
The chip connected!
For a moment, Lohan’s vision was flooded with static and crimson lines of code; his brain processed the deluge of data without the lag that would cause dizziness in a normal human, while the wounds he’d cut to insert the chip closed instantly, healed by the sacred energy Lohan circulated internally.
Lohan opened his eye and blinked. In front of him, a light-blue holographic interface floated, synchronized with the movement of his pupil.
He could control it mentally, simply by focusing his will on the virtual icons.
However, his smile of satisfaction vanished when a system message from the chip appeared in the center of his vision:
[ERROR: BIOMETRIC LOCK ACTIVE]
[DNA SIGNATURE DOES NOT MATCH REGISTERED OWNER]
[DEVICE LOCKED. PLEASE PROVIDE GENETIC AUTHENTICATION]
Lohan let out a frustrated sigh that echoed through the room.
He looked at the installed chip and then at Oscar’s body, which was still lying in the pool water, crying silently.
’Shit... I cleaned the chip too well...’ Lohan thought, a brief pang of regret crossing his mind.
If he had left the blood on the chip during installation, perhaps the system would have recognized Oscar’s genetic signature by osmosis.
But the regret quickly vanished. The thought of the filth of having a junkie’s blood injected directly into his mana channels and the risk of contracting a degenerative disease typical of the Lower Zone made Lohan grateful for his own caution.
Lohan didn’t hesitate.
He couldn’t risk the chip entering self-destruct mode or sending an alert signal to the Federation’s security headquarters.
With a quick movement of Structural Stability, he removed the chip from himself even more easily than when he’d placed it there, sliding it out of his eye socket as effortlessly as a Slime expels a Mana stone, yet still maintaining a thin thread connecting himself to the chip.
He walked to the edge of the pool and crouched down beside Oscar. The landlord looked at him with dilated eyes, blood dripping from his toothless mouth. Lohan ignored the terror in the man’s gaze. He brought the chip close to Oscar’s neck, where a vein pulsed irregularly.
With the tip of the chip, Lohan made a small cut, collecting a blood sample as carefully as possible, just enough to fool the chip’s biometric sensors.
The chip emitted a soft beep and the light changed from red to a steady green.
[DNA AUTHENTICATION: CONFIRMED]
[USER: OSCAR V. MALCOLM]
[WELCOME BACK]
Lohan quickly wiped the chip again with a mana film and reinserted it into his own eye.
This time, the interface opened fully.
He saw the Sector 4 news feed, the building’s camera feeds (which now showed the empty hallway where Lohan had killed the two reinforcements), and, most importantly, Oscar’s banking app.
Lohan focused his will on the Atlas Bank icon. The floating screen expanded before his eyes, displaying the updated balance.
[Atlas Bank]
[Account Holder: Oscar V. Malcolm]
[Available Balance: $73,412.18 Credits]
Lohan was silent for a long moment.
Seventy-three thousand credits.
For any resident of the Lower Zone, that was an astronomical sum, a fortune capable of buying the freedom of an entire family for generations in the slum.
However, for Lohan, the reaction wasn’t all that surprising. He recalled that, in a short time of intense hunting with Lisa and Alice’s group, he had accumulated coins that, if sold at the right rate, would yield nearly double that amount.
"Seventy thousand credits... that’s the price of the desperation of hundreds of tenants he extorted..." Lohan thought, feeling a pang of disgust.
But Lohan’s financial reality was relentless.
Although the money was there, within reach of a mental command, Lohan felt bad that he couldn’t take it immediately.
He knew that large-sum transactions on the Atlas Bank network were monitored by the Federation’s financial AIs.
If he transferred the seventy thousand credits from Oscar’s account to his own (Lohan Hayes’s account), the digital trail would be even more dangerous.
The moment Oscar’s body was found, or his disappearance was reported, the Federation would trace the money and Lohan would be arrested before he could even log back into Elysium.
Lohan closed the banking interface with a mental command, feeling immense frustration.
"If digital money is blocked by tracking, then I need something real." Lohan decided, standing up and looking around the luxurious yet tacky penthouse.
He knew that men like Oscar, who dealt with gangs like the Asphyxia and hired mercenaries on the side to avoid corporate taxes, rarely trusted the official banking system 100%.
Oscar must have a stash of physical cash, untraceable credits, or perhaps even physical gold and silver coins taken out of circulation, the kind of "dirty money" that Lohan could carry with him and use wherever he needed without raising immediate suspicion.
Lohan activated Instinctive Perception and Thermal Perception, scanning the marble walls and designer furniture for thermal anomalies or hidden compartments.
Lohan walked toward Oscar’s private office, where techno music was still pounding off the walls. He sensed that his true reward was still hidden somewhere beneath the fake gold of that penthouse.