I leaned forward as much as the restraints would allow, locking eyes with the corrupt officer.
"They put a highly classified, military-grade black box inside my skull, Major. A kinetic data siphon. It’s designed to wirelessly extract, decrypt, and store localized encrypted data... but it requires a massive kinetic impact to break the encasement seal and initiate the upload protocol. It requires physical trauma to activate."
Vance’s face drained of color. The wrench lowered slightly.
"You see, Major," I whispered, the blue light beneath my torn skin pulsing faster now. "I couldn't just download your private ledger. It was encrypted on an air-gapped drive in your office. But the moment you smashed my face into that table... you broke the physical seal on my relay. You activated the siphon."
To understand the terror dawning in Major Vance's eyes, you had to understand the history that brought me to this cold, concrete room.
Two years prior, I was a standard infantryman. My squad was running a routine sweep through a contested mountain pass when our Humvee hit a command-wire improvised explosive device. The blast tore through the armored hull like tissue paper. I was thrown fifty feet, waking up days later in a military hospital in Germany.
When I finally looked in a mirror, half of my face was gone. The blast had sheared off my lower right mandible, destroyed my cheekbone, and left me with a gruesome, hollowed-out visage. I thought my life was over. I thought I would be discharged, sent home as a broken, disfigured veteran to waste away in obscurity.
But then, General Hackett visited my ward.
Hackett was the head of a covert intelligence division known only as Phantom Unit. He didn't offer me pity. He offered me a job.
"We can rebuild you, Silas," Hackett had said, standing at the foot of my hospital bed. "Better than you were. But the prosthetics won't just be cosmetic. We have a rat in Sector 4. Someone is bleeding our armories dry and selling the weapons to the enemy. We can't get close to him. He's too careful, too paranoid. But he has a weakness. He's violent. He's prone to physical outbursts."
Hackett had presented a silver briefcase containing a prototype cybernetic implant.
"This is the Aegis relay," he explained. "It functions as a structural replacement for your jaw, but internally, it's a quantum-decryption engine. We will transfer you to Sector 4. You will get close to Major Vance. You will poke around. You will irritate him. And when he inevitably snaps and strikes you..."
"...the kinetic force activates the relay," I had finished for him, my voice slurred through the bandages.
"Exactly. It's a dead-man's switch, but for data. Once the physical seal is broken by blunt force trauma, the relay will instantly connect to any local network within a fifty-yard radius, bypass the security protocols, and download every piece of encrypted data it can find. But it has to be a severe impact. A simple punch won't do it. He has to really want to hurt you."
For two years, I underwent grueling surgeries. The titanium chassis was grafted to my surviving bone. The microscopic wiring was interwoven with my nervous system. They covered it with synthetic skin that looked and felt perfectly real.