Generator [v4] ghosts of reality

At first she hadn’t recognized him. She was distracted by the random chaos of spilled groceries on the sidewalk. Also, the name he used when they introduced themselves was not familiar either. Yet later, when they were in her apartment, she suddenly recognized who he was. It had been a long time since she had first seen him ~ Yet, he had never seen her before... She smiled to herself. At that time, as she watched him, she had a premonition their paths would intersect again; sometime in the future. Maybe it was destiny, she told herself, that she was attracted to him now that fate had brought them together again. Maybe that is why she had released him all those years ago.

Camellia knew the details of his distant past. She was thoroughly familiar with his dossier. Even now, she thought, if she concentrated she could probably still clearly recall the details from the depths of her memory ~ They hadn’t destroyed her grey matter when they removed the bioram.

After ‘Cordova Frost’ had defected, Flex Global Security assigned her the mission of tracking him down. At first she couldn’t discover any leads. It seemed like he had vanished off the face of the earth. She placed the mission files on inactive status for some time. Then one day, a favourable source reported that he had seen ‘Cordova’; mentioning it casually during one of their periodic conversations. The source recalled that the chameleon had once been looking for him, and thought he might earn a few credits by supplying her with some important fragments of information.

Her source was a young man named Yuri. He was a sewer shark; a physical hacker that really seemed to enjoy his work. His supple, lean body got him into places inside the physical world that very few people could access. She appreciated his talent, because she recognized the difficulty of his activity, and she also knew that life on the street was tough. The chameleon also valued his integrity: Yuri was true. He lived by the code. It pleased her to be able to increase the balance of his credit account.

Yuri also shared an incredible talent for detecting faces in a crowd. For that reason, at the beginning of her mission, the chameleon originally transmitted Yuri an encoded image of the person she was seeking; an ex Flex Global agent named Cordova Frost, who at that time had recently defected ~ While sources in the underground had often been in contact with Agent Frost, no-one had ever seen his actual face. Cordova always manipulated the signal with an image generator to disguise his appearance whenever he used a video communication link like TVi ~ On the network, a person can be anybody they want to be ~ She knew she could trust Yuri not to reveal the confiden‐ tial information she transmitted to him.

He experienced no ethical ‘conflict of interest’ by occasionally working in conjunc‐ tion with Flex Global; as long as his identity was protected. Through their working relationship, they formed a bond of trust, and an understanding of where the bound‐ aries of their individual interests overlapped to provide a mutual benefit. At the time, the chameleon was aware that Yuri was also one of the founders of a group of digital