I drag my aching body out of bed and over to the bathroom. Ah, I really did have to pee. I almost fall asleep again standing in front of the toilet, but just as I’m about to zone out completely, I hear an odd little scrabbling noise, like the feet of a giant cockroach.

I flush the toilet and I’m about to step out of the bathroom when an enormous explosion rocks the apartment and a cloud of fire bursts through the hallway to the bathroom. I’m thrown into the sink, cracking the mirror with my head. Holy shit. What just happened?

I rush out of the bathroom to see my bedroom demolished except for a few burning chunks of floor and ceiling littering the rim of the giant hole that used to be a room. Who did this? CyberCorp?

Squinting through the smoking wreckage, I see a trace of movement on the far side of the room. A person, silhouetted through the smoke, climbing through the giant hole in the wall of my apartment. He pulls himself up to standing and I can tell that his movements are unnaturally sure, inhuman. Cybernetic. It has to be Drake. Shit.

A red laser, probably infrared, projects from his eyes and scans the room once. I duck into the bathroom to avoid detection. “Jack!” Drake yells from across the apartment. His voice is hollow, mechanized, as if it were coming through a tin can telephone. He set the explosion and now he’s here to finish the job.

I could attempt to activate my home security system and get the hell out of here, but god only knows if that’ll have any effect on Drake whatsoever. That, and I’d have to run into the room with him to hit the switch. Assuming the switch even survived the explosion. I suppose at some point I coulda wired it into the net so my chip could access it, but I’ve always been just a little more . . . cautious in matters of personal information. For example, I do keep a gun in the bathroom cabinet. Always good to have a weapon, just in case. Who knows if it’ll stop him, but at least I’d go down fighting, if it came to that. Time to choose.

Attempt to activate the security system and flee

Grab the gun and go in shooting