Swap Chips

The woman's strange smile was a bit eerie to Grey as he watched her from the other side of the table.

"You said that the Death Qube tournament wasn't going on for a few hours, am I remembering correctly?" She asked curiously.

"Correct."

"What were you going to do until then?" She asked with a burning sense of intrigue.

"We were going to a black, black market to find a surgeon that used to specialize in swap chips." He replied.

"You keep bringing up these 'swap chips,' what exactly were they?" She asked.

"Swap chips were an implant that let the Dark Paradise administrators know who you were and monitor you at all times." He explained casually, but there was nothing casual about this insight.

Grey's expressionless face shifted subtly.

From what she'd learned, this slight shift in expressions told her that he was glaring daggers at her at the moment.

It had been a while since she was reminded of Grey's game. She started sweating.

"So… it was like an identification chip?" She asked casually. She was carefully avoiding the topic of where they were implanted.

She already knew the answer to the question since she investigated the scene. However, as was the case about the software in the entry point, she was afraid that Grey would know more about them than he did.

It was well known that Dark Paradise was the only known server in the Nerve Network that could strip people of their ability to log out. It was because of this feature that a human trafficking ring was possible.

Therefore, she couldn't avoid the subject for the sake of her job, but she had to be careful.

Her eyes guided to the left. She might have been looking at Adam sleeping to any cameras, but she was looking slightly above him.

This gesture told Grey that she understood the situation but could not avoid the conversation completely.

Grey's eyes relaxed. That was his signal of understanding.

"Yes, that's correct. It also may have had something to do with how Occam's Razor or the greater administrative network kept people from logging out.

They were implanted in the user's skull." He explained.

"So why were you going to a surgeon? To take Sebastian's out?" She pried.

"No, I needed to have one." He replied nonchalantly.

"Pardon? What did you just say?"

She was feigning ignorance. Grey was acting casual, but there was nothing casual about what he just said.

"I needed to be wearing a swap chip. How else was I supposed to get into the Death Qube?" He asked.

"What if it was deadly? They might have chipped you for life." She argued.

"Yes, but I probably would have died because I didn't have one." He retorted.

"I'm still very confused. You said you were there because you were there on invitation. Why did you stay there?" She pried.

"In general, I was there to figure out how I could shut the place down. You probably recall the results, yeah?" He asked.

"Yes… that's true. Did you know how you could?" She confirmed before moving to the next query.

Grey shook his head. "No. It was unclear what would happen to all the enslaved victims if Dark Paradise was raided.

Dead people tell no tales, so they'd all probably be murdered in batches." He elaborated.

There was no way that she didn't know this, so the line of questioning was pointless.

"So you had to find a way to protect the victims in the event it was shut down, yes?"

"Correct."

"And you put yourself on the list of potential victims if it was shut down?" She asked to confirm.

"There was no other way." He replied definitively.

The woman mulled over this new information. It was completely logical. At some point, she would have to accept the fact that

"Okay, that makes sense. You needed someone to implant the chip they had into you?"

"... Kind of. I believed that people with the swap chips didn't record someone by their username.

After all, no one is going to use an existing username in Dark Paradise. So I figured that someone would have to program one with my credentials." He explained.

"Also… I wanted my swap chip to be programmed and implanted in a safe way that looked as though it was implanted but didn't kill me." He added.

This was yet another example where Grey withheld information that proved that he was not in nearly as much danger as he made himself out to be.

While this fact would normally irk someone, she had come to understand that Grey was only answering her questions literally.

There were no plot holes in his stories as long as she asked the right questions to get the answers that she wanted.

The hard part was assuming that he would not answer questions related to past events. So she could not jump to a question that clarified an answer by referencing the future.

If she did that, she'd run the risk of not being able to glean answers from questions before that point.

The best she could do was ask the conclusion to small events and clarify the event itself.

Once again, he would only answer the clarification questions literally.

She had already learned her lesson about these rules the hard way in the past. It was a hard road, even though he was technically being 100% honest.

"I see. Skipping past all the horrifying details, I assume that you found the place alright?" She asked hesitantly.

"Correct." He replied, stone-faced and literal as always.

"Also, that person had to have been expensive if they handled taboo business in a place where all laws normally didn't exist." She muttered pensively.

"I was floating around with a few million credits worth of weapons, so money wasn't really an issue." He joked.

No one could tell if he was joking except for the woman, however. His poker face told no tales.

"That's a good point. About the surgeon, what was he like?" She asked with a look of despair in her eyes.

"It was a she, and the entire time I was there was a case study in sexual harassment."