#id probably be forced to pursue a bad career i hate

[outragedslime]

im so conflicted!!

[hnnyoongs]

akai shuichi headcanons

shuichi wears a beanie all the time because he's self conscious about hir hairline .... and I mean who can blame him? id be too

shuichi saw gin when he was visiting Japan in the 10 years ago flashback and was like ooh long hair is cool AND it'll piss ka-san off flash forward 5 years later when shuichi infiltrates the BO and is like fUck cool long hair dude is a psycho

shuichi cut his hair off when he heard akemi was killed by gin he kinda went into the whole mental breakdown mode and was like fuck this shit because he started growing his hair out cuz of gin and also akemi really liked his long hair

shuichi used to be a band kid when he lived in England and wanted to pursue a career in music (much to the chagrin of Mary) but after tsutomu disappeared he was like fuck that and stopped playing until he entered the BO

shuichi has a really bad memory about things that dont have to do anything with his job kinda like BBC's Sherlock but not as bad

shuichi used to find dead bodies when he was a kid just like shinichi but it wasn't as often maybe like a dead body once a year or something

shuichi named himself dai because that's what Mary actually wanted to name him when she was giving birth she was screaming die die die and tsutomu wasn't there yet so she was like aight die sounds like the japanese name dai the only reason shuichi wasn't named that was that tsutomu burst in and was like FUCK NO

shuichi was picked on when training for the FBI since compared to 6 foot jock white men shuichi was a 5 foot 7 asian with long hair and dressed like a teenage girl who frequented Starbucks in the toxic environment of the FBI for anyone who doesnt fit the mold shuichi had it cut out for him

shuichi showed signs of multiple mental illnesses but they were all difficult to pin down so he was never diagnosed with anything since he refused to talk at the FBI mandated therapy sessions

shuichi's type is someone who is kind but could wield a gun

he used to dislike kids but being around them as okiya has made SOME kids special in his heart

before tsutomu's disspeareance he taught shuichi how to hunt with a shotgun

shuichi lived off of sports drinks and bars whenever he was single since he couldn't rely on take out due to it being unhealthy which wouldn't help his FBI styled life

shuichi taught akemi simple self defense techniques but refuses to teach her how to shoot a gun saying he didn't want her hands to get dirty

shuichi and shukichi blackmail each other for favors by using the "ill tell ka-san you did that one thing that you blamed dad for when we were kids if u dont help me out"

scotch once told him that bourbon's type was a white milf (in reference to Elena who was white and was a mother) so shuichi was scared as fuck when rei met Mary's adult self for the first time

shuichi hates being compared to his mother but the truth is they're the most similar and they both started mimicking tsutomu after his disappearance

the only thing shuichi knew how to cook before meeting yukiko was plain white rice as that was the only thing tsutomu was able to teach him

shuichi mimics an American accent while talking in America or talking in English unless he's talking to his family or he's mentally shook up and his British accent slips out

he thinks in British accented English as well (idc if the animanga shows him thinking in japanese it makes no sense that western raised people like Jodie and camel think in japanese) but he does use some japanese like ka-san and when he's trying to get deep into his okiya persona

he tries very hard to keep the polite speech patterns of okiya Subaru since as akai shuichi he's very .. rude

shuichi's sniper skills were so good the fbi was willing to overlook his disrespect of authority and his tendency to do everything by himself without consulting everyone

shuichi slips into a British accent around James if he's feeling really comfortable

he felt bad about using shiho since she was only a year older than masumi and she hadn't done anything wrong so he vowed to get her and akemi out of the BO

he had a plan to get akemi and shiho out by convincing the higher ups to grant them immunity if they testified but akemi's death derailed the entire thing

he hates to admit it but his family is the most important thing to him he may not contact them that often but he's going to such lengths to bring his father back because he cares for his family so much

shuichi didnt really know what he wanted to do with his life once he took down his father's pursuers but after akemi and scotch he decided that if he solved his father's disappearance first he'd hunt down the BO next tho once learning that Haneda Koji’s death had something to do with the BO he's back at the thing where he doesn't know what to do with his life without revenge

he promised shukichi that he'd be the one to solve shukichi's death if what happened to Haneda kohji also happens to shukichi

he isn't a fan of dates in amusement parks but if it makes his partner happy and smile he'll have fun

dating Jodie was a quiet thing most likely from an attachment maybe due to a bad case or a loss of a mutual friend depending on the agency they might have been legally allowed to date each other but it is usually looked down upon I dont think they went out together often probably spending time together at home ... doing stuff

he identifies as bisexual it was normal to him in childhood since both Mary and tsutomu talked about their past relationships to their children he never told anyone due to the fact it would affect his FBI status since it was illegal in America shukichi and Mary know he's bi but shuichi has no idea Mary knows

akemi and shuichi would take strolls in parks go shopping and go to cafes

he's very self conscious about his height and whenever he goes to Japan it makes him feel good about himself since he's relatively tall there

Mary was the one who drilled japanese into his head not tsutomu

the last time shuichi talked to Mary was when he called her up to tell her to take masumi and leave Japan for Britain after masumi cornered him and scotch him and Mary had a whole argument and after that they stopped talking to each other, not that they talked to each other much in the first place

shuichi learned jee kun do by watching training videos from vhs tapes/cds/YouTube depending on when you consider detco taking place I personally believe conan shrinks in 2018 meaning that tsutomu disappeared in 2001 and shuichi used a mixture of tapes and cds to learn

shuichi can read people really well but has a hard time manipulating people by being nice he can use people by being a jackass very well but trying to be a normal person is hard for him

Yukiko and yusaku remind shuichi of his parents before tsutomu disappeared but like more upbeat

shuichi dislikes full body hugs

akemi and shiho were both anime and romance drama fans so he knows random things about the shows and uses that info to connect with the DB and especially haibara

he considered himself British first and foremost but when asked about whether he considers himself white or asian he'll always go with asian

he started smoking soon after his father disappeared since his father used to smoke and he needed to cope but didn't wanna fall into drugs like cocaine

smoking is heavily looked down upon in America and is seen as unprofessional which helped shuichi go undercover a bunch due to him being a heavy smoker

akemi would make him stop smoking around her and shiho saying that second hand smoking was dangerous and that shuichi who was smoking constantly was going to get lung cancer but he would tell her that he just couldn't stop smoking he did stop smoking around shiho and akemi tho going outside to do it instead

as okiya it makes him go wild because he desperately needs to smoke to cope but okiya cant smoke it doesnt fit his image so he smokes a shit ton at night during his nightly drives

shuichi forced himself not to smoke during his time visiting Japan when he met masumi because he knew Mary would get even more upset with him

shuichi was terrible driving American styled cars and he got so upset that he perfected his drive-in techiuque over the years just to spite the instructor that said he was barely passing

he likes to go on late night drives and speed on the high way because he's a thrill seeking idiot

he has no social media but he created on as okiya Subaru to keep an eye on haibara's higo stan account

he takes offense to the idea that he's stalking haibara he's just p r o t e c t i n g her

he wants shiho to be happy more than anything so he's an avid coai shipper and is exhausted in Conan's obliviousness

shuichi didnt tell shukichi he wasn't actually dead shukichi just walked up to okiya Subaru one day and was like shuuichi-ni-san right? shuichi has long stopped questioning shukichi's weird ways of knowing shit he shouldn't know

shuichi is a sherlockian but he's not like shinichi or hakuba in that he does not hate BBC's Sherlock and actually enjoys it a bit

one upside to shuichi living in America is that he gets to hoard guns because he's obsessed with them he thinks they're really cool it's like conan with Sherlock he starts yapping his mouth of about them

bourbon once dangled a gun on in front of a sleeping shuichi cuz he didnt believe scotch when he said that rye was obsessed with guns and started saying incorrect shit about the type of gun he was holding and shuichi just shot up and started berating him

shuichi hates that chianti is a killer because she's the only person who's as much as a gun fanatic as he is

he tends to steal Jodie's car a lot

he likes fucking with peoples heads it's very fun to him to watch them get all worked up

shuichi hasn't mourned his father yet because he doesnt believe his father’s dead

deep down he blames his father for his mother going slightly bonkers

he didnt want masumi to be a detective at first but now hes proud of her

he drinks a lot as okiya Subaru since he cant smoke as much

he's willing to go to hell if it means he can rip gin from limp to limp

he really hates gin yall I dont think I can convey how much he hates gin

[leonkennedystuff]

not alone p.2 (leon kennedy x reader)

[RE4!Leon]

Summary: wherein reader finally confronts leon about ada wong

Warnings: angst, swearing, underage drinking, descriptions of mental illness, mentions of broken family (?)

Part 2 of 2

holy crap, you guys. This is probably the longest chapter I’ve ever written in my LIFE. I got so carried away making this oops I’m sorry but wah! I’m so happy it’s finally done! Hope you guys enjoy!

Weary (E/C) eyes staring blankly outside the window, the budding feeling of depression pays you another visit– like a viper, it coils around your scorned heart tighter and tighter, choking you. 

It’s been 6 days since that horrid fight with your longtime boyfriend, Leon Kennedy, and your insatiable sadness was the only friend you let in and comfort you. You knew you were coping with this unhealthily, you were aware you were setting yourself up for disaster, but you honestly could care less. You barely felt the discomforts anyway; you didn’t give no mind to how weak or hungry or tired or numb you felt all over. You just didn’t have the energy or the will. You felt, for a lack of better words, dead – and the last memory you had before you died was that fucking fight.

On that same night, you left your shared apartment; you packed a bag and practically had to force your way out because Leon kept trying to stop you, blocking the door, pleading with you to talk your problem through. Despite how vulnerable you were feeling though, you didn’t budge – refusing him his request, refusing to hear anything else about his standing with Ada Wong. 

Relentless attempts after relentless attempts, he figured his pleas were falling on deaf ears. He eventually lets you go. Watching you leave - it was like the biggest part of his heart left with you. He’s never felt so empty, and you weren’t doing so well either.

That was the last time you’ve seen or spoken with Leon; his messages on your phone, the calls you were rejecting - they continued to grow almost hourly, but you had no plan on answering them. Not now, at least. You needed to heal; reading his words or hearing his voice, your emotions would overshadow your logic. You knew you’d succumb to how much you missed him and you had to be stronger than that.

Currently (and for the past 6 days), you’ve been squatting at your best friend’s apartment. Claire Redfield has been your constant person ever since you were children; your family and the Redfields have been long-time friends and you got along with her just like your parents did. You’ve never trusted anyone the same way you did her, at least not until Leon entered your life almost a decade after.

When you met Leon, you were 19 and had just moved into a new city to pursue your degree in Nursing. You were no philanthropist but you always wanted a career that revolved around helping others, it was a striking similarity you and him shared. 

One night long ago, you were invited by some classmates to go drinking in a bar, a bar that was a favorite among students because they didn’t check ID – and that was when you saw him for the first time. 

You almost smile at the fond memory.

He was with a bunch of loud, intoxicated and rowdy cadets from the police academy not so far from your school, he stuck out like a sore thumb because of how awkward he looked with them. Definitely, the comradery with him and everyone in that group was evident but he just seemed so out-of-place as the other guys hustled around, trapping him in the middle of their wild antics. Although you thought it was funny, you also remember feeling bad for him.

It was around 2 in the morning when you decided you really had enough drinks and were going to call it a night. 

Despite the protests of your friends, you bid them a woozy goodbye and started heading out of the still cramp, neon-signed local bar. You barely made it a foot out the door when your drunk body doubled over, the urge to puke out the excess alcohol making your already dizzy head spin more. This wasn’t your first time drinking, absolutely not, but this was the first time you drank more than you could handle. 

Did you regret it? Even with the throbbing hangover you had the next day - no, you don’t, because if it weren’t for you getting so shit-faced, you don’t think you would have had the interaction you did with Leon.

“Someone really enjoyed their night,” A pleasant voice resonates from behind, teasing you. Too out of it to check the face it belonged to, you remain as you are – your knees on the rough pavement while your head hovered over a bush. “That makes one of us,” He notes, his mild amusement and his voice drawing closer as he walks to where you were.

“Do you need help?” He asks, his badinage tone now mixed with a hint of genuine concern. When you feel him settle beside you, bending a knee so he was at your level and so that he can take a better look at how wasted you were, you finally turn just enough to see who this enigmatic joker was.

For a second, you felt like you sobered up at the mere sight of him. Initially, from his attire – a plain white shirt clouded by a navy-blue windbreaker and fitted black pants- you recognized him as the awkward dude from the big crowd, but your attention shifts from that after your gaze falls on his face.

My God – you wondered just how drunk you were to have your beer goggles be this misleading. There was no way, you thought, that anyone could look this heavenly.

A dirty-blonde guy with fringes framing his fresh face looked to be the same age as you; he had a small smile on his plump pink lips. He was saying something, his mouth was moving, but it’s like you’ve suddenly turned deaf. You were so fixated on his looks.

You note how structured his features are, like a sculpture, his jaw was ample and strong and contrasted well with the fullness of his rosy cheeks. He had beauty marks decorating his clear skin, two on his neck and one small one beside his celestial nose. The real star, though, were his eyes. They were bluer than blue, like sapphires and moonstones.

Who the hell was this dude?

“So, are you going to tell me or should I just guess?” He cocks a dark eyebrow, his playful demeanor returning. Snapping out of your trance, you just blink at him, confused.

Oh right, he was talking.

“What?” You manage to find your voice but hate how raspy it sounded even to your own ears. He chuckles, looking down. His long eyelashes flutter as he subconsciously checks your body for any wounds or bruises you may have gotten in your buzzed state.

“I was asking for your name,” He repeats himself, clearly finding the cute but besotted girl humorous.

Your own cheeky personality coming out, you give him a curious squint. “What’s it to you?” You question, “I happen to be very familiar with the saying–“ You lean forward a bit to be dramatic but stagger a little. As if on instinct, the blonde holds you by the shoulders. It was almost impossible to ignore the flurry of sensation building under your skin where his hands were. “-‘stranger danger’,” You finish off with air-quotations, keeping your cool.

The guy laughs again, the luxuriance of it making your own mouth curl upwards in a smile.

“Maybe you’ll feel better knowing I’m training to be a cop?” He offers, riding along with your banter. You shake your head, “No, I’ve heard stories of serial killer police men. All charming and dutiful and handsome – you could definitely be in the list and I’m not risking it,”

With that, Leon’s face lights up with a surprised expression. You also note how his confident demeanor suddenly shifted into a coy one. You nearly raise your eyebrows in question but realize soon after why. 

Damn your drunk tendencies!

Now amply embarrassed, you open your mouth to apologize but were cut off with his bona fide smile. “You’ll just have to trust that I’m going to be one of the good ones,” He says, his voice softer but seemingly warmer. “I’m Leon Kennedy,” He introduces himself, earnestly outstretching a hand for you to shake. You take it, a blush undoubtedly heating up your face.

“(Y/N) (L/N),” You respond.

That night, Leon walked you back to your dormitory and the rest became history. It didn’t take long for you both to develop the feelings sparked by the night you met – it was only a matter of a few months until he finally confessed the obvious affection you had for one another. You both agreed, though, to remain as friends until you both graduated.

Your ‘remain as friends’ phase lasted almost 2 years, but you didn’t mind because you were so in love with him and he, you. You’ve never been happier. When you graduated from college and him from police academy, he wasted no time asking you to be together. 

You couldn’t wait to finally tell Claire all about it; you’ve updated her that there was someone you were seeing but left it at that until you and Leon were official. You planned to meet with Claire the day after Leon left for Raccoon City, also the day that she’d be coming back from the same place to check up on her older brother, Chris.

Of course, everyone knew about the tragic events that lead to the death of hundreds and thousands of people in Raccoon. When the outbreak first spread, you heard about it in the television and nearly fainted in the hospital you were working as a trainee nurse. You thought you could die right then and there – your body and your heart unable to cope with the distress plaguing your head. For nights on end, you couldn’t sleep and, the rare times you were able to, it was due to fatigue from crying so much. 

You couldn’t fathom the thought of either Leon or Claire in danger, hurt, or worse.

When you received the most gratifying news though that they both made it out alive and clear from the horrific infection, you felt lucid. You don’t remember crying as hard as you did that day. When you found out that Claire and Leon actually ran into each other during the outbreak, you started to bawl again. They took up the deepest crevices of your heart.

You scoff softly at that.

Look how that now turned out in your favor. Half of it was broken beyond repair.

Suddenly, for the nth time this night, your phone blares in the dreary guest room you occupied, disrupting the welcomed silence. Your reverie broken, you sit up sluggishly on the bed too big for one person, your gaze indolently shifting to the vibrating device beside you. You didn’t need to think twice or wonder who it could be; your heart was already clenching knowing it was him.

With the heaviest feeling settled in your chest, you bring yourself to push your phone away, to push Leon away. To think nearly six years of your life was spent being with someone who might not have been entirely set on you after all…

You lay back down on the soft, silky sheets and close your exhausted eyes until the only noise left was your wounded sobbing. Inconsolable, dismal, helpless.

Alone with your wayward thoughts, another painful feeling creeps up your chest – although he was a persistent and tenacious man, you were sure he’ll eventually tire from reaching out just to have you ignore him. How long will it take until he finally gives up? How long will it take until he’s moved on from you? Will he be with Ada?

Too lost in your own sorrow, you almost didn’t hear the soft knocks resonating from the other side of the door. “(Y/N)?”

Startled, you bring your pounding head up. For a moment, you weren’t sure whether you imagined the sound. “Yeah?” You croak, your voice scratchy and barely there. You’ve misused yourself for the past few days and it was beginning to show.

“It’s me,” Claire leans her cheek on the door, pressing an ear to the wood. “Can I come in?”

You prop yourself upright a second time and a sudden wave of vertigo hits you. You lean back on the headboard, your vision dancing with stars. You wait until the dizzy feeling passes before you reply. “Of course,” You say, finding it a bit ridiculous that she had to ask permission in her own place.

Not a moment after your thumbs-up, the door creaks open and a crack of light from the hallway floods the room, illuminating your friend’s sympathetic face. “How are you holding up?” She checks on you, entering the room fully. You see she brought a glass of water and a cookie on a plate.

You smile, genuinely touched by the sweet gesture. Claire makes her way to you and settles down on the bed; she brings her feet up so she can sit with her legs crossed. The mattress rocks slightly as she shifts to a more comfortable position, turning the bedside lamp on. You wince at the orange light.

She hands you the glass of water, which you gratefully take from her hold and sip from, and places the huge chocolate chip cookie towards your body. She looks almost expectant but you pretend not to notice; you really couldn’t bring yourself to eat. 

Claire knew what was up though and, thankfully, she didn’t try to push it. It was always something you appreciated about her – she wasn’t overbearing, she didn’t try to impose or force anything. She just gives her 2 cents and leaves it to your better judgement; you respected that a lot.

“Still the same, unfortunately,” You crack a halfhearted chuckle, trying to sound better than you really felt. You look down and away from the sad look in Claire’s eyes, obviously seeing past the fabricated act. Wanting not to dwell in her scrutiny, you reach for the still warm cookie and break off a small chunk, bringing it to your mouth. It tasted heavenly – her food always did, but you couldn’t enjoy it.

“It’s good,” You comment with a nod, your eyes still anywhere but on the brunette girl in front of you. Of course, you were trying to evade the conversation that dealt with talking about how you were feeling.

You open your mouth, to apologize for being so detached, but her hand suddenly on your thigh catches you off-guard. You look at her to see her smiling. “How about we take a walk? Maybe visit the ice cream shop right before the curb? I’ve been wanting to check the place out,” She suggests with a thoughtful cock of her head, her dark brown hair swaying with her movements. 

She leans in a bit, her knowing expression deepening as she gives your leg a pat. “And it’ll do you some good to get some fresh air.”

Claire had a point, you acknowledged. Although you didn’t want to, going outside would probably help distract from your stuffy thoughts, especially considering that you’ve been camped in this apartment almost the entire time you were here. You note that Claire probably blew her plans off just to accommodate you. This is the least you can grant her.

“Okay, yeah, let’s do it.” You crack a smile, shifting your weight so you could swing your legs off the bed. Claire, who looked a little surprised from your answer, blinks before a big grin appears on her face. She gets up as well, “Alright! Just let me get changed,” She says, gesturing to her olive-green baseball tee and black sweatpants. 

You chuckle, nodding.

When the door closes behind her, you swap your pajamas as well for some leggings and a grey hoodie two sizes too big on your frame. Your hand moves its way to feel the letters of the police academy Leon attended bolded in the center; you didn’t realize you’ve packed it but now it’s the only thing you wanted to wear.

You let yourself. Considering you didn’t allow to talk or reach out to him, this will help you cope.

You sigh. You just couldn’t believe how complicated it’s gotten.

After taming your (H/C) hair into a ponytail and trudging out of your room, you enter the living space and the first thing that caught your eye was a small white envelope in front of the main door. It was most probably slipped in through the crack.

You walk towards it, your heartbeat picking up speed for a reason unknown to you. Crouching down to get a better look, you take it in your hands. It was plain until you turned it over.

A red kiss mark.

Your breath hitches – you knew point-blank exactly who this was from. No doubts, no second thoughts. 

Why the fuck has she sent this? How did she know where you were? Did Leon tell her about your fight?

“Unbelievable,” You hissed under your ragged breath, clenching your fists. With your stomach churning, your eyes brim with tears as you angrily tear it open. Your chest felt so constricted, it was almost painful to breathe.

               Hope you don’t mind that I told him your whereabouts.                                                                                  -A.W.

Just one sentence – just that one sentence was enough to get you bawling your eyes out. Even though it lacked reason for you to be this heavily affected, it was the mere fact that it meant Leon had reached out to Ada again. You visibly started to shake. 

You’ve had enough of this shit.

“You ready to head ou-“ Claire’s smile falls the moment she saw your slumped and trembling figure by the door, her crystal blue eyes growing wide with worry. She practically runs over to you, dropping to her knees and draping an arm around your shoulders. 

You were inconsolable, violent sobs rocking your body.

“(Y/N), what –“ Her sentence was left hanging in the air as she saw the poorly torn white envelope and letter in your hands. She cautiously takes it from your iron grip and reads what was written; her anger flares right away.

Before she had the chance to bust out her profanities, a loud series of knocks resonate from the door. Claire gets up and, because she was too overcome with ill feelings, didn’t bother to check the peephole. She swings the door open and immediately wished she hadn’t.

Leon Kennedy stood before her; his impossibly blue eyes were rid of any warmth – they looked exhausted, lidded and tired, and the dark bags under them seemed to weigh them down more. His body was stiff with tension, his usually groomed hair was in its messiest state she’d ever seen and, really, just his whole aura was thick with dread. 

He was a mirror image of you.

If it weren’t for how angry and disappointed Claire was with him, she would have felt bad seeing him in his weary state. Claire always looked so highly of Leon; she saw how pure, sincere and brave his character was in light of the events they experienced in Raccoon City. 

So, when she found out he was the man you were seeing? She approved of the relationship right off the bat, loving him for you. Claire knew, though, about the problem with the woman in red but she didn’t realize how bad it actually was to have this whole thing happen.

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here, Leon,” She scowls, chastising, crossing her arms over her chest. He looks down and takes the harshness of her words; he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t expecting this to happen. “Can I please see her?” His voice was hoarse.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,”

“It’s okay, I want to talk to him.”

Claire twists around to look at you. Your eyes were hard on the man whose heart had just skipped after being unable to see you or hear your voice for nearly a week. He recognizes the hoodie you had on and the ache in his chest tripled.

Despite your own heart jumping, your fury overclouded any feeling of longing. The letter crumples under your hand.

Claire gives you an expression as if to ask ‘Are you sure?’ and you nod. With one last look at the crestfallen male, she turns on her heel and leaves the premise to give you both some privacy.

“(Y/N)-“ Leon starts, taking a step towards you. You backtrack harshly.

Couldn’t he take a hint?

“Where’s Ada?” You grit your teeth, trying to keep your melting composure together. So much for a proper greeting. “I’m surprised you’ve bothered to come here, or that you even thought of me at all.”

Leon’s already fallen face sinks further, your words deepening the terrible pain the last few days have imbedded in him. If you only knew what the man’s been through; he could barely function not knowing where you were or who you were with or how you were doing and it showed in his present state. Ada, or at least the interaction you assumed happened between them, never reached reality.

“(Y/N),” He sighs, arduous, running a palm down his slightly stubbled cheek. The fact that you were so near but he couldn’t hold you made the inside of his chest itch. “Please, stop being like that. I want to talk this out. Properly. I don’t want Ada to be in this conversation,” He says, unable to keep the frustration from appearing in his tone.

Your anger grows. “That’s rich coming from you, especially when you hired her as your personal investigator,” You bring your clenched hand up and finally show to him the letter. “Here-“ You nearly hiss, taking a step towards him so you could press it to his chest. “You can thank her for coming through, as always.”

Leon studies the paper and his eyebrows furrow immediately. He shakes his head, looking at you perplexed. “I haven’t spoken to her ever since-“ He pauses for a split second, his jaw clamping ever so slightly, “-ever since we fought. I don’t know how she knows anything, or how she knew I was trying to find you.”

Despite your rancorous feelings, your chest prickled. You weren’t very surprised, but it softened your hardened exterior to hear his efforts. He always prioritized you, but the reason why you were so unwilling to move on from this was because of how prioritized Ada was too.

Noticeably gentler than a few seconds ago though, you moisten your dry lips. You knew Leon was telling the truth not only because of his honest eyes, but because he was just an honest person, especially when it came to you. But you just couldn’t wrap your head around how Ada was able to find out about you and Leon’s current situation and how she tracked you down.

As if he could tell what was plaguing your train of thoughts, he offers an explanation. You don’t know, though, if it made you feel better. “Ada – she’s a mysterious woman.” He acknowledges, cautiously moving closer. 

You stay where you are and it made him almost sigh in relief. If this proximity was all that the situation would allow, he’ll take it. “She has her ways, she has her own methods of knowing things.”

He shakes his head, “But enough about her. Please. I don’t want to talk about her – I want to talk about our relationship, because that’s what matters the most to me.” He says. 

You remain silent because you want him to continue and because a lump was growing in your throat.

You know from years of knowing Leon that he wasn’t the type of person to be vocal with his affection; how he grew up rendered him to be kind of awkward when it came to his feelings, he always had a hard time talking about it in general. It became especially more difficult after Raccoon City and you never tried to pry or change that; so, the rare times he did verbalize about what was in his chest, it was so special for you.

Leon takes a deep inhale, running his calloused thumbs over his fingers. “I-I’ve taken you for granted. All these years, you never left me, not even when our lives got so complicated.” He closes his stinging eyes, feeling his chest grow heavy as memories of his past played through his head – all the people lost, all the places now in ruin, all the missions he’s taken that always scared you half to death with worry. They were scars he had to live with.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever cared for me the way you do. It’s something I was never really familiar with,” He falters for a moment, wanting to compose himself. You, on the other hand, already had tears falling down your cheeks. You knew he was talking about his family and his upbringing – it was such a sensitive topic for him and your heart ached.

“-but it gives me so much hope, you know? It gives me more reason to want to end this whole attack on humanity. It’s contagious, how selfless you are.” He sighs, shifting his gaze to the carpeted floor. “The reason why I’ve been talking to Ada again is because she has information regarding new B.O.Ws being created somewhere. It’s stupid – maybe I should have just told you but I never include or disclose to you anything in my line of work because I don’t want to risk your safety.”

“You make me a better person, (Y/N), the love that you share so generously – I could only wish to reciprocate it all back to you. I-I’m trying, and I’m sorry if you have to suffer my inability to but I-“

Leon fails his words, his beautiful blue eyes glassy with tears. You’ve only ever seen him cry once your whole life, when you reunited after Raccoon City.

Without a moment more, you dash forward and wrap your arms tightly around the vulnerable and visibly upset man. You press your head to his chest, your tears – at this point – coming down like a waterfall as you listen to the beat of his heart. The heart made of pure gold, the heart that you loved more than anything in this whole fucking world.

Leon overlaps your embrace, one hand cupping the back of your head and the other snaked around your waist ardently, like he was afraid you’d fall out of his grasp again. 

He kisses the top of your head, his lips lingering for a few moments before he closes his eyes, feeling like a thousand pounds just lifted off his shoulders. He was light-headed, the warmth of your touch he craved so much felt like paradise.

“I’m sorry too, I just- I got so hurt but I never should have left the way I did,” You sob, not caring how you looked like. “I love you, Leon, more than anything. I don’t want you to ever feel like you’re lacking or that your baggage will ever be too heavy for me to carry with you. I’m not perfect either- I have my own shit, I have my own issues as well, but I know you’ll be there to help me out.”

You wipe at his eyes and he captures your hand, kissing it tenderly before intertwining his fingers with yours. “I promise I’ll be better,” He looks at you with commitment, his gaze unwavering and honest.

You smile, pledging to do the same. You trap his warm face in your palms and kiss him lovingly on the lips, your heart soaring. He deepens it.

You knew there were still going to be countless of bumps in the road ahead of you and Leon, some small, some big, and some worse or as worse as this but, no matter what, out of the billions of souls in this earth, it’s only him you’d ever love this way.

[avpdpunpun]

i disappeared for 3/4ths a year here’s an update?

its been 4 months since my queue ran out and way longer since i wrote an actual post. 8 months about? i think i last posted when i impulse quit a job that was bad for my mental health and just kept getting worse.

sometimes i wonder when ppl who blog about mental illness disappear if they’ve died. there was a big user i used to follow who did, and i still occasionally think about it sometimes, so i figure its nice to post updates sometimes. and being able to look back on posts ive written and reflect on them/what state of mind i was in can be helpful even if it can be embarrassing/dangerous because its so easy to fall back into those thinking habits 

after quitting my job i did basically nothing for 6 months haha. at some point i managed to clean out my room which i had done the bare minimum on for years because of depression, took out more built up trash than i thought was possible to fit into my small space. its disgusting but the only thing i struggle to keep up with now at least is vacuuming and putting clothes away so my space is a lot cleaner and it makes me happier. your living space can really have an effect on your mood bless you marie kondo

after my post about having an anxiety attack taking my test i got my drivers license in march. i saw the same lady again after going somewhere else and i think she just let me pass because she felt bad haha. i never finished drivers ed and i still get anxiety about driving unfamiliar routes but my skills and confidence have improved a lot. i managed to drive 2 hours to a big city to visit a friend! i literally didnt have a choice in getting my license, but its still something i can be proud of. like, when i have to explain it to people, it feels extremely shitty that i didnt get it until i was 20, and only about 5 months ago too but... for someone who struggles as much as me, i have to be proud of it my small accomplishments or i’ll have nothing.

at some point something in my brain just snapped and i literally havent been able to cry? for a long time in those 6 months i felt like i was right on the edge of breaking down mentally but never actually crossing that line and it was honestly one of the weirdest things ive experienced. i almost wanted to have a breakdown again just to get rid of the feeling and reach a catharsis like... i used to be a fucking crybaby almost but i. cant. anymore. but i think ive mostly moved away from this point... still feel kinda weird tho.

i didnt end up signing up to a local school fo gen eds. its still on my mind for the vague future because there’s topics i want to learn about (psychology, natural resources, languages...) and maybe try to pursue for a career but really i just wanted a way to get out of my toxic house, even if it meant going into debt to live in a shitty dorm. 

in the last 30 days though life has been moving extremely quickly for me. i dont think i couldve lived with myself much longer being a useless adult basically living in my basement bedroom of my parents house, especially with my younger siblings getting nearer to adult milestones, plus my savings were starting to run out.

so literally next weekend, i’m moving out! and i make enough money right now that with the rough budget i have established, if its accurate, i’ll have a decent amount of wiggle room and hopefully wont be ruining my mental health just trying to make ends meet.

it took a long time of searching but i managed to find a job that hasnt made me suicidal and has slightly more than the MIT living wage for my area lol. im a janitor now! we’ll see how long it lasts but a lot of the factors from my last two jobs that contributed to my failing mental health are gone. i rarely have to interact with other people, and if i do its my coworkers, of who i tend to only see for minutes per day, or the other people working in the building i clean who at most i have to say hi and have a nice night to lol. i get to listen to music and podcasts for 8 hours and its very routine heavy. i have to clock out after the 8 hours is up so i literally cant be forced into overtime. a lot of people dont respect cleaning jobs like this but honestly who gives a fuck, its something i can handle mentally and support myself with. its still hard adjusting to 40 hours. i know its the standard, but the standard is rly tough for me, but i think i can do it long term.

all of this has been achieved through sheer self hatred and impulse alone, and im very nervous about moving in with 3 other people even if 1 of them ive known for 8 years, and i dont think its even properly hit me yet. literally cant register that i have to fend 100% for myself but also ill be away from my toxic family! i can bring my cat with me, who before this i got to see at MOST once a week!

a dude ive known online for two or more years is moving to my area too for college and he’s so sweet and kind, i feel better talking to him than i have 99% of people in my life and im so lucky to know him. ive been forced to talk about personal things i was kind of dreading (not his fault, just a result of our relationship going to go from online -> irl and things id have to address beforehand) and honestly i didnt even mind it that much when i just got it over with and talked about it to him! vulnerability is literally the thing i struggle with the most in interpersonal relationships and is a huge block for me in every way and in even the most mundane life situations but like... he’s honestly the best and im getting emotional writing this and its weird af because i straight up dont GET emotional about other people. ive absolutely developed a stupid fucking crush on him recently and i THINK hes been receptive to flirting and i cant tell if he flirts back because we already say i love you and are wholesome af but honestly no clue if he’s into (trans) dudes but honestly? even if it doesnt work out im so happy to be friends with him and im so excited to finally meet him!! i really think knowing him has helped me improve myself 

i’ve always thought that if i could literally just achieve the bare minimum in life that things would naturally get better. like i’m still mentally ill and get paranoid about peoples intentions and i think if my boss yelled at me id have an anxiety attack on the spot. im still depressed and hate that i have low energy and that it’s still rly hard doing basic chores. 

but like a huge part of my problem was that i felt like i literally couldn’t TRY to connect with people if i couldn’t face having to tell them bare info about myself, like “oh i cant drive” or “i dont have a job” or that i was living with my parents but not even making PROGRESS on getting out. like how could i make friends or go on dates if i literally couldnt contribute shit or admit these things i was so ashamed of? a lot of my self image was shaped by this because my entire life i havent been mentally well enough to do as well as i should have.

but like. i feel like im finally doing these basic things!! i dont have to hate myself so much anymore! i dont look badly on other mentally ill ppl who are less lucky than i/havent been able to do those things yet/might not ever and are still in the same situation i was 2 months ago but the self hatred is strong pls understand.

i dont know yet if i could afford twice yearly drs visits for meds or anything and probably not therapy. i dont even know what my insurance is yet haha. but i’ll see

i need to figure out at what point in my life im going to be able to never contact a single person in my family ever again, considering i’ll be a 20 min drive away and they will know the precise location of where i live, and if i’ll ever feel safe enough in society to start hrt but :^) you know :^) i can at least present more masculinely in the meantime!

i dont rly know how to conclude this... i’m not trying to brag either im just very nervous and excited about where my life might be going for the first time ever? maybe? in my entire life? i have no clue what to pursue after moving out, but i can figure it out. and just... that there’s hope even if youre as fucked up and mentally ill as i am lmao!

[teshknowledgenotes]

RAY DALIO - PRINCIPLES NOTES - PAGE 1-40

INTRODUCTION

I'm passing along these principles because I am now at the stage in my life which I want to help others be successful rather than to be more successful myself. Because these principles have helped me and others so much, I want to share them with you. It's up to you to decide how valuable they really are and what, if anything you want to do with them.

Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals

Every day, each of us is faced with a blizzard of situations we must respond to. Without principles we would be forced to react to all the things life throws at us individually, as if we were experiencing each of them for the first time. If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result. Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success. All successful people operate by principles that help them be successful, though what they choose to be successful at varies enormously, so their principles vary.

HAVING YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES

We come by our principles in different ways. Sometimes we gain the through our own experiences and reflections. Sometimes we accept them from others, like our parents, or we adopt holistic packages of principles, such as those of religions and legal frameworks.

Because we each have our own goals and our own natures, each of us must choose our own principles to match them. While it isn't neccessarily a bad thing to use others' principles, adopting principles without giving them much thought can expose you to the risk of acting in ways inconsistent with your goals and your nature. At the same time you, like me, probably don't know everything you need to know and would be wise to embrace that fact. If you cant think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life. If you can't do that , you should reflect on the why that is, because that's most likely your greatest impediment to getting more of what you want out of life.

Thig brings me to my first principles:

Think for your self to decide 1) What you want, 2) What is true, and 3) What you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking avaiable to you. Being clear on your principles is important because they will affect all aspects of your life.

Five steps  1) Audacious Goals

     2) Failure

     3) Learning Principles

     4) Improving

     5) More Audacious Goals

MY PRINCIPLES AND HOW I LEARNED THEM

I believe the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

This way of learning and improving has been best for me because of what I'm like and because of what I do. I've always had a bad memory and didn't like following other people's instructions, but I love figuring out how things work for myself. I hated school because of my bad memory but when I was twelve I fell in love with trading the markets. To make money in the markets, one needs to be an independent thinker who bets against the consensus and is right. That's because the consensus view is baked into the price. One is inevitably going to be painfully wrong a lot, so knowing how to do that well is critical to one's success. To be a successful entrepreneur, the same is true: One also has to be an independent thinker who correctly bets against the consensus, which means being painfully wrong a fair amount. Since I was both an investor and en entrepreneur, I developed a healthy fear of being wrong and figured out an approact to decision making that would maximize my odds of being right.

MAKE BELIEVABILITY-WEIGHTED DECISIONS

My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I'm right” to having one of “How do I know I'm right?” They gave me the humility I needed to balance my audacity. Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. That allowed me to see many diminsions than if I saw things just through my own eyes. Learning how to weigh people's inputs to that I chose the best ones in other words, that I believability weighted my decision making – increase my chances of being right and was thrilling. At the same time I learned to:

OPERATE BY PRINCIPLES

That are so clearly laid out that their logic an easily be assessed and you and others can see if you walk to talk. Experience taught my how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that. With time, my collection of principles became like a collection of recipes for decision making. By sharing them with the people at my company, Bridgewater Associates, and inviting them to help me test my principes in action, I continually refined and evolved them. In fact, I was able to refine them to the point that I could see how important it is to systemize your decision making

Time is like a river that carries us foward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can't stop our movement down this river and we can't avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way

When we are children, other people, typically our parents guide us through our encounters with reality. As we get older, we begind to make our own choices. We choose what we are going after (our goals), and that influences our paths. If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school, if you want to have a family, you find a mate and so on. As we move toward these goals we encounter problems, make mistakes, and run up against our own personal weaknesses. We learn about ourselves and about reality and make new decisions. Over the course of our lives we make millions and millions of decisions that are essentially bets, somee large and some small. It pays to think about how we make them because they are what ultimately determine the quality of our lives.

We are all born with different thinking abilities but we aren't born with decision-making skills. We learn them from our encounters with reality. While the path I went down is unique being born to particular parents, pursuing a particular career, having particular colleagues I believe that the principles I learned along the way will work equally well for most people on most paths. As you read my story, try to look through it and me to the underlying cause and effect relationships at the choices I made and their consequences, what I learned from them and how I changed the ways I make decisions as a result. Ask yourself what you want, seek out examples of other people who got what they wanted, and try to discern the cause and effect patterns behind their achievements so you can apply them to help you achieve your own goals.

MY CALL TO ADVENTURE

I didn't like school, not just because it required a lot of memorization but because I wasn't interested in most of the things my teachers thought were important. I never understood what doing well in school would get me other than my mother's approval

When I didn't want to do something, I would fight it, but when I was excited about something, nothing could hold me back. For example while I resisted doing chores at home, I eagerly did them outside the house to earn money. Starting at age eight, I had a newspaper route, shoveled snow off people's driveways, caddied, bussed tables and washed dishes at a local restaurant, and stocked shelves at a nearby department store. I don't remember my parents encouraging me to do these jobs so I can't say how I came by them. But I do know that having these jobs and having some money to handle independently in those early years taught me many valuable lessons I wouldn't have learned in school or at play.

In my early years the psychology of the 1960s U.S. As aspirational and inspirational to achieve great and noble goals. It was like nothing I have seen since. One of my earliest memories was of John F. Kennedy an intelligent, charismatic, man who painted vivid pictures of chaning the world for the better – exploring outer space, achieving equal rights and eliminating poverty. He and his ideas had a major effect on my thinking

Everyone was talking about the stock market because it was doing great and people were making money. This included the people playing at a local golf course called Links where I started caddying when I was twelve. So I took my caddying money and started playing the stock market.

While I liked playing the markets, I also loved playing around with my friends, whether in the neighborhood when I was a kid, using fake Ids to get into bars when we were teeens, or nowadays going to music festivals and on scuba diving trips together. I've always been an independent thinker inclined to take risks in search of rewards not just in the markets, but in most everything. I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me great is better than terrible and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chosefor was from from Thoreau. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step the hte music which he hears, however measure or far away.”

In 1966 my senior year of highschool, the stock market was still booming and I was making money and having a blast, cutting school with my best friend Phil to go surfing, and doing what fun-loving high school boys usually do. Of course I didn't know it then, but that year was to be the stock market's top. After that, almost everything I thought I knew about the markets was proven wrong.

I gradually learned that prices reflect people's expectations, so they go up when actual results are better than expected and they go down when they are worse than expected

By midsummer, the dollar problem began to reach a breaking point. There were reports that Europeans wouldn't accept dollars from American tourists. The global monetary system was in the process of breaking down, but that wasn't clear to me quite yet. Then on Sunday, August 15th, 1971, President Nixon went on television to announce that the U.S. Would renege on its promise to allow dollars to be turned in for gold, which led the dollar to plummet. Since government officials had promised not to devalue the dollar, I listened with amazement as he spoke. Instead of addressing the fundamental problems behind the pressure on the dollar, he continued to blame speculators, crafting his words to make it sound like hwas moving to support the dollar while his actions were doing just the opposite. “floating it” as Nixon was doing, and then letting it sink like a stone, looked a lot like a lie to me. Over the decades since, I've repeatedly seen policymakers deliever such assurances immediately before currency devaluations, so I learned not to believe government policymakers when they assure you that they won't let a currency devaluation happen.

As I listened to Nixon speak, I wondered what those developments meant. Money as we'd known it a claim check to get gold no longer existed. That couldn't be good.

Monday morning I walked onto the floor of the exchange expecting pandemonium. There was pandemonium all right, but not the sort I expected: Instead of falling, the stock market jumped about 4% a significant daily gain.

To try to understand what was happening, I spent the rest of that summer studying past currency devaluations. I learned that everything that was going on – the currency breaking its link to gold and devaluing, the stock market soaring in response – had happened before, and that logical cause-effect relationships made those developments inevitable. My failure to anticipate this, I realized was due to my being surprised by something that hadn't happened in my lifetime, though it had happened many times before. The message that reality was conveying to me was “You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don't you won't know if these things can happen to you and if they do you won't know how to deal with them.”

I owned pork bellies stocks, I had lost a lot of money. It taught me the importance of risk controls, because I never wanted to experience that pain again. It enhanced my fear of being wrong and taught me to make sure that no single bet, or even multiple bets, could cause me to lose more than an acceptable amount. In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money. I believe that anyone who has made money in trading has had to experience horrendous pain at some point. Trading is like working with electricity, you can get an electric shock. With that pork belly trade and other trades, I felt the electric shock and the fear that comes with it.

I got fired from my job at Shearson, but the brokers, their clients and even the ones who fire me liked me and wanted to keep getting my advice. Even better, they were willing to pay me for it, so in 1975 I started Bridgewater Associates.

I set up a little business with Bob Scott, a friend from HBS. Along with a few pals in other countries, we made halfhearted attempts to sell commodities from the U.S. To other countries. We called it Bridgewater because we were “bridging the waters” and it had a good ring to it. By 1975 there wasn't much left of this commodities company, but as it did already exist on paper, I used it.

I worked out of my two-bedroom apartment. When a pal from HBS who I shared the apartment with moved out, I made his bedroom an office. I worked with another friend I played rugby with, and we hired a great young woman who worked as our assistant. That was Bridgewater.

Pursuing a mission with friends to help clients beat the markets was much more fun than having a real job. As long as my basic living expenses were covered, I knew I'd be happy.

MODELING MARKETS AS MACHINES

I was really getting my head into the livestock, meat, grain, and oilseed markets. I loved them because they were concrete and less subject than stocks to distorted perceptions of value. While stocks could stay too high or too low because “greater fools” kept buying or selling them, livestock ended up on the meat counter where it would be priced based on what consumers were willing to pay. I could visualize the processes that led to those sales and see the relationships underlying them. Since livestock eat grain (mostly corn) and soymeal, and since corn and soybeans compete for acreage, those markets are closesly related. I learned just about everything imaginable about them-- what the planted acreage and typical yields were in each of the major growing areas; how to convert rainfall levels in different weeks of the growing season into yield estimates; how to project harvest sizes, carrying costs, and livestock inventories by weight group, location and rates of weight gain; and how to project dressing yields, retailer margins, consumer preferences by cut of mean, and the amounts to be slaughtered in each season.

This wasn't academic learning: People with practice in the business showed me how to agricultural processes worked, and I organized what they told me into models I used to map the interactions of those parts through time.

For example, by knowing how many cattle, chickens and hogs were being fed, how much grain they ate, and how fast they gained weight, I could project both when and how much meat would come to market and when and how much corn and soymeal would be consumed. Likewise, by seeing how much acreage was planted with corn and soybeans in all the growing areas, doing regressions that showed how rainfall affected the yields in each of these areas and applying weather forecasts and rainfall data, I could project the timing and quantity of corn and soybean production. To me it all looked like a beautiful machine with logical cause-effect relationships. By understanding these relationships, I could come up with decision rules (or principles) I could model.

These early models were a far cry from the ones we use now; they were back-of-the-envelope sketches, analyzed and converted into computer programs with the technology I could afford at the time. At the very beginning, I did regressions on my handheld Hewlett-Packard HP-67 calculator, plotted charts by hand with colored pencils, and recorded every trade in composition notebooks. When the personal computer came along, I could input the numbers and watch them be converted into pictures of what would happen on spreadsheets. Knowing how cattle, hogs, and chickens progressed through their stages of production, how they competed fro meat-eater dollars, what meateaters would spend and why, and how the profit margins of meatpackers and retailers would influence their behaviours (for example with cuts of meat they would push in advertisements), I would see how the machine produced cattle, hog and chicken prices that I could bet on.

As basic as those early models were, I loved building and refining them – and they were good enough to make me money. The approach to price determination I was using was different from the one I had learned in my economics classes where supply and demand were both measured in terms of quantities sold. I found it much more practical to measure demand as the amount spent (instead of as the quantity bought) and to look at who the buyers and sellers were and why they bought and sold.

This different apporach was on of the key reasons I caught economic and market moves others missed. From that point on whever I looke at any market – commodities, stocks, bonds, currencies, whatever – I could see and understand imbalances that others whodefined supply and demand in the traditional way (as units that equaled each other) missed.

Visualizing complex systems as machines, figuring out the cause-effect relationships within them, writing down the principles for dealing with them, and feeding them into a computer so the computer could “make decidsions” for me all became standard practices.

Don't get me wrong. My approach was far from perfect. I vividly remember one “can't lose” bet that personally cost me about $100,00. That was most of my net worth at the time. More painful still, it hurt clients too. The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it's always best to assume you're missing something. This lesson changed my approach to decision making in ways that will reverberate throughout this book – and to which I attribute much of my success. But I would make many other mistakes before I fully changed my behaviour.

BUILDING THE BUSINESS

While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me.

Think about it: It's senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value – its value comes from what it can buy, and it can't buy everything. It's smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it's not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.

When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weight them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less – as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making moeny was an incidental consequence of that.

In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (”Grains and Oilseeds”, ”Livestock and Meats”, ”Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our busienss. Today aalmost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Obsrevations are read, reflected on, and argued about my clients and policymakers around the world. I'm still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expet to continue to write them until people don't care to read them or I die.

One of my consulting clients during this period was McDonald's, which was a huge beef buyer, and Lane Processing, then the largest chicken producer in the country. I made them both a lot of money – especially Lane Processing, which did even better from its speculations in the grain and soy markets than it did from raising and selling chickens.

Around this time, McDonald's had conceived of a new product, the Chicken McNugget, but they were reluctant to bring it to market because of their concern that chicken prices might rise and squeeze their profit margins. Chicken producers like Lane wouldn't agree to sell to them at a fixed price because they were worried that their costs would go up and they would be squeezed.

As I thought about the problem, it occurred to me that in economic terms a chicken can be seen as a simple machine consisting of a chick plus its feed. The most volatile cost that the chicken producer needed to worry about was feed prices. I showed Lane how to use a mix of corn and soymeal futures to lock in costs so they could quote a fixed price to McDonald's. Having freatly reduced its price risk, McDonald's introduced the McNugget in 1983. I felt great about helping make that happen.

I identified similar types of price relationships in the cattle and meat markets. For example, I showed cattle feeders how they could lock in strong profit margins by hedging good price relationships between their cost items (feeder cattle, corn and soymeal) and what they were going to sell (fed cattle) six months later. I developed a way of selling different cuts of fresh meat for future delivery at fixed prices far below crozen meat prices but that still produced big profit margins. Combining my clients' deep understanding of the way the “machines” of their own businesses operated with my knowledge of the way markets functioned worked to our mutual advantage, while making the markets more efficient overall. My ability to visualize these complex machines gave us a compeititve edge against those who were shooting from the hip, and eventually changed the way these industries operated. And, as always it was a kick to be working with people I liked.

I had made a lot of money on silver's rise to $10, I was kicking myself for missing the ride to $50. But at least by being out, I didn't lose money. There are anxious times in every investor's career when your expectations of what should be happening aren't aligned with what is happening and you don't know if you're looking at great opportunities or catastrophic mistakes. Because I ad a strong tendency to be right but early, I was inclined to think that was the case. It was, but to have missed the $40 move up was inexcusable to me. The plunge finally did happen in March 1980, silvercrashed back down before $11. It ruined Bunker Hunt (then the richest man in the world), and he nearly brought down the whole U.S. Economy as he fell. The Fed had to intervene to control the ripple effects. All of this pounded an indelible lesson into my head: Timing is everything. I was relieved that I was out of that market, but watching the richest man in the world – who was also someone I empathized with – go broke was jarring. Yet it was nothing compared to what was to come.

In 1979-1982 as I saw it, the Fed was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They either had to a) Print money to relieve debt problems and keep the economy going (which had already pushed inflation to 10 percent in 1981 and was causing people to dump bonds and buy inflation-hedged assets), or b) break the back of inflation by becoming bone-cushingly tight (which would break the back of debtors because debt was at the highest levels since the Great Depression). The worsening problem showed up in both progressively higher levels of inflation and progressively worse levels of economic activity. Both appeared to be coming to a head. Debts continued to rise much faster than the incomes borrowers needed to repay them, and American banks were lending huge amounts – much more than they had in capital – to emergineg countries. In March 1981, I wrote a Daily Observation entitled “The Next Depression in Perspective” and concluded it by saying, “The enormity of our debt implies that the depression will be as bad or worse than that witnessed in the thirties.”

I believed that the choice was between accelerating inflation and deflationary depresssion, I was holding both gold (which performs well in accelerating inflation) and bonds (which perform well in deflationary depressions). Up until that point, gold and bonds had moved in opposite directions, depending on wheter inflation expectations rose or fell. Holding those positions seemed much safe that holding alternatives like ccash, which would lose value in an inflation environment, or stocks, which would crash in a depression.

Mexico defaulted on it's debt and my prediction was starting to come true, a lot of people were intersted in what I had said and I was asked to be on popular stock market shows.

My prediction was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed's efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. Economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history.

How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors' committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for Interanational Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years.

My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong – and especially so publicly wrong – was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had build at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view.

So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I'd been right much more than I'd been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

At one point I'd lost so much money I couldn't afford to pay the people who worked with me. One by one, I had to let them go. We went down to two employees – Colman and me. Then Colman had to go. With tears from all, his family packed up and returned to Oklahoma. Bridgewater was now down to just one employee: me.

Losing people I cared so much about and very nearly losing my dream of working for myself was devestating. To make ends meet, I even had to borrow $4000 from my dad until we could sell our second car. I had come to a ford in the road: Should I put on a tie and take a job on Wall Street? That was not the life I wanted. On the other hand, I had a wife and two young children to support. I realized I was facing one of life's big turning points and my choices would have big implications for me and for my family's future.

FINDING A WAY PAST MY INTRACTABLE INVESTMENT PROBLEM

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy – if you can do all that in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.”

In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I'd said on Wall Street Week: “There'll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was.

Second, I again saw the value of studying history. What had happened, after all, was “another one of those.” I should have realized that debts denominated in one's own currency can be successfully restructured with the government's help, and that when central banks simultaneously provide stiumulus (as they did in March 1932, at the low point of the Great Depression, and as they did again in 1982), inflation and deflation can be balanced against each other. As in 1971, I had failed to recognized the lessons of history. Realizing that led me to try to make sense of all movements in all major economies and markets going back a hundred years and to come up with carefully tested decision-making principles that are timeless and universal.

Third, I was reminded of how difficult it is to time markets. My long-term estimates of equilibrium levels were not reliable enough to bet on; too many things could happen between the time I placed my bets and the time (if ever) that my estimates were reached.

Staring at these failings, I realized that if I was going to move forward without a high likelhood of getting whacked again, I would have to look at myself objectively and change – starting by learning a bettwe way of handling the natuaral agressiveness I've always shown in going what I wanted.

Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you apporach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.

I just want to be right I don't care if the right answer comes from me. So I learned to be radically open-minded to allow others to point out what I might be missing. I saw that the only way I could succeed would be to:

1) Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning.

2) Know when not to have an opinion.

3) Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles.

4) Balance risks in way that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.

Over the years that followed, I found that most of the extraordinarily successful people I've met had similar big painful failures that taught them the lessons that ultimately helped them succeed. I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push you limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think that you have failed but that won't be true unless you give up. Believe it or not, your pain will fade and you will have many other opportunities ahead of you, though you might not see them at the time. The most important thing you can do is to gather the lessons these failures provide and gain humility and radical open-mindedness in order to increase your chances of success. Then you press on.

The computer was much better than my brain in “thinking” about many things at once, and it could do it more precisely, more rapidly, and less emotionally. And, because it had such a great memory, it could do a better job of compounding my knowledge and the knowledge of the people I worked with as Bridgewater grew. Rather than argue about our conclusions, my partners and I would argue about our different decision-making criteria. Then we resolved our disagreements by testing the criteria objectively.

While the computer was much better than our brains in many ways, it didn't have the imagination, understanding, and logic that we did. That's why our brains working with the computer made such a great partnership.

Truweth be known, forecasts aren't worth very much, and most people who make them don't make money in the markets. This is because nothing is certain and when one overlays the probabilities of all of the various things that affect the future in order to make a forecast, one gets a wide array of possibilities with varying probabilities, not one highly probable outcome. We believe that market movements reflect economic movements. Economic movements are reflected in economic statistics. By studying the relationships between economic statistics and market movements, we've developed precise rules for identifying important shifts in the economic/market environment and in turn our positions. In other words, rather than forecasting changes in the economic environment and shifting positions in anticipation of them, we pick up these changes as they're occuring and move our money around to keep in those markets which perform best in that environment.

[ecotone99]

[SF] [HM] Case in Point

**Case in Point was written as a short story, and is also now the prologue for the SF novel I'm writing, of the same name. So feedback very much appreciated, good or bad, to help me shape & develop the novel!**

Frank Kincaid was not a happy man. He wasn’t even Frank Kincaid. At least, not the original.

It started like this: you want something done right, do it yourself. Don’t have the time? Copy yourself into a new body and send them instead. Expensive, certainly, but if the job was important enough, the payoff sufficiently high, you’d be crazy to send some other schlub. But what if the job was unpleasant? What if it was something you didn’t want to do? Well, that was easy too: you adjust the copy, tweak it a little so it won’t mind getting its hands dirty or, if it does, it’ll be stubborn enough to do it anyway. And then, assuming you’re a decent human being, you meet up afterwards, buy yourself a few beers, pat yourself on the back, and reintegrate.

Assuming. Of course, if you’re not a decent human being, then you just take the money and run. Saves having to fill your head with all those unsettling memories. And then your copy would find itself stranded somewhere – say, a sleazy bar in the cheap side of a half-finished habitat dome on Mars – with no money, some newly-acquired enemies, a head full of edited memories and personality algorithms, and one solitary certainty to cling to: that the real Them, whoever They were, whatever Their actual name might be, was an absolute, first-class, no-holds-barred, unrelenting bastard.

As small comforts go, that one was pretty tiny, but Kincaid clung to it with a tenacity that had probably cost his old self a small fortune in psychosurgery bills to acquire.

He glared up at the barman defiantly, and ordered a whisky. The barman glared back and laughed.

“Nice try. Orange juice or lemonade?”

Kincaid sighed, gesturing his meagre bank account into life in the space between them, and proffered a ¥2,000 note. “How about a coffee, and maybe you could Irish it up for me?”

The barman shook his head in disgust but took the bribe anyway. Kincaid snatched up the drink and retreated to a table in the corner where he could brood in peace.

“For the love of God, kid, read the sign. No smoking.”

Kincaid glanced guiltily at the cigar poised halfway to his mouth, and returned it unlit to his top pocket.

That was another thing. Would it have been too much to ask to give himself a fresh set of habits to go with the new body? Say, a keen interest in football, sucking his thumb, and fizzy drinks from around the solar system. As opposed to booze, tobacco, gambling and womanising – the last being particularly problematic. There was an old joke: “I wouldn’t touch any woman who’d be interested in the likes of me.” Ha. Welcome to Self Loathing, Population: 1.

He glowered into his coffee.

“Jen: Any interesting contracts available?”

Genevieve burst into glorious life in the corner of his retinal HUD and pursed ruby lips thoughtfully. “Some old lady’s offering fifty thou’ for the safe return of her missing cat?”

“Hysterical laughter. For the last time, I’m not a PI anymore, I don’t find pets. Next?”

“Halcyon have-”

“Hang on. Fifty grand? For a cat? Mark that one down as a definite maybe.”

“Sure thing. Halcyon Interplanetary Industries have a ¥150,000 bounty on one Tricia Altmann, wanted for embezzlement. Civil case, so bring her in alive. I’m flashing up her corporate ID, address, known contacts and immediate family.”

Kincaid scanned the data sourly. “A hundred and fifty. Well, aren’t they generosity incarnate. What did she do, make off with the petty cash? Don’t you have anything with a little punch? I’m not getting off this rock on cats and suits.”

That earned him a stern look from eyes the colour of molten bronze. “Cats and suits pay the bills, Frank. “Punch” gets you killed.”

“What are you, my Mum? Come on, something in seven figures, at least. Make it worth my while.”

She raised an eyebrow but let it pass. “You know I hate the ‘armed and dangerous’ file.”

“We’re not having this discussion again. I’m going back to Earth. I’m going to find the real me. I’m going to punch him for a while, and then I’m going to bodynap the bugger. Okay, maybe reverse the order on that one and switch bodies first. The important thing is, I’m getting my body back, and my life, and the real me can have this one, see how he likes it. That’s going to take money and plenty of it. And that means spraying bullets – no two ways about it.”

She gave him a Look. “It’s only because I care, Frank.”

“You’re programmed to care, don’t make it sound noble.” He regretted it instantly, but the damage was done. Synthetic hurt feelings washed over technicolour features, sculpted brows drawing together in artificial fury. “Listen, Jen-”

“Fine. You want seven figures? How about eight. The Raminov Brothers, Lev and Vadim, wanted for extortion, armed robbery and five counts of murder. Seven mil’ for Vadim, eleven for Lev, dead or alive. There’s your big score – might even cover the hospital fees. You can catch them now if you hurry, they’re all over the news, shooting up a housing fab three blocks away. Two badges dead at the scene, so – your lucky day – the reward should be going up any time now.”

“I-” The apology got no further than his throat, or its digital equivalent in his private VR, where it twisted into a grunt of annoyance. “Huh. Right then. Was that so hard? Flash me the address and let’s get going.”

She sulked all the way there. Well, he was an arsehole, right? Case in point: young Frank, two years out of New Scotland Yard Crime Academy, working traffic in South London. That’s London, Earth. As in, real air, real whisky, real coffee. There he was, admiring the congestion, when a black roadster came screaming out of a side street hotly pursued by a ’29 Ford Classique. They both swerved to avoid the gridlock, the Classique mistimed it, mounted the curb, and ran over a ten-year-old kid.

Messy. Kincaid still remembered the shock of staring down into the ruined face as he dialled the emergency services, hoping against hope the boy’s parents were among the privileged few who could afford personality backup, because it didn’t take a medical degree to see that nothing was going to be salvaged from what was left of that poor skull. The driver was stood beside Kincaid, sobbing that he was a copper in pursuit of a suspect, that he hadn’t seen the kid, oh Christ, he just came out of nowhere.

No sympathy. The man’s career was over, of course, and he didn’t try to fight it, but the higher-ups wanted to paint it as a freak accident. No Reckless Endangerment, just a blameless copper in the wrong place at the wrong time, resigning out of guilt and nothing more. Kincaid wouldn’t have it. That much speed in a built-up area, someone was going to get killed, and he testified accordingly. Two more ruined lives to add to those of the family – the kid wasn’t backed up, so it was jail for the officer, and Kincaid was drummed out of the force on a trumped-up disciplinary a few months later. Or maybe it wasn’t so trumped up; he’d had a few issues since the accident, hadn’t exactly been cooperative with the mandatory trauma counselling. So some punches were thrown, big deal.

The point was, he’d had it easy, threw it all away on a point of principle. And for what? To hammer another nail into the coffin of a man already riddled with guilt? Arsehole.

He checked the action on his Glock Needlegun, made sure the concealed armslide was unobstructed, and swung himself out of the beat-up VW that currently served his transportation needs. There were a couple of camerabots jockeying for position outside the fab’s characteristically Martian red brick frontage, but no immediate sign of trouble. He pushed past them, drawing angry electronic squawks as their live feeds filled with the back of his head.

A shot rang out from inside the building as he reached the entrance, followed by a burst of automatic fire. He flattened himself against the wall. The distant wailing of sirens gave him about a two minute lead on the police – couldn’t claim a bounty for men who were already dead or in custody. He unclasped his satchel, pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The foyer was gloomy and had the look of a rundown hotel, shoddily converted into housing after the colonial bubble burst: grubby carpet that might once have been beige, cracked plaster, and a cheap plastic reception desk made up to look like wood. Kincaid decided against using the lift and was halfway up the first flight of stairs when more automatic fire rang out, answered by a couple of single shots. Sounded like the next floor, somewhere off to the right. The bloody forms of two private police decorated the landing. No pulse.

He pushed through the door to his right and followed the gunfire down a dim corridor. Half the lighting strips were out and one in every two of the doorways had been crudely sealed up as part of the conversion, the brickwork left exposed. No one had even bothered to paint over. He peered around the corner and then ducked back hastily. Two men were taking cover beside a kicked-in door, automatic shotguns in hand, the kind of faces that betrayed a lifetime of violence – broken noses, cauliflower ears, more scar tissue than unmarred flesh. Lev and Vadim, without a doubt. There were bullet holes in the plaster behind them; someone was firing back?

The shotguns sounded out once, twice, three times. Kincaid risked a glance in time to see the pair pile through the doorway, firing as they went. He followed as stealthily as he could, pausing outside to take stock. The Russians were advancing down a short hall, weapons trained on the far door, through the tattered splinters of which could be seen the remains of a hand basin, a cramped bathtub, and fallen across it, bleeding heavily, a middle-aged woman. A handgun slipped from her grasp as Genevieve flashed up a photo ID: Tricia Altmann, formerly of Halcyon Interplanetary Industries.

Kincaid considered the Glock, but the odds of putting both men down cleanly without either twitching off a shot into Altmann’s face weren’t promising. No time to think. Shit.

“Mummy!” He broke cover and ran towards them, satchel bouncing around at his side. “Don’t hurt my mummy!”

The brothers turned in confusion, and one reached out a hand and grabbed him by the front of his school uniform, hauling him into the air. Pitiless eyes stared into his.

“Your mummy’s going to die, son. You can watch if you like.”

Kincaid reached into his top pocket. “Cigar?” he offered civilly, by way of a distraction, as his other hand found what it was looking for in the satchel and brought it out. “I’d run if I were you.”

He brought his little legs up against the Russian’s chest and kicked as the grenade hit the ground, clattering away across the tiles. He landed awkwardly, rolled into the tub next to Altmann, and covered her eyes as the flashbang detonated.

The Glock slid smoothly into his hand and he was firing blindly into the room before the flare died away. Huh. The Raminovs weren’t as stupid as they looked – there was no sign of them, which meant they’d either fled back down the hallway or else ducked into one of the side rooms. His ears were ringing too loudly to be much help on that front, but Genevieve reported the sound of running footsteps in the corridor outside.

“You okay?”

He realised the futility of the question when his own words were drowned out by the ringing, so he settled for checking her over by hand. Her shoulder was a mess and blood was seeping from a wound in her side, but she was strong enough to pull him off when he tried to lift the blouse.

“Listen-” He shook his head, and switched to virtual audio courtesy of Genevieve. “Listen, you need medical attention. Here-” He fumbled in the satchel and brought out a medical kit. He started to pantomime patching her wounds, but it seemed she’d had the same idea about virtual audio.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Kincaid. Hi. How are you? Now help me get that blouse off before you bleed to death.”

It wasn’t pretty. Buckshot might not be the most sophisticated of technologies, but the shotguns were state of the art, military-grade kit. Powerful, lethal, highly illegal, and still relatively safe to use within the confines of a hab dome. Not as safe as his needle rounds, mind, but not everyone could be the upstanding citizen he was.

He tutted and sprayed on idiot mix – a combination antiseptic, anaesthetic and fast-acting clotting agent that was usually enough to get the drunk and accident-prone to hospital before they bled out. The pock-marked flesh scabbed over and he added a layer of synthskin for good measure. It looked a god awful lumpy mess, but then it would all have to be redone when the shot was removed anyway.

She glanced at him questioningly and he shrugged. “You’ll live. Probably. Here-” He offered his hand and half-helped, half-dragged her out of the tub. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the sound of a dozen pairs of flat feet piling out of a rapid response unit. Fancy sticking around and explaining all this? Didn’t think so. Rear exit?”

She led the way. They came out in the car park, and she unlocked a corporate dronemobile and ushered him in. There’d be some explaining to do when the police traced his VW out front, but he’d have to figure that out later.

��So what’s your story?”

The car glided out of the lot and into the Martian twilight, and Altmann eased the seat back and sprawled. Her hair was more dust than brunette, her face a patchwork of worry lines, pale with shock, but there was enough of a hint that she might be bookishly handsome underneath it all for him to want to like her. She quirked a tired grin at him. “You first, ‘son’.”

He grimaced. “You don’t want to hear all that.”

She laughed, then clutched at her shoulder. “Ow. Sure, no one ever wants to hear that story, I bet.”

“Hardly anyone at all,” he agreed dryly. “Okay, fair enough. My name may or may not be Frank Kincaid, and I’m not me. I’m a copy. If I can trust my own memories, which honestly I don’t, I was created to collect on a particularly difficult bounty here in New Beijing.”

To be fair, she was probably too tired to look especially shocked, but she still took it pretty well. “Bounty hunter, huh? That mean we’re about to take a detour to Halcyon corporate HQ?”

“The thought had crossed my mind. But I’m happy to cruise on auto while we talk things through. I was after the Russians.”

“Isn’t it against some kind of code to take out the competition?”

He snorted. “Those two, bounty hunters? Do me a favour. The pittance on your head wasn’t even enough to get my attention, never mind the Raminov Brothers.”

“Pittance? I’m positively insulted. I thought they’d at least stretch to a trifle. So if they aren’t bounty hunters, who are they?”

“Thugs. Killers. Any idea why they’d want to spray paint your home in buckshot grey?”

“Not if they weren’t after the money. That wasn’t my home, by the way. That was temporary. Trying to lie low...” Her voice tailed off and she looked for a moment like she might be sick, then she drew in a long breath and sighed it out. “So, you were telling me about this person you’re not. If I’ve got this right, you’re some kind of edited copy, sent to kill a big shot here in New Beijing. Anyone I know?”

“Wu Lao Hui.”

He smirked. No hiding her reaction to that little name drop.

“Wait, you-”

“Yep. Wu, AKA Ahmad Ben Shah, AKA The Butcher of Benghazi, AKA Theodore Valentinas. That last name you probably won't have heard before, but it’s the one he was born with. The man swapped identities like you’d swap shoes. Anyway, that was me. Unnamed government operative, my arse.”

She frowned sceptically. “The Libyans couldn’t reach him, and you took him out in that piece of shit body?”

“Appearances can be deceptive. Which was the whole point. Valentinas had a brother, lived with him in the bunker, and the brother had a family. Specifically, a wife, Lara, and their ten-year-old son, Raph. This body was custom ordered by the original me to be a perfect duplicate of Raph. I was created to occupy that body, and psychosurgically altered to suit the needs of the operation. I strolled in past security, shot Valentinas twice in the chest and once in the head, and strolled right back out again.”

She whistled. “So why-”

“-doesn’t anyone know it was me?”

“And why-”

“-am I still here? Because, firstly, killing the head of the most powerful crime family in New Beijing is one thing, living to tell the tale is another (hello, Frank Kincaid, blabbermouth, pleased to meet you), and secondly, I can’t afford transport off this rock. Frank 1.0 welched on the deal. Collected the money and disappeared. That’s assuming, of course, there ever was a version of me working as a bounty hunter on Earth, and I wasn’t cooked up in a lab by Libyan Intelligence to take care of business. Plausible deniability, all that jazz.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of uncertainty to live with, and any way you look at it-”

“-I’m buggered. Yep. Speaking of which, your career prospects aren’t looking too rosy right now either. Care to fill me in? Maybe we can work out why two hired killers with military issue hardware have taken such a dislike to you.”

She took another deep breath. “It doesn’t make any sense. Look, I work in Accounts. The pay stinks, the hours are lousy, and my boss has bad breath and wandering hands. So, I siphoned a little out of the slush fund. A couple of mil’. Just enough to tide me over till I found a new job – I didn’t think they’d even notice.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, several mil’. Nine, actually. Still, petty cash to a hypercorp.” She leaned into him, one hand on his chest, and big brown eyes bore into his. “Please help me, Frank.”

Kincaid sighed and shook his head sadly. “Just when I was starting to like you. You’re a poor helpless pencil pusher who got greedy, and now the big nasty hypercorp is trying to kill you. Good thing there’s a strong, dashing man for you to snuggle up to.” His lip curled in disgust. “You’re not a pervert, Ms Altmann, and neither am I, so drop the act. You wouldn’t be trying to manipulate me this hard unless you knew a lot more than you’re letting on.”

She recoiled as if she’d been struck, and sat watching him for a moment. “Halcyon are trying to kill me, Mr Kincaid.”

“Doesn’t wash. Why set the bounty so low if they give a damn about finding you? Try again.”

“Because licenced bounty hunters won’t kill over simple theft – it’s illegal. And Halcyon don’t want me alive, they want me dead. I took ¥100,000,000, and it’s still not about the money.”

Kincaid whistled softly. “Go on.”

“It’s about our Russian friends, in a way. And corporate espionage, corruption, false accounting, insider trading; all the happy things. A lot of big players went bust when the bubble burst, and Halcyon owns most of them now. There’s reasons for that. Dirty, shameful reasons. The kind of reasons politicians need an incentive to overlook. I was supposed to deposit the money in Governor Chou’s Swiss bank account, like I do every month. I opened one of my own instead.”

The pieces rotated in Kincaid’s mind, and clicked into place. The best way to serve a lie was with a liberal garnishing of the truth. “So they accused you of petty theft to cover up a larger one. Posted a bounty so low they hoped you’d never be found. Sent in a team of their own to make sure.”

“That’s about the size of it. What do you plan on doing, now that you know? I’ll cut you in for half if you take me someplace safe. You could get back to Earth on that kind of money, set yourself up with a whole new life.”

He would’ve taken her offer – of course he would. He didn’t get the chance, because at that moment a black van T-boned the saloon, crumpling the left rear corner like so much tin foil and sending the vehicle spinning into a wall.

It could’ve been worse. If the autodrive hadn’t swerved at the last moment, Altmann would have been crushed to a pulp and Kincaid would have found himself pinned between the van and the wall. As it was, the car’s automatic restraints protected him from the brunt of it, and he was left with a nasty case of whiplash and a stupid look on his face.

After that the shot starting flying. The rear window vanished, along with both rear headrests, followed shortly after by Kincaid’s. Fortunately, he was already huddled in the footwell by that point, nursing his Glock and trying to kick the passenger door open. It wouldn’t budge. What did budge was the window, which exploded outwards, the roof support, which was neatly severed halfway down, and finally the windscreen, which shattered in several places before giving up the ghost entirely. Then the roof fell in.

It’s hard to describe the destructive force of a fully automatic shotgun if you haven’t witnessed one in action, but if you imagine a regular machine gun and scale up appropriately, you’ll get the general idea. Kincaid got the idea and hammered desperately at the door, wishing he had bigger legs. If the top half of the door had still been present, he probably wouldn’t have managed it, but as it was the composite cracked, split in the middle, and gave way. He wriggled out with all the grace of a beached turbot, leaving an ugly wash of red in his wake.

“Kincaid?”

The firing had stopped. He reached into the footwell and fumbled out his satchel.

“You in there, Kincaid?”

He slid out the compact Heckler and Koch he kept for special occasions, extended the shoulder rest, smacked in a clip and thumbed off the safety.

“We know who you are, Mr Kincaid. We know your reputation. We work for powerful people. Wealthy people. We can pay you a great deal of money to walk away now. We can give you a new body. An adult body, Mr Kincaid, custom grown to your specifications. Combat chassis, muscle aug, the works.”

Kincaid flipped open the access port behind the HK’s tactical display and pulled out the fibre optic viewer concealed there. Bellying forward across the debris, barely aware of the agony in his back, he slid the fibre round the corner of the car and monitored the display. There was the black van, doors open, Lev and Vadim sheltering behind them, weapons trained on the car. He synced the display with his retinal HUD and painted his targets. Then he fired twice into the air.

There was a brief flare as the micromissiles took flight, a streak of light across the tactical display, and both Russians dropped, headless, to the ground.

Kincaid laughed grimly and coughed up blood.

“Jen?” Technicolour curves filled his view. “What’s the damage?”

He didn’t really need to ask. Her playful expression was gone, replaced by a mask of concern. “Multiple buckshot wounds to the back. You have liver damage, kidney damage, intestinal perforations, massive internal bleeding. I – I’m sorry, Frank. I’ve already called an ambulance.”

“ETA?”

She shook her head. “Without medical insurance? Too long. Idiot mix isn’t going to cut it this time.”

He craned his neck, tried to move, then gave up and fed the fibre optic up over the remains of the side window and into the car. There was precious little left of the driver’s seat. Some of the frame, some cushioning, fragments of fabric imbedded in Altmann’s corpse.

He sighed. “You know, that wasn’t a bad offer they made.”

“You should’ve bid them up. They probably would’ve thrown in a fancy car and a house in France.”

“When you’re right, you’re right.”

He lay there for a moment, a cosy endorphin glow starting to replace the fiery throbbing in his back. Drowsily, he said, “Would’ve been nice to get back home. Teach that bastard a lesson.”

The mask cracked. Tears welled in amber eyes.

“It’s a lie, Frank. All of it.”

He frowned, half asleep. “Hm?”

“You’re not a copy. You never were. You’re not Kincaid, but you’re not a copy either. Your name is Webber, Frank Webber.”

The officer who ran the boy over, back in London. That made no sense. That’s not how it went.

“The Met wanted to go easy on you, Frank, but you wouldn’t have it. You talked to the press, told the family exactly what happened. Pled guilty to manslaughter. You served three years in hell when you could’ve walked away, but when you got out, it still wasn’t enough. You kept saying the punishment didn’t fit the crime. You hated yourself. So very much.” She wept, electronic tears streaming down flawless cheeks.

“So you decided to run away. From yourself, from what you’d done. That wasn’t easy in the centre of a media frenzy, you were going to need a new body and fake ID, and transport to someplace far away. You already owed a fortune – the kind of fortune it takes for a child-killing copper to survive behind bars. It took you a while, but you were desperate, and you came up with a plan. You went to the Libyans, offered to solve their problem for them. They trained you, carved away those awful memories, built you a new reality. A new Frank, in a new body, living a whole new life. The punishment fit the crime, I guess.”

Thoughts tumbled through his mind. Memories clashing with facts. None of it fitted anything he knew, it made no sense, and every word of it was hideously, unquestionably true.

“Jen?”

“Sh, Frank. Rest until the ambulance gets here. Just rest now.”

“I better bloody be dying, Jen.” He laughed wildly, coughed, red foam flecking his lips. “Otherwise this was one hell of a wasted effort.”

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