22:10, Docklands, NMK, Sunday the 25th of April, 2055.

22:10, Docklands, NMK, Sunday the 25th of April, 2055.

Roland lays Sykes on the back seat of the car. Yuki gives him a quick once over and pronounces that he's mostly just stunned. Leaving him there to regain his senses (or what little of them he ever had anyway) Yuki returns to the wounded gang members she's still treating.

Roland and Crash head back up the alley to have a look at the door now the smoke and dust has cleared. A short while later metallic banging and crashing sounds issue forth. I guess the door wasn't blown open then.

There's a burst of static from the radio and somewhere within it is Roland's voice announcing his plan to climb onto the roof of the building to see what he can find. Then a minute or so of silence, before another technological hiss attests to the fact that Roland has scaled a drainpipe and is on the roof.

It's a flat roof of around a hundred feet in length, punctuated only by two skylights. He can't see much of any note when he looks in through them though. Nor is there any sign on the roof of anyone having been there recently.

Meanwhile, Sykes has come round enough to make a phone call apparently. Looking back at the car from where I stand watching over Yuki giving her tender ministrations to the street punks, he's clearly on the phone to someone, though he's listening more than talking.

When he's finished on the phone, he gets out the car and walks over to me and Yuki looking like the proverbial meerkat that got the cream. He says he's got the skinny on Nanotech Industries and starts telling us before we can interject.

As far as the public are concerned, Nanotech Industries is a nanotechnology company that produces neuralware processors. Their processors aren't anything special, but the 'installation' process is. They use nanites to knit their processors into the nervous system of the victim. Sorry, I did of course mean customer. Those nanites are their unique selling point, as an interweb marketeer might say.

Now, the word on the street is that the company was recently the victim (there's that word again, but in context this time) of a hostile takeover. Now I know what you're thinking, "Cool. Who got blown away then?", but this wasn't one of those kinds of hostile takeover. More unusually for contemporary business dealings, this was a hostile takeover of a purely financial nature.

The 'taker' was a company called iCorp and word has it that they weren't after the company, so much as a nanotechnician called Edward Courvoissier.

It's at about this point in the tale that Roland and Crash appear at the end of the alley...