SiN

Ten years ago, in 2027, the city of Freeport teetered on the brink of collapse, its understaffed and inefficient police losing the long fight against crime. With the overstretched government unable to keep the peace, a bill was passed granting individual corporations the right to form their own police and security forces in exchange for protecting the companies and citizens of the cities, giving rise to a new order of law enforcement. Several respected sec-forces emerged, among them a hard-hitting outfit called HARDCORPS, which helped lead the charge in crime prevention, and slowly order returned to the streets. Now Colonel John Blade, HARDCORPS's owner, is hunting the source of a street drug called "U4." Long in circulation and fiercely addictive, the drug has lately been doing strange things to its users, and it falls to Blade to uncover what's happening, identify who or what is behind the bizarre afflictions plaguing the streets, and put an end to it. The trail leads back to the enigmatic Elexis Sinclair, a brilliant biochemist determined to push human evolution forward by a thousand generations — and willing to stop at nothing to get what she wants.