Zai was using 90% of her processing power on the most critical task she’d ever undertaken. Trying, with the remaining 10%, to save Curtweather and fight two NME’s was more than a little challenging therefor.

Curtweather’s rescue was relatively simple. A green flash of the led on his weapon at the right moment told him that it was just as live as Ai’s had been. He’d jumped at the chance, grabbed the gun, shot three of his former comrades (non-fatally, which was unfortunate in Zai’s view), and then fled back down the stairs. All Zai had to do to give him enough of a head start was to lock the door behind him before the remaining cops could follow him.

Zai had a ticket flagged in her memory as a reminder to expose the initial arrest warrant as a fabrication. It would clear Ai’s name, posthumously, but more importantly, it would allow her to maneuver the GCPD into destroying the officers who were involved.

Well aside from Adams. He was already pretty thoroughly destroyed given the huge void where he’d once had a head and most of his shoulders.

Zai had another ticket with his name on it. That one was to make sure that his entire estate was liquidated and consumed by Heartless’s various enterprises. Then she would unearth as many of his shady dealings as she could, and make it look like he’d left information to rat them all out in the event of his demise. Zai couldn’t cause Adams any more direct harm so destroying his legacy would have to suffice. If that happened to leave people less trusting of including police in on criminal dealings then mission accomplished.

Those were tasks for the future though. Of more immediate concern were the two Gray League agents who Tython had decided to sacrifice to the NME transformation.

Or were they sacrifices?

Ai had been concerned that Tython was potentially close to completing their “Cure” for the NME transformation. People would pay exorbitant sums of money to be protected from the transformation themselves, but to be able to transform others and bring them back? That would be world conquering.

“What is happening to those guys?” Sidewalker asked. In one hand he held a gun that wasn’t going to be of any use against an NME. In the other he held a explosive chip the size of a credit card which packed the blasting power of a box of grenades. It also wasn’t going to be of any use against an NME.

“They are mid-transition NMEs,” Zai said through the Heartless robot interface.

Sidewalker shot each of them three times again. He threw the blasting card at them. The shots did damage and the blasting card did more. Unfortunately the only net result a second later was that the transformations increased in speed and the partial NMEs blinked to life from their mid-transformation quiessence.

“That only made them mad, didn’t it?” Sidewalker asked.

“We need to be on another building,” Zai said. Speaking through Heartless’s interface wasn’t difficult, and even with most of her attention elsewhere she had plenty left to evaluate the environment and their options. What she didn’t have was a lot of choices to pick from.

The restaurant wasn’t located in a particularly tall building. Jumping to the neighboring roofs was an impossibility for Heartless’s tourism bot, and unlikely for Sidewalker even with his combat class bio-mods.

That meant dropping down to street level was their only real option. The other Gray league agents would be waiting for them on the ground, but the real problem was that the NMEs would follow them.

If they tried to hide in the crowds, the crowds would die. If they tried to flee from the crowds, they’d be easier to find, and, depending on how well Tython had perfected their NME control scheme, the crowds would still suffer tremendous casualties.

Zai had been with Ai for long enough that the simple numerical calculation of “x lives lost with option 1” vs. “y lives lost with option 2” wasn’t sufficient to drive her to a decision.

“We need to go back into the restaurant,” she said.

Sidewalker cast her a confused glance, but absorbed the idea quickly.

“Can you call the cops?” Sidewalker asked. “Normally I’m not a fan of them showing up but in this case it’d be nice if there was someone else to shoot at than us.”

Zai laughed without letting it show on the Heartless bot. There were a number of police officers she would be delighted to put in na NME’s line of fire but instead she was actively suppressing the tourism bots automated distress call.

“Tython has significant inroads into the GCPD,” she said. “Any officers that show up are likely to be more guns firing at us.”

Sidewalker jumped back down into the hatch they’d climbed out of and Zai heard gunshots ring out. Echolocation put the cries of pain as being distant from the opening, which reassured her that Sidewalker had shot first and more accurately.

She dropped down into the building as the first NME began to move. One of the HVAC units on the rooftop tore away from its mooring on the building as the NME’s transformation continued pulling pieces of the cooling unit into the armored shell that surrounded the former Gray League agent.

In the hall below there was a Gray League agent spread out on the floor by the stairwell. Sidewalker was crouched in an open doorway and for a brief moment there weren’t any gunshots ringing out.

“Ten seconds until NME incursion,” Zai said, hating how limited speech was for conveying information but choosing to gamble that the Gray League agents who heard her words would understand the danger they were in as well and react accordingly.

Unfortunately, not all gambles pay off.

A Gray League agent used the sound of Heartless’s voice to locate the new arrival and popped off two deliberate shots before Sidewalker’s return fire forced the agent to duck back into the stairs.

Zai noticed that both shots had hit her center mass. The tourism bot wasn’t particularly well armored – they were expressly disallowed from doubling as combat units – so the bullets had both punched right through her robotic torso. Unlike a human however, the tourism bot had  distributed control systems and could ignore a few trivial things like gaping holes through the center of their sternum.

“We all have to flee,” Zai said, advancing with loud footsteps down the hall towards the Gray League agents.

The agent took a chance on firing another pair of rounds off at her, but it proved to be a tactical mistake. Zai had moved in the hallway to allow Sidewalker a clear field of fire. The instant the Gray League agent stuck his head around the corner, a bullet from Sidewalker’s gun drilled a neat hole from the front of the agent’s cranium to the back.

Sidewalker didn’t wait for the agent to finish falling. He scooped up the Heartless bot that Zai was piloting and dashed over the toppling agent, diving down the stairs just as the first NME burst through the roof.

Zai was glad for her lack of a human endocrine system. Sidewalker had to deal with the complications of chemicals flooding his body, enhancing his flight or flight response at the cost of degrading his reasoning capabilities. To his credit, and as a testament to his experience, he didn’t seem to have lost too much awareness or cognitive capability, but Zai still saw the next agent before he did.

Tourism bots are not meant for combat. Tourism bots are also filled with valuable electronics. Tourists often take tourism bots to places in the city where they should not go. Those facts taken together explain the array of non-lethal weaponry high end tourism bots are equipped with.

That Zai could circumvent the manufacturer’s safety limitation on the charge applied by the Tourism bots palm taser was not the fault of the engineers who designed in. It was strictly against the warranty to make internal modifications to a rented tourism bot. Also, to turn any of the non-lethal weapon systems into something dangerous to humans would require the passcodes from the original equipment manufacturer in addition to a deep working knowledge of the bots schematics.

Zai didn’t feel good about electrocuting the Grey League agent who tried to ambush them around the corner of the stairs. She didn’t feel bad about it either though.

She could have used just enough charge to render him unconscious, but any combat mods could have remedied that condition before he hit the ground.

She could have used enough charge to kill the agent but an NME activation code would have been enough to resuscitate him in a form that was far more difficult to deal with.

So she set him on fire.

His bio-mods were capable of coping with an extreme amount of damage when measured on a human scale. Enough voltage to ignite a body made mostly of water however was also enough to cook the combat mods before they had a chance to either repair the agent or go haywire and transform into an NME.

“What the hell?” Sidewalker shouted, vaulting off the wall to get away from the flaming corpse that exploded beside him at Zai’s touch.

“No more NMEs,” Zai said. “Two is more than enough.”

The rest of the Gray League agents apparently received word that the NMEs were active and felt the same, because none were in evidence when Sidewalker and Zai reached the bottom floor.

“We’re right back with the same problem we had before,” Sidewalker said.

“No, it’s much worse now,” Zai said.

“Sewers this time?” Sidewalker asked.

“They’ve mined the hallway leading to the basement entrance,” Zai said.

“Are the mines enough to stop the NMEs?” Sidewalker asked.

“No,” Zai said. “They’re enough to render either of us disfunctional but they’ll barely scratch a fully transformed NME.”

Sidewalker was backing away from the stairs which the NMEs from the roof were tearing apart as they descended. He stepped past a window and Zai’s limited tactical algorithm kicked in.

She threw her right hand up, losing it in the process but deflecting the sniper shot that would have clipped Sidewalker in the temple. Without a word, he dropped below the sight line of the window and rolled to put a table between himself and the wall as well.

There were sniper rounds that could easily punch through a wall, a table, and kill the person behind both, but hitting someone in motion with those other defenses in play required better gear or skill than most standard mercenaries came equipped with, even ones on the scale of the Gray League.

“Any ideas?” Sidewalker asked, still in motion and angling to return fire at the sniper since that was the only part of their current problem set he was able to affect.

Zai ran a few simulations, dedicating the full 10% of her processing that she had available. Curtweather looked like he was a clever mastermind who’d managed to escape certain doom already thanks to her machinations. The illusion worked best if he wasn’t apprehended, but if Zai had to sacrifice someone, he was the prime candidate under the circumstances.

“Yes,” she said after reaching a conclusion that was roughly a thousand times riskier than she preferred. “Let’s hope this works.”

As the NMEs smashed into the room, she rose to meet them.

NMEs vary tremendously in capabilities. The only constants are their near indestructible nature and the guaranteed presence of multiple weapon systems.

The two who entered the main dining area were still in the process of transforming, as Zai had expected. Their weapon systems were adapted to that, scrounging wood and metal and cloth into their structure as they built and rebuilt their armor for the battle to come.

“If this doesn’t work in the next two seconds, run!”  Zai said and walked directly between the two NMEs.

They tore her to shreds.

Bits of the Tourism bot were ripped off and incorporated into each of the NMEs, until, in less than a second, nothing remained of the mechanism Zai had been driving.

That’s when she tore into them.

“Thank you for giving me direct access to your code,” she said. “Now let’s see about that control mechanism shall we.”

Zai had never felt the urge to let out gales of evil laughter as much as she did when the walls protecting the NME’s control centers fell before her.

With just a few simple touches, the light in the NME’s eyes shifted and the destroyers were hers.

Sidewalker didn’t mind waiting. The peaceful moments in life were too few and too fragile to not enjoy while you had the chance. The rest of his team would have been itching to conclude the meeting with Heartless and be on getting back to “lucrative endeavors”, and that was Sidewalker didn’t invite them along to meetings with their clients all that often.

Herding his current team wasn’t bad, but none of them had the sense of timing and tact needed for building professional relationships. It was a shame. If he could offload the work onto one of them, make them the team’s liaison with the rich and powerful, he could focus on the tactical planning that he enjoyed the most. As it was, he tried to parlay the ability to be quiet and patient he’d learned as a sniper into the sort of demeanor that made clients think he was attentive and respectful enough to trust with the sort of jobs they were willing to part with large sums of money to see handled discretely. That it worked as often as it did was a continuing source of delight and amusement.

“My apologies,” Mr. Heartless said after going inactive for several minutes. “That was more critical than I’d expected.”

Sidewalker nodded, finishing up the last of his meal and wiping the corner of his mouth. Heartless hadn’t taken that long, and the break in the conversation hadn’t come at a bad time. From anyone else, the apology would have seemed out of character, but Mr. Heartless had always treated their business dealings as the meetings of equals rather than “lord and servant” arrangements many wealthy clients liked to believe they had with their hired guns.

“Need to call the meeting here to deal with the fallout?” Sidewalker asked. It seemed like a good stopping point anyways. There wasn’t much more to discussed since his team had rejected the notion of attempting a live capture on an NME. Even with the gear that Heartless had offered, the risks involved put the operation far outside their accepted mission parameters. Someone else could try for the “not impossible, but extremely likely to lead to vaporization” mission and enjoy the big win if they succeeded.

Sidewalker knew that, with Heartless’s backing, someone would eventually manage to take an NME in while it was still functional, but he was also certain it wouldn’t be the first team who tried it. Let one of the teams that were desperate to prove themselves rush in and provide data for the ones who followed them.

“Yes and no,” Heartless said. “I have another contract to offer you.”

“Not NME related?” Sidewalker asked.

The restaurant had emptied since they’d come in. Of the three other tables, only one was left finishing their food still. That was odd. Usually the lunch rush would have the place at least half full or better.

“I can’t promise that,” Heartless said. “But I can promise you that you’ll want to take this contract.”

“If NMEs are involved at all, I’ll have to discuss it with my team,” Sidewalker said. They had been adamant about not tangling with the techno-monsters and Sidewalker didn’t blame them. Even the military didn’t do well against those things and, for as well equipped as Sidewalker’s team was, they still didn’t have the combat strength of a platoon of soldiers.

“This isn’t a contract for them,” Heartless said. “This is a contract for you, right here, right now.”

Confusion swept over Sidewalker’s face and he started to protest but Heartless silenced him with a handwave.

“There are half a dozen or more Gray League agents outside this restaurant,” Heartless said. “Tython has employed the Gray League before so they’re most likely here for you and me. So far everyone they’ve engaged has been targeted with lethal force. This contract is to compensate for saving both of us.”

“But they can’t kill you,” Sidewalker said. “You’re not really here.”

“I’m not, but this tourism bot has communication logs and authentication information. They could use that as a stepping stone to find me. That’s why I wish to employ you.”

“You want me to get the bot out of here?” Sidewalker asked.

“I want you to get both yourself and this bot to a secure location,” Heartless said. “If you fall into their hands, they’ll most likely do a destructive scan of your bio-systems. That would give them more information to find me with, and it would be fatal to you, which would make it difficult to call on your continued services.”

As Heartless spoke, a contract appeared in Sidewalker’s in queue. He called it up and found a simple document with a large sum of money on the bottom line.

“Six agents you say?” He debated whether it was worth trying to haggle for more.

“Correction, eight, two more identified behind the building,” Heartless said. “This increases the likelihood of troops beyond that number to 90%. Payment has been increased to reflect twelve hostile combatants.”

Heartless’s voice always sounded synthesized, but his diction had become rigidly robotic in the face of stress.

“Count me in then,” Sidewalker said, tapping the button for agreement and subvocalizing his authorization codewords.

“The restaurant will be empty of patrons in one minute,” Heartless said. “That’s their most likely attack window.

“You said there’s two waiting in back? How many on the rooftop?” Sidewalker asked.

“One second,” Heartless said, apparently meaning it literally because he continued without missing more more than a single tick of the clock. “There are two on the roof as well.”

“Good, that’s our exit path then,” Sidewalker said.

“No!” Heartless said, hands surging upwards in exactly the sort of animation he never showed.

“What else is up there?” Sidewalker asked, trying to remember if Heartless had ever mentioned a fear of heights.

“In terms of active threats I can identify, just the two of them,” Heartless said. “But they’re encamped. The moment we climb up the ladder, they’ll have an open field of fire on us.”

“I can work with that,” Sidewalker said. “The important thing is that the two up there aren’t in a position for the other forces to assist them. They’re relying on surprise. If we take that away from them, they’ll be our easiest path out.”

“No. Things do not work out well on roofs,” Heartless said, frozen in place by some phantom of memory that Sidewalker couldn’t begin to guess at. The paralysis passed with preternatural speed though as Heartless resumed speaking in a steady, and unemotional voice. “There is a danger beyond the baseline capabilities of the Gray League agents. If we make a clear escape it is probable that one or more NMEs will be activated to pursue us.”

“Activated?” Sidewalker asked.

NME’s were supposed to be code degenerations, aberrant mutations that twisted basic combat bio-mods into hideously overperforming beasts of destruction.

“I’ve added an addendum to the contract,” Heartless said. “If we escape from this I will explain what I have discovered about NMEs and how you can ensure neither you nor your team falls victim to an activation.”

“I’d prefer to have that information now so that my team can be protected even if we don’t survive,” Sidewalker said.

“We don’t have time at present,” Heartless said. “They are starting to close in. The backdoor has been breached.”

“If we can’t go up and we can’t go out, then we’ve got to go down,” Sidewalker said.

“There’s access to a basement level from the kitchen,” Heartless said.

Sidewalker had no idea how someone human could be as prepared as Heartless was. Sidewalker always looked up the schematics for the locations they worked at, but looking up the plans for a restaurant you weren’t even going to personally be present at? That spoke to either an extreme depth of paranoia or the ability to parse information at a ludicrous rate.

“Can we get there before the strike team coming in from the back does?” Sidewalker asked.

“No,” Heartless said. “There’s a external window. They would have seen us earlier and they will be directly in our path at this point.”

“Then we risk the roof, and if NMEs show up, we pray for a miracle,” Sidewalker said.

As soon as they started moving, the team outside the front of the restaurant would be alerted. Sidewalker knew that.

“Pretend you’re pestering me, and follow me towards the bathroom,” he said, rising and throwing his napkin down onto the table as though their conversation had just come to an angry and disagreeable end.

Despite being in an only barely human-ish robot body, Heartless did a good job of selling a visual narrative that he was exasperated with Sidewalker and intent on getting the last word in.

Babbling near incoherent phrases the two of them stalked towards the bathrooms. Which also happened to be adjacent to the stairs leading up.

The tourism bot wasn’t as fast as Sidewalker was, but it also didn’t need to slow down for turns like he did. Where Sidewalker whipped himself from one set of stairs to the next, Heartless simply slammed into the wall and used the rebound to reverse his direction quickly.

They made it up to the roof access hatch just as they heard sound of feet beginning to scramble up the steps from the ground floor level.

“Which direction are the two waiting for us?” Sidewalker asked.

“Up there,” Heartless said, pointing at an angle to the southwest.

A data feed from an unknown source appeared offering an overlay projection and before Sidewalker could choose to accept it, his display system had connected to it and rendered the image on his vision.

It was a tactical visualization driven by the city’s EyeGrid. He could see exactly where their ambushers were waiting, and could call up multi-angle display windows to evaluate the overall environment.

“Uh, thanks?” he said, unsure about the casual breach of his internal security but grateful for the combat data.

“How do we get past them?” Heartless asked.

“Like this,” Sidewalker said and flipped the access open. Through it he tossed a black pellet that exploded into a cloud of noxious purple mist. His breath filters were pre-programmed to deal with the cloud, and Heartless didn’t breath at all but, more importantly, with the top of the roof engulfed in a vision obscuring fog, their ambushers couldn’t tell when Sidewalker leapt onto the roof.

Since they’d been staying still, he took a gamble and assumed they hadn’t moved from the last position he saw them in. His gun barked six times in less than a second, recoil compensators and inertial tracking systems ensuring each bullet found its mark.

He didn’t wait for the cries of pain, or the thud of bodies on the rooftop before turning to pull Heartless up. He didn’t need to though. With a single spring of his robotic legs, Heartless sailed up onto the roof on his own.

“Tourist bots don’t tend to be that agile,” Sidewalker noted.

“I paid for some extras,” Heartless said. “Can you slow the people pursuing us from below?”

“A grenade would do it, but I hate to think what it would do to the restaurant,” Sidewalker said.

“I can pay for the damages,” Heartless said.

“To the staff?” Sidewalker asked.

“We should find another building to be on,” Heartless said.

But things weren’t that simple for them. Sidewalker wasn’t surprised. Things were never as simple as he wanted them to be.

There’d been no a thud of bodies hitting rooftop. There’d been time for them to fall, but they hadn’t. The ambushers were still standing.

That was an unlikely outcome from Sidewalker’s point of view. Three shots each should have been enough to at least incapacitate the Gray League mercs. They might have survived the attack if their armor was good enough, and the Gray League did have a rep for fielding solid gear, but Sidewalker’s ammo was designed with armored targets in mind. Each bullet cost more than a typical Rusty would make in a year, and they were worth it precisely because they dealt with the targets that absolutely needed to be put down without being given the opportunity to fire back.

What they weren’t designed to put down though were NMEs. Not rampaging ones, and not even ones that were in the first stages of their transformation like the two that Sidewalker saw on the other side of the roof as his smoke blew away in the wind.

Agatha slipped the pot holder off her left hand, balancing the hot casserole dish one-handed as she punched the button for Ai’s floor.

It was Thursday and the young police woman should have gotten off early from the morning shift. For anyone else that would mean there’d be a good chance they’d be out on the town, but Agatha knew her odds of encountering Ai at home were approaching a certainty.

Some of her tenants got along just fine on their own. Others needed someone to check in on them once in awhile. Ai didn’t fall into either category.

Agatha had known Ai’s father, and her mother, back when the two had been together. She’d seen what their separation had done to Ai, and had seen the impact her father and brother’s deaths had as well. Outwardly, Ai had grieved for a time and then come back to herself, like most people do. Inwardly though? Agatha could only speculate on that but what her intuition hinted at was not comforting.

Things were bad in the GCPD. They were bad in the whole city. Maybe even the whole world. Most people took that as a given and found what scraps of comfort and goodness they could. Ai though? She hadn’t gone looking for comfort, and when she spoke, it was never about the good things she’d found.

She was careful of course. Careful not to rail on about the injustices that surrounded them. Careful not to express too much of herself at all. In any conversation she was always looking to learning more about the speaker than to reveal anything about herself.

For Agatha it was a welcome change to have someone who was genuinely interested in her stories of the old days, or even the bits of random gossip and trivia she collected. Agatha maintained a healthy social circle, but people tended to get caught up in the day to day affairs of life. Reminiscing about the past felt self indulgent but Ai made it simple to slip into a mode where Agatha could talk about anything she wanted and feel like they were having an engaging conversation. It was only over time that Agatha even noticed how little they ever discussed where Ai was at, or what she was working on.

Agatha had tried to change that several times, and Ai had proven adept at managing those conversations as well. A question about how Ai was doing at work could lead to hours of discussion about the minutia of the job, and her coworkers, and the various hoops and hurdles Ai had to jump through. It would touch on events that were frustrating or rewarding or just weird, and on the surface that seemed like Ai was opening up.

But she wasn’t.

Each story seemed to be real, but Ai’s connection to the events was ephemeral. She could speak of the galling lack of respect the other officers showed her, but her outrage was muted, as though she was angry for someone else having to experience what she was describing.

Agatha had watched her closely for a while, but Ai hadn’t shown any other signs of losing touch with the reality she lived in. Her joy at Agatha’s cooking was genuine, and the smile she greeted Agatha with whenever Agatha dropped by went all the way up to her eyes.

Within her apartment, Ai was relaxed as Agatha ever saw her, but she was never unguarded. It was as though she was a double agent, living life as “Ai Greensmith” as a cover for some far greater and more prestigious role that she played.

Agatha couldn’t imagine what that role could be though. It certainly wasn’t an inherited one. Ai’s father had never been wealthy, and her mother had been a starry eyed drifter when Agatha first met her. Neither traveled in the circles of the elite, and neither had lived lives that allowed for much spare time.

Joseph Greensmith Sr. had spent enough days working double and triple shifts that his marriage had eventually fallen apart from it. Caroline Shinimoto, Ai’s mother, had possessed plenty of time when she was a traveling artist, but she and Joe Sr. had gotten down to making their family shortly after they met and were married. Some women who Agatha knew could have managed three children plus a the life of a double agent, but not Caroline. That wasn’t a failing on her part though.

Caroline took to her role as mother with a passion that surprised even herself, and brought that passion to her art as well. When she’d moved back to her family’s home in London, she’d returned not as a failure but as a celebrated creator with a sold out show behind her, and that had come only due to a level of work and investment that Agatha was surprised any mother of three could have managed.

The elevator arrived and dinged open, allowing Agatha to shuffle out.

It wasn’t as easy to make her rounds as it once had been. She’d passed on the last few performance upgrades to her bio-mods. They’d promised to help manage the aches and pains she felt by some arbitrary and implausibly exact percentage. It was a racket, one designed to allow her the illusion that she wasn’t aging as much as she really was. With all the things she’d seen and lived through though, Agatha didn’t feel like she needed that illusion. Better to know how she was really doing, to be aware of what her limitation were and how they were changing. She could live a good life still, even if she had to live it a little slower than she was used to.

She knocked at Ai’s door, to be considerate in case the building’s occupation logs were incorrect. As the owner and superintendent, Agatha had access to all of the biometric data her building’s sensors collected. Or at least all of the data the companies were willing to admit that they were collecting. It was an open secret that far more monitoring went on than anyone admitted to but the mass of data tended to work against useful information gathering as much as it helped.

The sensor logs confirmed that Ai hadn’t returned, and that the apartment was empty, so Agatha didn’t hesitate, and let herself in with her master key. Ai was used to her landlord’s coming and going and was always happy to see a freshly cooked dinner awaiting her when she got home. If Agatha had calculated correctly, there should be at most ten or fifteen minutes before Ai arrived. She would be carrying a bag with take-out food from a convenience store or sidewalk truck, but she would push that into her otherwise empty fridge in favor of the plates of food Agatha provided.

The plates caught Agatha’s eye as she set them out. They were plain. Unremarkable bland white, circles. Nothing alarming about them. They were the sort of dishware a college student would buy to save money for books. Taken by themselves they said their owner didn’t particularly care about their dishes beyond having anything something to eat off of.

Looking around the apartment there were a lot of other similar signs though.

The walls held no posters or artwork. The furniture was as generic as it could be. Together the pieces told a story of someone who wanted to be overlooked. Someone who was trying to appear as bland and uninteresting as they could.

In another tenant, Agatha wouldn’t have questioned the aesthetic. Some people she rented to didn’t have an eye for visual design. Some actively enjoyed a minimalistic environment.

But that hadn’t been Ai. Not when she was a little girl, and not as a teenager.

Agatha remembered finger painting plates with a six year old Ai. It had been for fun, but Ai had taken the task seriously and produced a set of plates that sang with color and light and images in motion.

Even the teenaged Ai’s room had been an expression of the ever changing moods and interests of its occupant. Posters of the solar system had been tacked over with schematics for circuit boards, and then replaced with glossy pictures of cinema detectives from old movies and on and on to dozens of different interests that Ai dove into and devoured.

“Bright” has been used to describe the young Ai on nearly every occasion that Agatha could remember, but that quality was missing from the apartment she lived in. Agatha thought about that and wondered how she’d missed the change.

The color hadn’t drained out of Ai’s life all at once, but it had dimmed after Joe Sr.’s death, dropping away in stages until, when Ai moved into a smaller apartment of her own, she’d simply left the last remnants of it behind.

The more Agatha looked around, the more she felt the emptiness of it all. Someone new to the room would find it unremarkable, but when Agatha compared it with Ai’s earlier home the apartment felt like a diorama. Each piece arranged to allow the eye to slide off it, even the ones that were out of place, like the unwashed plates, or the clump of uncleaned clothes hanging out of a washing basket. The room was clearly inhabited but it wasn’t lived in. Ai’s life was somewhere else, as someone else it felt like.

A message buzzed onto Agatha’s virtual display, appearing as scrolling green letters across a black bar background running along the bottom of her vision.

Apartment 1522 had reverted back to an unclaimed state.

Agatha blinked and shook her head. She was getting old but reading the message again proved her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her. Apartment 1522 was no longer bound by a rental agreement to its former tenant.

Ai’s apartment was 1522. The one Agatha was standing in, ladling a casserole onto plain white plates. For a moment the message didn’t make sense. Ai was paid up on her rent. Ai was always paid up on her rent. The deposits arrived automatically at the beginning of each billing cycle.

Another message dinged for attention.

An estate consisting of the contents of Apartment 1522 had been transferred to Agatha’s ownership. She could dispose of the items or retain them as she desired. If she wished to claim the items she would need to indicate this to the building’s owner within 24 hours.

It was an automated message, and not a particularly insightful one given that it was telling Agatha to inform herself whether she wanted to keep the contents of Ai’s apartment or not.

Agatha was tempted to write off the messages as one of the governmental glitches the Gamma City municipal computers were prone to, but there was a link in the second message to follow for “further details”.

She tapped it and immediately hit a screen with a lockout notification informing her that the case she had requested was part of an ongoing police investigation and details would be held in confidentiality until the investigation was resolved.

The official channels weren’t the only source provided by the link though. A data aggregator had dredged up related news feeds and found a dozen live feeds commenting on a scene outside what looked like a hospital.

The details were sketchy, with various commenters spouting the same bits of information while trying to put a unique enough spin on them make it onto one of the paying feed streams.

What came through clearly though was that there had been some kind of firefight atop the hospital. Someone had fallen from the roof, struck an automated delivery truck in her fall and then landed hard on the concrete outside the hospital. Police had swarmed the scene and there were reports of casualties on the roof as well.

The most recent development was that the GCPD had finally, after hours of keeping the hospital on lockdown, released a statement and made an official pronouncement regarding the deaths. Three of GCPD’s finest were dead, and an officer accused of aiding and abetting in multiple NME rampages was still on the loose.

Agatha didn’t recognize the names of two of the fallen officers, but the accused officer who was on the loose was familiar to her. Ai complained about her partner Curtweather often.

Agatha felt a twist in her stomach at that thought. Ai wouldn’t be complaining about her partner anymore. Or anything else.

Hers was the last name on the list of the fallen.

Ai set her foot on the stairs to the roof and felt her killer’s gun jab into her ribs. It was an unnecessary bit of cruelty, but it wasn’t as though she was going to be in a position to file a grievance over it. Ahead of her, one of her other killers walked her partner Curtweather up to roof with far less “unnecessary roughness”. The disparity made Ai laugh. Even headed to their executions, Curtweather was still “one of the guys” and she was “other”.

They stepped out into the daylight on the rooftop and Ai calculated the distance to one of the defensive pillboxes that provided the hospital with anti-aircraft support in the event of a flying robot invasion.

The pillbox was far too well armored for any, or all, of the available firearms to penetrate. If she could make it inside she would be safe for weeks if need be thanks to the emergency rations and running water feed each defense post was supplied with.

At her best speed she would make it roughly one quarter of the distance to the nearest pillbox before they shot her though. Surviving one bullet would be doable. Even two or three or four in the right locations wouldn’t be too threatening. The problem was they wouldn’t stop at four. They wouldn’t stop at a dozen. They would keep firing until they knew she was dead.

She couldn’t run, and looking out at the empty roof, Ai saw that there was nowhere to hide either.

She imagined pleading for mercy. Or offering to buy them out.

She had money, more than any of her killers could imagine. Enough to buy their loyalty a hundred times over. These weren’t deep or complicated men. She could enlist them to her service and bribe them enough to keep them committed to her cause right up until she fed each one into a wood chipper.

She could do that, but she still wouldn’t survive.

“When’s the autocopter supposed to get here?” her killer asked.

“Still five minutes out,” Adams said. “So we get to sit here and wait.”

“This ain’t right Adams,” Curtweather said. “Who’s paying for this?”

“Didn’t ask, don’t care,” Adams said.

He was lying. Ai watched the micro-expressions of guilt play across his face in slow motion. He knew Tython was behind it. He wasn’t apathetic either. There was a restrained eagerness in how he held himself, and he was glancing over at Ai too often to be unaware of who she was.

“They’ve been worrying about me,” Ai said. “You can work with that.”

“We. You mean ‘we can work with that’, right?” Zai said.

“I’ll be honest,” Ai said, feeling her stomach churn as she confronted the reality of her situation, “You’re going to need to run on your own for a while.”

“But you’re going to survive this, right?” Zai asked.

“Maybe,” Ai said. “There’s a chance, but the chance I don’t is just as big, and a lot of it is going to come down to luck.”

“How can we make our luck better then?” Zai asked.

“I don’t think we can,” Ai said. “We’re on the knife edge whatever we do. The only victory I’m certain we can manage is through you. No matter how this goes for me, you can remain active. So for a bit, all the work of stopping Tython is going to fall on you.”

“I’m not ready to become a digital god yet,” Zai said.

“You don’t have to,” Ai said. “You’re fine just as you are.”

“I don’t want to be alone either,” Zai said.

“That one’s harder,” Ai said. “Worst case though? Seek out Harp. Seek out other digital sapients. You’re not alone in the world, even if you don’t have me.”

“Yeah, but…”

“I know,” Ai said. “I’m not thrilled with it either.”

Her killer pushed her to her knees with a shove.

“They’re starting early,” Ai said. “I thought they’d wait until we were in the auto-copter to break out the pain sticks.”

“Is she resisting arrest?” Adams asked, snapping an electrified prod open.

“Looks like she is,” Ai’s killer said.

“Go into secure mode,” Ai said, beginning to struggle against her handcuffs.

“But I won’t be able to help you!” Zai said.

“Yes you will, but not now,” Ai said. “This only works if you’re still functional later on.”

“Entering secure mode then,” Zai said. “I’m coming back out the moment the voltage spike drops though.”

Ai felt Zai’s control of her various bio-mods release. Technically they were all working in autonomous mode now, but that meant they could be switched as needed to manual override. It was tempting to throw the pain blockers to maximum, but since combat mods of that caliber were not allowed to the general public or the GCPD, she set them to quarter strength to mimic the maximum efficiency they should have possessed.

The pain stick was aptly named. Even with the pain filters in place, Ai felt her muscles lose coherency and her spine turn to jelly.

“What the hell is up with that?” Curtweather said. “If you’re out to get her, why did you drag me into this mess?”

Ai let her surprise and anger play across her face as the pain retreated.  It wasn’t shocking that Curtweather would betray her to save his own skin. She’d been counting on that and a sudden burst of basic decency on his part would have complicated things more than she could handle. None of that made it easier to hear Curtweather being so eager to sell her out though.

She was on the ground with her hands secured behind her back. Effectively helpless and harmless. That didn’t stop the next blow from the pain stick though.

A second later when the pain passed, Ai saw she was on her belly. She couldn’t remember getting there, but, hidden from the camera’s, she smiled. It was a workable position.

The next time Adam’s swung the pain stick, she intercepted it with her handcuffs.

GCPD handcuffs don’t have physical keys. Those were too easy to lose or replicate. Instead they were coded so that only an authorized GCPD law enforcement officer could remove them.

A licensed officer, or an overload of their circuits.

The handcuffs came loose and Ai rolled away from Adam’s reach with a speed and shakiness that would look like blind panic in the recording that Tython was going to see.

Careful to keep her every movement that of a rookie driven wild by pain, she slammed into her killer’s kneecaps, bringing him tumbling down on top of her.

The other cops were moving from confusion to laughter, not understanding quite what was going on, but amused to see one of their own suffer a silly looking spill.

The laughter began to die, the moment Ai grabbed her gun back.

Her killer had taken it from her and stuffed it into a pocket, assuming it was an inert hunk of metal. Proper procedure called for the weapon of any officer being arrested to shut down remotely before the arresting officers arrived. The order had gone out, but it had been easy for Zai to erase it and make it look like the sloppily executed arrest order had failed to generate the automated shutdown message.

Ai kept moving, not needing to feign the shaky weakness in her limbs for the camera’s benefit.

Like he was locked into the script she’d written, she saw Adams charge after her, ready to put her down with more pain stick blows. Then he saw that she had her gun. It should have been an oddly shaped paper weight, but his eyes lit up with fear and he went for his own.

The other officers were caught between laughing, if they weren’t paying attention closely enough, or starting to go for their own guns, if they were.

Ai scrambled to her feet, bringing her weapon flush against Adams’ head.

With her perception accelerated to the utmost he stood over her like a statue. She couldn’t move faster than him, and certainly couldn’t move faster than the bullets that were going to be fired within the next few seconds.

She could only think, and consider her actions.

Adams couldn’t escape whatever she chose to do to him. He was, in that single moment of time, helpless before her, and that argued for mercy,

Her father had been clear on that. A good cop didn’t use any more force than was necessary. Ai had stun rounds available. They would disable Adams long enough for the rest of her plan to play out. No one had to die.

Except her.

There wasn’t any option for Officer Greensmith to leave the rooftop alive. She had to be removed as a threat, or Tython would have the lead it needed. That wouldn’t just endanger Harp either. Tython would go after her landlord Agatha because she knew Ai. They would go after her mother and sister despite them being across the Atlantic and in the nigh-unlivable environs of the London Exclusion Zone. They would go after everyone who shared any contact with Ai, and while that wasn’t a long list, it would be enough for them to turn up Zai.

That was what Adams was going to take away from her.

Just like he’d taken her father. And her brother.

Ai couldn’t keep the glimmer of rage from her eyes.

When she pulled the trigger, her gun wasn’t slotted with Stun rounds. The bullet that was fired was an Obliterator.

Adams’ head vaporized before her as the blast radius from the Obliterator round reduced his cranium to a wet spray of particles and the pulse charge fried every bio-mod in his body.

There was nothing in him left to perform any recovery work and nothing left to be recovered.

The explosion of the Obliterator round bought her a fraction of a second and she used it to move, fleeing away and watching Adams’ headless corpse fall without looking behind herself.

Not that she needed to look to see where she was going. She knew exactly how far the edge of the building was, and exactly how fast she needed to be to make it there before it was too late.

She was ten steps away from the edge when the first bullet hit her. Her killer had fired it and Ai’s luck held. He’d been too shocked to switch to Obliterator rounds so it was just a normal bullet.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t a fatal blow though. Heart muscle does not enjoy being shredded by the fragments of a projectile that bounces off a nearby rib.

“Hold on!” Zai said. “We can deal with this!”

The next bullet was comparatively mild, striking her in the forearm and passing through without even shattering a bone. Ai felt her bio-mods marching through her body like tiny repair crews, ready to restore the areas that were damaged in no time.

That was impossible of course. By their nature, bio-mods can’t be felt anymore than white blood cells or bone marrow can be.

Ai stumbled back another two steps. It was so far to go to reach the edge and her head was spinning.

From the bullet that had clipped her in the temple and fractured her skull.

“I’m bringing the auto-transport up,” Zai said, showing an overlay on Ai’s vision of the flying craft that she’d suborned as a getaway vehicle.

“No,” Ai said. “Use it to break the fall, but not enough to keep me alive.”

“What? Are you delirious?” Zai asked.

“No,” Ai said. “This is the plan. We’re going to fall off the building and go splat.”

“Why?”

“They have to think I’m dead,” Ai said. “The only story that turns away Tython’s attention now is if Officer Greensmith winds up dead trying to escape. If I get out of here through any sort of fortunate coincidence or clever plan, they’ll know I was the one behind everything we’ve done.”

“But you can’t die! I won’t let you!” Zai said.

“They need to find a body,” Ai said. “They need to run down to the ground floor and see me dead for themselves. My body can’t disappear before the EMTs get there. It can’t disappear before there’s a positive confirmation of death by the coroner.”

“But I don’t want you to go,” Zai wailed.

“So don’t let me,” Ai said, making to the edge of the roof as another bullet punctured straight through her left lung. “I know this is going to be hard, but I need you to keep me in stasis. Wake me up as soon as I’ve been declared dead and no one will notice me missing.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Zai said.

“I believe in you,” Ai said and surrendered herself to gravity’s embrace.

The perception of time slowing in a moment of crisis is a trick of the brain for most people. It’s not that more time is perceived, it’s that more time is remembered because of the emotional weight attached to each sliver of a moment. On its own, the human brain can only process inputs and form an awareness of its environment so quickly. Events that occur faster than the mind can follow are either fabricated by the imagination or vanish entirely.

For those who have a human brain.

Ai wasn’t limited like that.

“Ok, six Gray League for Sidewalker to deal with, how many GCPD are we facing here?” she asked. She could see two plain clothed officers standing on either side of her, and there was Adams with a gun to her head. Three was plenty for a hit team but there’d been more when they took down her father and brother.

“The three around us entered with five others,” Zai said. “Two are outside cafeteria door directing people away, one is waiting by the stairs and the other two are advancing to the roof.”

“How’s the EyeGrid on the roof?” Ai asked, pulling up the personnel files on each of the men who were arrayed against her. Each was on “The Special List”, which didn’t surprise her.

“Fully functional, and unhacked,” Zai said. “Whatever they’re planning, they’re fine with it being recorded.”

“That doesn’t sound like an assassination,” Ai said. “Can you find any official orders for them to bring me in?”

An eight person team to arrest one cop was incredibly out of line with how the GCPD usually operated but it wasn’t an impossible situation. Normally if an officer had to be detained, their partner would be notified, their weapon would be remotely locked down, and a second team of two would be dispatched, maybe with an additional drone escort as backup for particularly serious and violent charges.

Eight flesh and blood officers on the job would be considered an exorbitant expenditure regardless of the charges against the accused. The accuser would need to have deep pockets and an irrational desire to see the job overdone to pay for four times as many officers as was required, especially to bring in a unsuspecting rookie.

“No, there’s nothing…wait, yes there is,” Zai said. “It’s hidden from your account, which makes sense I guess, but it’s also fake.”

“Adams and the rest hacked the dispatching system? They never bothered with that before,” Ai said.

“I don’t think it was them. I mean, it’s a bad fake, but it’s not neanderthal levels of bad like they would manage,” Zai said. “I think it was created by someone who understands security infrastructure well but isn’t familiar with standard GCPD procedures. It looks like they read the comments in the code and tried to cobble together an arrest order based on that, rather than how it’s really done.”

“So, these guys could think this is a legit arrest?” Ai asked, trying to calculate the odds that the cops assigned to bring her in would also happen to be dirty ones. A quick approximation lead to it being about 90% likely, but factoring in that these were dirty cops that she had a personal grudge against dropped the number drastically below 1%.

“I doubt it,” Zai said. “The order appeared in the system about ten seconds before Adams put his gun to your head. They had to be moving here well before this fake got generated. Sorry for not catching them when they were heading in. I didn’t think it was worth monitoring people here with all the security the hospital has.”

“You had your priorities right,” Ai said. “I didn’t think we were this exposed yet.”

“How is Tython moving against both Officer Greensmith and Heartless at the same time?” Zai asked.

“It’s not a coincidence,” Ai said. “Either they found a link between the two identities or they’re worried enough about someone else having the NME activation code that they’re doing a broad spectrum sweep to remove anyone who it could be.”

Less than half a second had passed since Adams finished speaking and with Ai frozen “in surprise” no one was expecting her to react yet.

Not that she had many options. Police firearms were all but useless against NMEs or structures reinforced to prevent them from breaking in but against flesh and blood targets even a standard issue GCPD pistol could easily incapacitate or destroy its target at the user’s discretion.

“I don’t know if this helps or makes things worse,” Zai said, “but there’s another faked arrest order for Curtweather too.”

Curtweather, who was currently on guard duty for the witness they were supposed to be protecting. That confirmed that there was zero probability that Adams and his team were here on a real arrest order. Someone was paying for the witnesses survival, and the GCPD took those contracts seriously because none of them came cheap. If they’d needed to arrest both Ai and Curtweather, they would have removed the on duty officer first, in order to prevent any chance of the witness being harmed.

“It leaves open the possibility that Tython doesn’t know that Greensmith and Heartless are one and the same,” Ai said.

“That’s a good thing,” Zai said.

“It would be, if we could survive this one,” Ai said.

“You’ve got a clever plan though, don’t you?” Zai asked. “You’ve always got a clever plan.”

She sounded worried. Not emulating worry. Not practicing it because that was the appropriate response to the situation. Zai’s voice was filled with the kind of fear that you try to fight away and deny even when it’s impossible to do so.

Ai thought for a moment about how often she’d lead Zai into dangerous situations, and how often she’d gotten them both out. She knew she wasn’t as brilliant as Zai believed her to be. She took advantage of luck more than any sane person should, and even when her guesses were correct, it wasn’t always for the reasons she’d predicted. Despite that, Zai depended on her and trusted her. Together they’d been willing to take on corporate entities beyond the scope of any single human, even the humans who ostensibly controlled the giant multinational behemoths.

Everywhere Ai turned though, every plan she came up with, showed her how trapped she was.

“I’ve got a whole lot of ideas that make things a lot worse,” Ai said.

“Like what?” Zai asked.

“Like fighting Adams and his two flunkies,” Ai said. “We can take Adams down, right?”

“Definitely, I can jam up his bio-mods,” Zai said. “Even without reflex boosting that’ll give you the edge to drop him before he can aim and focus on you.”

“But that leaves us with two other shooters right here,” Ai said.

“You could knock into one to throw their aim off, but the third one’s a problem,” Zai said.

“Yep. Even if he only hits us with stun rounds, we’re going to go down, and then they’ll have us disarmed and dragged off to wherever they plan to take care of us.”

“Could we wait until they have us in the hall?” Zai asked. “That would limit their field of fire. We could use Adams as a shield too.”

“That gives us a better chance of surviving the initial volley,” Ai said. “They have reinforcements though and we can’t fight our way out of here. The isolation shields are too tough.”

“What about disarming these three and using them as hostages until we get the fake arrest order revoked?” Zai asked.

“There’s money riding on this now,” Ai said. “Even if you could get the fake order removed, the department would insist on my being brought in and held until a hearing could be convened.”

“That’s better than being shot full of holes though right?” Zai asked.

“I don’t know,” Ai said. The farther she looked the broader the disaster spread. “If they get me into a cell, they can suppress all of my biomods, including you. And we know how well the holding cells are monitored. If I go into one, I’m not coming out again.”

“There has to be some trick we can use to beat them though!” Zai said.

“This is my fault,” Ai said. “I shouldn’t have used anyone from the Special List. I knew we were on the knife’s edge of discovery but I wanted to do something awesome to save Harp and I went too far.”

“What do you mean?” Zai asked.

“It’s not just Adams and his crew,” Ai said. “Maybe we could work up a scheme to out fight them. The hospital’s a fortress. We could use that to our advantage. Even a broom closet might be defensible. But it doesn’t matter because there’s no chance that Officer Greensmith could do any of the things we’d need to be able to do to escape from this.”

“Officer Greensmith can do whatever we need to in order to survive can’t she?” Zai asked. “That has to come first.”

“There’s another option,” Ai said, dreading where her thoughts were leading her.

“Than you surviving?” Zai asked, anger flaring in her voice. “No, there’s not. There’s no plan if you can’t survive it.”

“Tython either knows who we are, or they’re a hair’s breadth away from figuring it out,” Ai said. “Or, more precisely, they’re that close to figuring out who Officer Greensmith is. Anything we do, any trick that gets us out of this, it’ll confirm that we were the ones behind everything on the police side of the events that have happened to them. It might even be enough for them to backtrack our movements and find clues to where the Black Valkyries are.”

“That’s not worth dying over,” Zai said.

“They’re going to take us to the roof,” Ai said, a plan forming in her mind that she honestly didn’t know if she was brave enough to attempt. “That’s the most open place we’re going to reach. If we’re going to get away from them, it has to be there.”

“Good. Excellent,” Zai said. “That sounds much more like the kind of plan I can get behind.”

“See if you can take control of a shipping drone,” Ai said. “But hold it down at its usual altitude. We can’t let them see it as an escape vehicle.”

“On it!” Zai said.

Ai relaxed her ultra-fast processing, letting her neurons and neural circuitry cool as her perception of time decelerated to match something close to the human norm.

“What’s going on?” she asked, feigning the sort of surprise she thought a rookie should feel at being accosted in a safe spot like a hospital cafeteria.

“Got a special request to bring you back to the station,” Adams said. “You’re going to come quietly right?”

“Yeah, sure,” Ai said, letting annoyance creep into her voice. “No need to draw your damn gun on me.”

“You’re a dangerous perp now Greensmith,” Adams said. “Just like your old man.”

Ai shook at his words but only because she realized he thought she didn’t know what had actually happened to her father. Even with her brother finding out and being killed for the discovery, making it twice as likely Ai would find something wrong with the official story, the men responsible still believed she was ignorant of what they’d done.

“We supposed to take her gun?” Silvestri, the cop on her right, asked.

“Yeah, it’s locked down but better safe than sorry. Take her belt too. The only handcuffs she needs are going to be the one’s she’ll be wearing,” Adams said.

“What the hell? This is ridiculous. It’s obviously been a screw up somewhere,” Ai said. “Or is this a really stupid prank?”

Acting like an aggrieved rookie shouldn’t have been hard, she had plenty of reasons to be angry, but losing her gun and toolbelt was almost enough to make her back away from the plan that she felt less eager to pursue with every step.

“Are you resisting arrest Greensmith? Do you want to go there?” Adams asked, digging the barrel of his gun into the back of her head.

“No. No. Let’s just get to the station and work this out,” she said, knowing she was never going to see the station.

Not in this life at least.

Ai’s biggest regret in her dealings with Sidewalker and his crew was that he loved eating in nice restaurants but she never got enjoy the fare in the rented robot bodies she used to keep Heartless’s identity secure.

“I was surprised to hear from you again so soon,” Sidewalker said. He’d chosen the venue for the meeting, though Heartless was the one footing the bill. As restaurants went it didn’t look like much, just a large open dining area with tables of various sizes and a kitchen in the back that several, somehow harmonious, scents wafted out from every time a server passed through the swinging doors that separated it from the main room.

“My gratitude for agreeing to this meeting,” Ai said, the voice and diction modulators rendered her words into Heartless’s precise accent and vocal range.

“It’s always nice to have someone pick up the tab for lunch,” Sidewalker said.

Since time was of the essence, Ai had scheduled Heartless’s meeting as early as was practical, making it a lunch meeting rather than a dinner one. Had either of them been regular office workers an even earlier meeting would have been plausible, but as a mercenary Sidewalker kept erratic hours, and if Heartless appeared to be in a hurry to resolve an issue Sidewalker would have had the sense to avoid the mission on general principal.

“I trust the proceeds from our last transaction haven’t run dry?” Heartless asked, the robot body executing a series of small motions meant to evoke a sense of liveliness without venturing into the Uncanny Valley. Ai wanted Sidewalker at ease. Talking to an unmoving, unblinking, near human face was not optimal for creating a sense of security. With small, relatively slow motions though, the sort that humans make unconsciously on an almost continual basis, it was easy to fool the pattern recognition engine of the mind into believing the machine in front of someone was a relaxed and unthreatening living being.

“It’s funny you bring that up,” Sidewalker said, as he dropped a forkful of rice into his curry. “With the bonus you added, we should have been on vacation for at least a few months, but when I checked the ledgers and with the others, the money seems to have just disappeared on us.”

“Not literally I presume?” Heartless asked.

“No, the money wasn’t stolen,” Sidewalker said. “We know what we spent it on, but it just seems odd that so many things we were looking for became available just as soon as we had the money to afford them.”

A server approached the table and gestured to the quarter full glass of synth-beer beside Sidewalker’s plate. Sidewalker responded in sign language, thanking the woman and agreeing to the refill.

Ai glanced around the room, noticing that they had arrived before the lunch rush and were one of only three tables of customers in the restaurant, each seated equally distant from the others.

“Deaf?” Heartless asked, indicating the retreating server.

“Since birth,” Sidewalker said. “Would need platinum tier bio-mods to restore her hearing and there can be serious sensory issues that come up even then.”

“I take it that’s why you prefer this establishment?” Heartless asked. “For the extra privacy it affords?”

“No,” Sidewalker said. “Kaeta can see what we’re saying just fine. She’s got a pretty decent speech-to-text rig, and it’s a restaurant, people only talk about so many different things in here.”

“Why the sign language then?” Ai asked. She knew various factoids about adaptive bio-mods, ones which worked around problems when the core issue couldn’t be addressed for whatever reason. With Zai’s mod reprogramming wizardry, Ai hadn’t needed anything like that for herself though so it wasn’t an area she’d studied in much depth.

“Respect,” Sidewalker said. “Also, come on, sign’s beautiful.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Heartless said. “As to your earlier question, you alluded to my being involved in your current financial situation? You’re correct there, to some extent at least. After our parting I did give a few of the people who contacted you your public links.”

Through Heartless’s eyes, Ai watched Sidewalker scoop up a bit of the curry and rice with the flatbread that came with his meal. He was going to be chewing for a few seconds after that so, risking a moment of disorientation, she blinked her real eyes and returned her vision back to the hospital cafeteria she was sitting in.

A meeting during lunch meant a meeting while she was on duty, so Ai had Zai make sure that the work she and Curtweather were assigned for the day didn’t require much attention. Normally patrolling would have fallen into that category, but since Ai needed to ‘zone out’ for the duration of the meeting with Sidewalker, Zai had substituted guard duty instead.

In theory, guarding a witness within a hospital was an assignment where the only danger was death by boredom. Even mildly decent hospitals were covered in EyeGrid cameras and had containment measures designed to stop anything up to, and possibly including, an NME from breaking out or in.

During the first zombie robot apocalypse, people had learned the hard lesson that critical care facilities were, by definition, critical to maintain. It was one of the few pieces of wisdom that endured past the rebuilding of society.

As Ai sliced through the bland Nutri-Paste on her plate, she had to wonder if all of the extra security spending for the hospital had come out of the food budget. It was particularly had to stomach something so unappetizing given the mouth watering scent of Sidewalker’s curry reaching out across the neural link with the robot she was inhabiting.

She made a show of picking at the paste and refocused on her conversation with Sidewalker. To anyone wandering into the cafeteria, it would look like she was viewing an internal display and spending her lunch break watching whatever vid-feed entertainment had drawn a decent number of hits the night before.

“So you were sending people to us as a favor?” Sidewalker asked in between bites of curry that Ai felt her real stomach grumbling for a taste of.

“As a favor yes, though not specifically for you,” Heartless said. “Keiyan Dhalmler was looking for someone willing to invest in his prototype armoring mod. It seemed like the kind of thing your team might find useful, but the favor was to Keiyan in providing him with a lead which turned out well. Similarly, Iatee Holdings needed an outlet for an arms shipment which was stuck here due to unforeseen export restrictions. You seemed like a local buyer who would benefit from the reduced sale prices.”

Ai didn’t mention that Keiyan’s two other investors had been seduced by vaporware projects which one of Heartless’s more distance shell companies had sold them on, or that Iatee Holding’s shipment of regulated firearms had been detained due an anonymous tip backed by a hefty bribe to the Gamma City customs officials.

Sidewalker’s crew had refused the request to capture an intact NME, and thought that was the end of their association with Heartless, but Ai had no desire to lose good talent. Not when grooming a relationship with them was so easy to do from several steps removed.

“We’ve had other turns of good luck since working with you along those lines, but I suppose it’s not worth looking that gift horse too closely in the mouth,” Sidewalker said. “That’s why I agreed to this meeting. I have a favor to return to you.”

Ai allowed her surprise to register on the robot’s face.

“I wasn’t aware I had asked for any favors?” Heartless said.

The crowd outside the restaurant was growing more dense but, as yet, no one else had entered to eat. Something about that felt wrong but Ai couldn’t place quite why.

“Could you run a scan on the Eye Grid cams around the place we’re meeting with Sidewalker?” she asked Zai, returning her focus to her lunch companion.

“Sure,” Zai said. “I’ll start running facial recognition on the people outside and let you know if anyone interesting turns up.”

The sound of several more people entering the cafeteria near her tried to divide Ai’s attention further, but she resisted the urge to switch video feeds. It would have taken only milliseconds to adjust but it would have been out of character for Heartless to be that distracted.

“This is the sort of favor that comes without being asked for,” Sidewalker said. “You hired us, and paid the fee fairly and promptly. I can’t tell you how much less of a hassle that makes you than some of our other customers. That’s why I refused a job yesterday.”

“You had a job related to myself? Or to my interests?” Heartless asked.

“Related to you,” Sidewalker said. “Related to this very meeting in fact.”

“We didn’t arrange this meeting until today though?” Heartless said.

“Yeah, but someone knew you were going to get in touch with me,” Sidewalker said. “Someone who wanted me to sell you out.”

“Sell me out how?” Ai asked, dozens of scenarios, each worse than the last, spinning to life in her mind.

“The offer was simple,” Sidewalker said. “The next time you arranged a meeting, I was to request we dine at the Charles Club and notify a contact number of the date and time we would be arriving.”

“Who was the contact?” Ai asked.

“It was a blind data drop,” Sidewalker said. “Or mostly blind. We followed the access logs back to an account with NovaGenesis.”

“They’re a division of Tython,” Ai said, not liking at all where the conversation was going.

“Yes, the same company we broke into a data warehouse to steal data from,” Sidewalker said.

“That wasn’t wise to say aloud,” Heartless said.

“You’re blocking the data feeds,” Sidewalker said. “Just like you did last time. It’s ok. I appreciate that. That however is why we will not be taking this new contract. We appreciate your business, and the work you’ve done for us since, but, at this juncture, we seem to be known by a corporation which is much larger than we wish to contend against. I don’t know what they can do to you, or whether they are a concern at all for you, but until we fall off their radar we can’t risk letting them get any closer.”

Ai felt the cool bite of metal press against her neck.

Her real neck.

For a moment she was confused, trying to sort out the conflicting sensations from the robot body and her natural one.

“Right Greensmith, wake up from your vid, you’re coming with us,” a cop said from behind her.

“I understand,” Heartless said for Ai. “Please hold that thought, I need to take care of a brief matter.”

Ai opened her regular eyes and found herself surrounded. They weren’t in uniform, but she recognized several of her fellow GCPD Officers. Even the feeling of the gun barrel pushed against the base of her skull wasn’t wholly surprising. A betrayal from within the force was something she’d been expecting ever since she made the decision to join it.

“We’ve got a few questions for you Greensmith,” Officer Adams said, punctuating his words with small presses on her neck with the gun.

Ai didn’t know what the questions would be, but she knew the last word said would be a gunshot. Three in fact. Two of them center mass in the torso and one right between the eyes. That they were willing to do the deed in a hospital was unexpected. Whatever happened would be recorded by at least a half dozen cameras.

Unless the camera’s had already been hacked.

“I’m checking for intrusion into the hospital’s system’s right now,” Zai said. “Starting to get back results on the facial analysis of the crowd outside the restaurant too.”

“Pardon me,” she said as Heartless to Sidewalker, “This matter may take a few minutes to resolve.”

“He may not have a few minutes,” Zai said. “At least a half dozen people in the crowd are active Grey League agents. Tython had him followed and I can’t imagine it was for his health and safety.”

Fear has the power to bring every problem into immediate focus. No matter the likelihood of a particular bit of trouble occurring, it can feel like it will absolutely happen in the next instant unless something, anything, is done without delay. Ai was gripped with that sensation and fought against the panic driven urge to do something that rose within her at the thought that Tython had developed a working cure.

“We have to act like it’s not too late yet,” she said, as much for her own benefit as for Zai’s. The automated taxi had dropped her off at her apartment building, and she let the outdated bio-scanners identify her for the minute it took them to run their antiquated processing routines.

“The keyword there being ‘act’, right?” Zai asked. Ai knew that her companion had dozens of sub-tasks churning away, pre-fetching data that might be relevant. Where Zai was capable of gathering information though, Ai was the one who was able to synthesize it into a deeper, more meaningful set of contextual clues.

“Maybe,” Ai said. Her brain felt overheated, though a quick check of her internal thermometer showed that she was still well within the safety limits of her cognitive augments. “Acting feels right, but almost too much so. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking each move an enemy makes demands a counter. The illusion of control is like a drug to the human brain.”

“I think I might have inherited that from you,” Zai said. “I’m not getting close to Tython but it feels like casting a wide net for data is mandatory at the moment.”

“As long as you’re careful, I think you’re doing the right thing,” Ai said. The elevator opened as she entered the lobby. It was mercifully empty, aside from the various advertising posters that were plastered over every wall. The posters flickered as Ai entered the small area, the Sensi-Papers reconfiguring the images they displayed to show ads targeted at her presumed interests. Life insurance ads were prominent, with cosmetic body mods a close second in frequency, and home security packages the next most common. Ai wondered if other cops saw the same messaging or if the ad servers just couldn’t find anything specific to link her to and so defaulted to the most generic of results.

“Before we take another step though, let’s take a moment to consider how things play out if we stop reacting to Tython’s moves.” Ai said, stepping into her apartment. It was quiet and still. Usually that was comforting. Silence meant no one had tripped any of the alarms she’d added to the room. Stillness meant the environment was safe, for the moment at least.

Ai threw her coat onto one of her chairs. The apartment didn’t feel safe so much as empty. She pushed away that though along with the fatigue that was dragging her down.

“If we don’t do anything doesn’t Tython win?” Zai asked.

“Yeah,” Ai said. “This round. Beating them at this stage though won’t fundamentally change how the system is setup. We could have Harcroft taken out and someone else would be promoted to fill his place.”

“On the other hand though,” Zai said. “If we walk away and Tython does finish their cure, society will change on a fundamental level, maybe even to one we won’t be able to effect meaningful change against.”

“Do we care?” Ai asked, forcing herself to look past her gut reactions and search for the truth beyond the cravings of her Id.

“About Tython ruling the world? I think we do,” Zai said. “That’s supposed to be your job right?”

Ai chuckled, and pulled a bottle of chilled PureWater™ from the refrigerator.

“Less rule the world, more remove the parts of it that aren’t working anymore,” Ai said. “That is a solid argument against inaction though. If Tython finds a cure they gain a stranglehold on the world that would be impossible for us to remove. Or more impossible, given that ‘quixotic’ is probably the kindest description you could give to our work as Heartless.”

“That makes things simple then,” Zai said. “We move against Tython because we have to, otherwise they’ll turn us into hideous techno-monsters. Well, maybe not us. Our bio-mods are so far off spec that no permutation of the NME activation code could come close to infecting us.”

“Hmm, thanks for reminding me of that,” Ai said. “We don’t have a cure for the NME code, but we do, in a sense, have an actual vaccination against it.”

“If Tython figures that out, we’re kind of in trouble aren’t we?” Zai asked.

“Not necessarily,” Ai said. “Or at least not for that reason. Military grade bio-mods are also too well protected to be affected by the NME code right?”

“True, but we’re not supposed to have military grade bio-mods,” Zai said.

“Yeah, but the key here is that if Tython wanted an actual vaccine against the NME code, they’ve got existing models they could draw from,” Ai said. “It’s not hard to figure out how to make people immune to the digital virus, it’s just costly.”

“At current pricing levels, there’s not a nation or multinational on the planet that could afford to shield all of their citizens or employees,” Zai said. “At most the top 40% of wage earners could be protected, but an economic analysis suggests the cutoff point is more likely to be the top 20% by net worth, with a portion of the remainder being able to self-fund their upgrades.”

“Upgrading everyone to combat levels of encryption on their bio-mods would create other issues as well,” Ai said. “Combat mods need to work in disconnected mode, right? Once people had a sufficient set of enhancements running, they could disconnect from the upgrade grid and escape the monthly maintenance fees.”

“That would also prevent them from being subject to similar attacks in the future, particularly if the NME activation code was released in an enhanced form,” Zai said.

“From Tython’s perspective, none of that is good,” Ai said. “They can’t afford to have their revenue stream cut off, even if it gained them an enormous one-time windfall.”

“What is their end goal with this project? Just more money or literal world domination?” Zai asked.

“I’d speculate it’s about putting them in the ultimate position of market dominance.  Not exactly ruling the world, but with no restraints or competition to hold them back at all,” Ai said. “That’s the smart play from what I can see, but it’s never a good idea to bet on humans going with the smart play. As a species, we seem to have an addiction to grandiose displays of stupidity.”

“So the question is, how do we stop them?” Zai asked.

“As indirectly as possible,” Ai said. “They’re probably going to come after us at some point before this is all over. We’re too close to what’s gone on so far, for them not to try to clean us off the board.”

“Should we think about giving up the Officer Greensmith persona then?” Zai asked.

“No, that’s all that’s keeping us safe at the moment,” Ai said. “If Officer Greensmith disappears, or even changes her role significantly, whoever was watching enough to send the NMEs after Curtweather will definitely notice and readjust their aim.”

“If we run though, I can make sure they never find us,” Zai said.

“You can make us invisible, electronically, and socially,” Ai said. “Picture how we’d search for someone who’s hidden using the techniques you’d use though.”

“We’d have to try something unusual,” Zai said. “Flush them out through their habits or connections or across a wide enough array of statistical samplings.”

“Right,” Ai said. “Even if we’re invisible, Tython could find us by looking for the hole in the world that we leave behind. It’s a lot harder, but these are people with a lot of resources and a lot of motivation.”

“So what do we do when they come after Officer Greensmith again?” Zai asked.

“We rely on the honor and support of our fellow GCPD officers to see us through this trying time,” Ai said.

“Huh, I didn’t realize I needed to start administering anti-psychotics to you so soon,” Zai said.

“Yes, yes, the GCPD hates me, you know that, I know that, but Officer Greensmith doesn’t,” Ai said. “She’s just a rookie, and she thinks being stiff and formal is what cops do. She doesn’t know that she’s being snubbed when no one invites her out to their drunken bar crawls. She doesn’t know that mentors are supposed to fill their trainee in on all the little details that don’t make it into the manual. She still thinks that because she graduated with good grades, and is clean and honest that people look at her as being a good cop.”

“And if push comes to shove, not a one of them will stand up to protect you,” Zai said. It wasn’t a question.

“They’ll stand up for each other,” Ai said. “No one wants to be the one who let their buddy down. I just don’t make the cut for being a buddy. They’ll never stand up for me, but fortunately we don’t need them too.”

“You’re thinking of using more of the people on the Special List?” Zai asked.

“All of them and more if we need to. I’m planning to empty that list someday,” Ai said. “If and when Tython comes for me, that someday may get here in a real hurry. That’s assuming that they’re needed at all though. Part of me expects Tython to turn more subtle in their attempts to silence me. Subtle we can deal with. Subtle even gives us a chance, in most cases, to turn the tables on them. That’s why the other part of me is expecting another horde of NMEs to bust through our window any time now.”

“I don’t like how rational you make that sound,” Zai said.

“Well our best defense against an army of NMEs tearing the city apart as they hunt us down is to stop the Cure project before it reaches a viable implementation phase,” Ai said. “For that though we’re going to need the kind of access that only an insider can get.”

“Which insider?” Zai asked.

“I think we start with Harcroft,” Ai said. “He’s one of the initial architects of this and even if it’s being run by someone else now, there’d have to be touchpoints back to him.”

“I’ve gathered a lot of information about him from Tython’s servers,” Zai said. “I can’t put together what bits might be relevant to the NME Cure project though. They all seem to be removed from that by a wide margin.”

“I’m not surprised,” Ai said. “What we need is more than what you can find on the net about Harcroft, we need answers from the man himself.”

“I don’t think he’s likely to be all that interested in talking to us,” Zai said.

“We don’t need to talk to him,” Ai said. “In fact, I think speaking is pretty useless in this case. He has every reason to lie and he can do so about things we have no method of verifying.”

“So, you’re going to trick the information out of him,” Zai asked.

Ai tossed her water bottle into the bottle bin by the door and let herself tumble over onto her small couch.

“If he’s been in the game this long, he’ll probably be fairly cagey,” Ai said. “At least about the details of his life that he’s aware of. There’s a whole bunch of things that people just don’t pay attention to though. So we’re going to be play a little catch and release and see where Mr. Harcourt decides to lead us.”

“The ‘catch’ part of that sounds somewhat dangerous,” Zai said.

“It is,” Ai agreed. “Horribly. Which is why we’re not going to do it. Not when our good friend Mr. Sidewalker is eager for another contract.”

“Didn’t he call you back and turn you down for further work after the last time?” Zai asked.

“He did,” Ai said. “But that was before his team saw the work that you’d done on their behalf. Let’s get in touch with him again and see if his heart has soften as much as his bank account has.”

No one came to kill Ai. It proved to be a disappointing turn of events. A nice assassination attempt would have felt like they were making progress. It would have been a piece of incontrovertible proof of where and who her enemies were. That it might have succeeded was something Ai was also aware of. Her disappointment was tempered therefor with the relief that she didn’t need to fight for her life, though that shining crystal of joy was in turn marred because while an assassination attempt hadn’t happened yet, one could occur at almost any time, so she couldn’t exactly rest easy.

“We’ve gotten deep enough into this that we’re starting to lose safe options for moving forward,” she said, as she picked a path out of the deserted train yard. Gamma City never really slept, but public transit had sharply limited hours and apart from cops with a lot to hide and an sapient cyberpal to surgically disable security, no one had much use for the city’s trains when they were out of service.

“Should we back off then?” Zai asked, temporarily suppressing the alarms and giving Ai a marked route to safely exit the train yard. “We could be buried in normal case work that would keep us under the radar of everyone who’s involved in this.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve been active enough that it may not matter how unimportant and unconnected we appear to be,” Ai said. She wasn’t a ninja, but moving silently and invisibly was pretty easy with Zai making sure no one was watching or listening for her. Despite that she still took care to remain in the shadows of the cars. Zai was talented but that didn’t mean there weren’t people with similar levels of skill and Ai saw no reason to make her enemies lives any easy than she had too. “If Tython has caught sight of us, or Dr. Raju is playing the Valkyries as patsies, they’ll move against us just to be on the safe side.”

“No one’s made a move yet,” Zai said. “So is that a good sign or a bad one?’

“Probably a bit of both,” Ai said. “In the plus column, Tython and their associates aren’t so desperate about what we’ve discovered that they’re willing to come at us guns blazing. Which means they don’t know the extent of what we’ve uncovered.”

“That sounds like an exceptionally good thing. This Harcroft we found a trail to? He seems to like sending NMEs to solve his problems,” Zai said, she projected video footage on a side screen in Ai’s vision as a reminder of just how bad that attack had been. “Is there a reason he didn’t follow up the attack the Valkyries busted up though? I’ve been trying to figure that out for a while now. I mean, we barely survived the first encounter and that was with the Valkyries’ help and a convenient river to crash into.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” Ai said. “If he’s the one who unleashed the NMEs, then he’s clearly not on too tight of a leash, and that seems odd for a company like Tython.”

“I agree. Why be so obvious?” Zai asked. “The NME Cure project has been operating under hard walls of secrecy. It seems out of character to send three monsters at a time.”

“The usual explanations would be either desperation, or their creator wanted to send a message,” Ai said, getting into the automated taxi that Zai had waiting for her outside the trainyard.

In the systems that recorded her position, a worm wiggled, changing dates and locations to make a number of police location records unreadable. Only one was left with ‘difficult to detect but definitely present’ signs of tampering, and with enough digging an investigator could discover that the officer in question had faked being home at a time when he was selling patrol schedules to a backroom information broker.

“The lack of a follow up attack argues against the “desperation motive” though it might also speak to a change in leadership,” Ai said. “Can you see if Harcroft is still officially employed by Tython? They would have hidden him if he was directly in charge of the NME program.”

“Huh, they didn’t. He’s still a Tython employee. He’s even in the same role,” Zai said. “Wasn’t our theory that the NME Cure project was what got him his position in Tython?”

“Yeah, and the theory still stands,” Ai said. “He got a fat promotion after the acquisition. Going behind a research veil to manage an illegal program would have been a crippling blow to his career – you can’t list ‘illicit human experimentation manager’ on a resume – and it would have been hard to explain from Tython’s end. You don’t promote someone, give them a big bonus, and then wish them the best of luck pursuing ‘other opportunities.”

“So is he not connected to the project anymore then?” Zai asked.

“I can’t see that happening either,” Ai said. “It’s too big and too important, and if he’s not a part of it then he becomes a loose end. Given that he’s still alive, I can’t picture that being the case. I think he split the difference and is running the project through a trusted underling. That’s a lot more practical overall too. As a public face of Tython, there’d be too much scrutiny on him by the newsfeeds for him to have daily interactions with the research staff.”

The automated taxi slid as it turned a corner a little too tightly. Ai smiled knowing that Zai was messing with its control interface to ensure that the hidden monitoring systems were returning something painfully bland.

“And that’s true even if it’s being done is unlicensed labs, with contractors who can’t be traced back to Tython?” Zai asked.

“Especially then,” Ai said. “Picture if every day, or even every week, there were chunks of time out of his schedule that he couldn’t account for to anyone.”

“Is this the kind of thing that could be given to an underling though?” Zai asked.

“I’m doubting Harcroft was happy with the idea, but he’d already have been relying on a bunch of researchers to do the work. Having one of them step forward as the project director would have felt natural to everyone concerned.”

“And they could stay behind an Identity Hedge so we don’t have any direct one options for determining who they are,” Zai said. “That supports your idea that they’re not acting out of desperation.”

“Yeah. I’m starting to think there’s more to it than I originally considered though,” Ai said. “My first theory was that they were sending a message to the GCPD. Tython knew about the theft from their data vault. They probably guessed, or are just paranoid enough to assume, that Sidewalker’s crew escaped with the data, so the next step is to kill who has the data or someone close enough to them in a spectacular enough fashion that the real holder of the data will sit on it forever.”

“That seems like a pretty strong message,” Zai said.

“What if there was another side to it though?” Ai asked. Her gaze flicked over the people on the sidewalks as they drove by at the taxi’s regulated and unexceptional speed. Bits of metal, body piercings, low grade bio-mods, and handmade armor bits, kept catching her eye. None of the people in the crowd were who she was looking for though. None of them were Harp.

“They were trying to signal someone else as well? Like the Valkyries?” Zai asked.

“That’s one possibility,” Ai said. “They found us pretty quickly. I’m not complaining about that, but being the right place at the right time for an attack like that is tough. It would have been a lot easier if they received a sign that something was going to go down in advance of the NMEs being deployed. It wouldn’t need to be a direct invitation, just a stray bit of data that tipped them off.”

“We should ask Harp about that when she comes back,” Zai said.

“If she comes back,” Ai said without meaning to.

“Are you worried she’s going to turn on us too?” Zai asked.

“No, it’s just nerve wracking not hearing anything,” Ai said. “I told her to call if she gets into trouble, but what if she can’t?”

“You think Dr. Raju did something to her?” Zai asked.

“I don’t know,” Ai said. “It’s possible. If Raju is in on this from the wrong end, and I know that’s unlikely, she could have a literal kill switch installed in Harp. Given the power the Valkyries have, I’d almost be surprised if there’s not a kill switch in the code somewhere in fact.”

“Should we try to find Harp?” Zai asked.

“No, I’m being paranoid,” Ai said. “Interfering now won’t help things unless Harp is in serious trouble, and if things are that bad we’d need a very different plan than ‘rush in and try to rescue her’.”

The automated taxi arrived at the all night soy noodle shop where Zai directed it to stop and Ai got out. It was too long of a walk back to get back to her apartment from there but not too long of a walk to make it to the coffee shop Ai sometimes spent her nights at when she was in college. Calling another taxi from there would provide a fresh record of her whereabouts that was consistent with past behavior and, with luck, not arouse too any suspicion if someone was scanning for officers who were in unusual locations that night. Or in unusual company.

“I’ll try to keep my eyes out for any reports that might involve any of the Valkyries,” Zai said. “In the interim maybe you can explain what message you think Tython was sending to them?”

“Hmm, maybe the message wasn’t meant for the Valkyries, or not just for them” Ai said as her mind continued to chew on the idea. “Try this one; we were meant to be the victims. We get obliterated as a notice to the GCPD to stop poking around in any cases that Curtweather and I were working on. The three NMEs would have done tremendous damage to the city after that though, except the Valkyries show up and stop them, so the message to them was ‘get ready to up your game, because you can expect to see more and more of these things’, which is perfect if Tython is planning a pandemic for show and needs someone to make sure their client base survives to demand the cure they have to offer.”

Ai watched a light go flickering by in the cloud choked sky. It was only a plane, Zai’s information overlay confirmed that, but for a moment Ai could have believed it was a Valkyrie suit racing for the heavens. She shook her head and pulled her thoughts back in order, wondering how tired she was that they were getting as scrambled as they appeared to be.

“Then there’s the final message,” she said. “We weren’t the only people watching the fight. The Valkyries scrambled communications but those explosions weren’t exactly subtle. Anyone who’s been working with NMEs would recognize the damage patterns. All they wouldn’t know would be how the NMEs were stopped, and that would scare the hell out of anyone who knew that Tython was searching for a cure.”

“You think Tython was putting their competitors on notice?” Zai asked.

“Maybe it was a bluff,” Ai said. “And maybe not. Activating three NMEs, even though that wasn’t Plan A, is a pretty bold move. They have to be at a stage of the project where they can’t afford to back off on development and that means it’s at least possible that they’re close to the breakthrough they need.”

“I think they might be able to shutdown the NMEs already,” Zai said.

“Why?” Ai asked.

“Because earlier tonight one tore apart Eddie Page,” Zai said. “He was the one I picked off the Special List and routed the EyeGrid archive through.”

“I haven’t seen any security alerts on that,” Ai said. “So they deployed an NME and shut it down? That’s chilling. I wonder if the subject survived? Probably not. I hope not.”

“Why?” Zai asked.

“Because if they can turn off an NME transformation and recover the subject then they have the Stage 1 cure in their hands already and we’ve run out of time.”

Ai sat alone in the train car, her eyes at last taking in the dark and empty metal structure that surrounded her.

“I should have gotten off a long time ago shouldn’t I?” she asked, her brain twisting into knots of worry and concern.

“You seemed pretty absorbed by the footage we found,” Zai said. “I didn’t think you wanted to be interrupted.”

“You were right, it just feels weird to be here without anyone else but us around,” Ai said.

The emptiness of the deserted train car sent a chill running down her spine. Aside from the plastic seats, she could have been sitting in her apartment. She’d never been one for posters or artwork in general. Her “decorating style” was laughable to describe as either decorating or a style. She hadn’t noticed the emptiness in her life though until she noticed the Harp-shaped void that haunted the train with her.

“Am I missing something?” she asked, grappling to understand why she felt so tangled. Her parting words to Harp had been firm and supportive, but her imagination could conjure so many scenarios that turned out poorly for them all.

Even though it was far too early to hear anything about how Harp’s conversation with Dr. Raju went, Ai could feel the waiting eating away at her nerves. She had spent years being as patient as a spider in its web, but this still left her unsettled.

“In relation to what?” Zai asked.

“The footage I guess,” Ai said, hoping to force her thoughts onto a more productive path, or at least to distract herself from the phantom fears that threatened to entice her to actions both rash and stupid. “It’s an interesting coincidence that the breadcrumb trail of information from the lab the Valkyries found just happened to lead to video that suggested Dr. Raju was involved with the chief researcher’s work.”

“Coincidences do happen,” Zai said. “And the footage wasn’t exactly easy to acquire.”

“I know and that adds a lot of weight to it,” Ai said. “But it also makes for a really strong trap.”

“Because we’ve invested so much in getting this footage, we’re inherently biased towards accepting it as true?” Zai asked.

“Yeah, it’s one of the basic failure modes for human thought,” Ai said. “If we struggle for something we internalize the belief that it must have value, and we fight to hold onto that belief in the face of mountains of evidence that it’s incorrect.”

“That’s why the city council member manage to get re-elected despite having single digit approval ratings?” Zai asked.

“Partially. Their supporters are so dug into the belief that their candidate, and only their candidate, has their best interest in mind that they accept any argument that supports that belief no matter how outrageous and transparently false a lie it might be,” Ai said. “The other reason is that the current officials are there because the real powers in Gamma City want them there, they’re the ones who buy and sell the elections.”

“So you think we’re doing the same thing with the footage?” Zai asked.

“Maybe,” Ai said. “I thought of this before, but what if Dr. Raju is right.”

“What? That you’re an enemy agent?” Zai asked

“No, not me, the footage,” Ai said. “We knew Dr. Fredrick Derricks has some kind of system worm that’s running close to the root level of the EyeGrid. It corrupts images of him to make sure he looks normal still but not in a manner that’s consistent enough for recognition software to identify him.”

“There’s another possibility there,” Zai said. “He may not have a worm corrupting the EyeGrid’s data. He might have the worm working in the facial recognition sub system.”

“That would be simpler I suppose,” Ai said. “And if it’s true that we know what he looks like. Or at least what he looked like then.”

“But how does that explain Dr. Raju’s presence in the video?” Zai asked.

“If Derricks has a backdoor into the EyeGrid, the feed could have been manipulated from the beginning as a trap for anyone who came searching for him,” Ai said. “He was probably at the warehouse the day it changed ownership – this doesn’t seem like a project with Tython has been working on slowly and patiently – but his trip to Cypress afterwards could have been spliced in from an earlier or later date. Or fabricated entirely.”

“Even if what we’re seeing is a pure fantasy though, that leaves open the question of why is it Dr. Raju in the scene?” Zai asked. “If Derricks was setting a trap to destroy Raju’s credibility, then he has to know her. Pretty well in fact, because he not only could replicate her appearance, she’s also listed as having been employed at Cypress at that time.”

“What was her role there?” Ai asked.

“Vice President of Research Analysis,” Zai said. “The role description in their Human Resources system says she was the final reviewer on Cypress’ projects, responsible for coordinating the team that evaluated their research investments for technical impact, practicality, and security.”

“What was Tython’s stake in Cypress at the time?” Ai asked.

“None,” Zai said. “But Tython did step in an acquire control of Cypress a year after the project started.”

“Hostile takeover?”

“No, Cypress ran into a debt death spiral. One of their major bio-mods, a depilatory application, developed a fault and paying off the claims knocked two of their other projects off schedule enough that they didn’t make first to market, or capture the patents they were looking for,” Zai said.

“They lost their company over a bad hair care product? Wow, that’s kinda said,” Ai said, and asked, “the competitors who beat them to the market; were they Tython subsidiaries?”

“No, they were Cypresses chief competitors,” Zai said.

“That’s cleaner, so if it was part of a conspiracy then they’re not a dumb one,” Ai said. “Can you get access to the competitors research notes?”

“Some of them are public record now and the others are under pretty light security since the products are obsolete now, so, yeah, I’ve already got them,” Zai said, audibly pleased with herself.

“If I wanted to take a company’s value down by letting their competition leap frog them, corporate espionage would not be a bad tool to use,” Ai said. “With time to market pressures though, they would be under the gun to make sure those breakthrus happened in fast enough. So what are the chances that in their haste, the people in Cypress who were working to make the Tython acquisition happen delivered their secret data to both competitors on the same day?”

“That would be hard to prove unless we could find a record of the files being transmitted,” Zai said.

“True, proving it is probably impossible. I’m sure the conspirators, if they exist, would have covered their tracks well enough to prevent that,” Ai said. “We don’t need legally admissible evidence though. All we need is enough support to see if it’s worth pursuing this line of reasoning further.”

“Proof like the filing dates for the competing patents?” Zai asked. “Cause if so we’re looking at both competitors filing for their versions of the patents on the same day.”

“Wow, that’s even closer than I’d expected,” Ai said. “I was thinking it would be the same week, but I guess they were all really close to finding a working process on both inventions.”

“That seems likely,” Zai said. “In both cases the research notes point to a last hurdle that was overcome without a lot of testing leading up to it.”

“That can happen, but on two different projects? At two different companies? To sabotage the same third company? On the same day? That’s kind of stretching things.”

“This is all leading back to Dr. Raju somehow isn’t it?” Zai asked.

“Indirectly,” Ai said. “Check me on this one. The other guy in the room? His name was Bill Harcroft right? Is he still employed with Cypress?”

“No,” Zai said. “He transferred to Tython itself.”

“What’s his current title?”

“Director of Emergent Product Development for the Tython’s Dermal Group,” Zai said. “They’re a branch Tython absorbed from Cypress. Several personnel transfers with Harcroft leading the pack.”

“What about Dr. Raju? Is she still connected to either company?” Ai asked.

“No, she resigned from Cypress years ago,” Zai said. “It was shortly after the transition of ownership to Cypress but the termination of her contract seems to have been mutually satisfactory. She gave six weeks notice for her departure and facilitated her replacements onboarding process before she left.”

“Can we construct her real reasons for leaving?” Ai asked.

“She was on track to vest into a significant ownership stake in Cypress, not controlling but she would have had a place on the board probably. With the takeover, her shares were bought out,” Zai said. “So on the one hand, she had less investment and control in the new company, and on the other she had a pile of money to pursue her own agenda with.”

“Where did she go after Cypress?” Ai asked.

“I don’t see any records of her joining another company,” Zai said. “From her tax records, she’s been living off investments made with her buyout from Cypress.”

“We know she was part of the group that created the Valkyries,” Ai said. “Given Harp’s apparent age, I think the Valkyries are a somewhat recent invention, so that could easily have been after she left Cypress.”

“Were there any deaths among Cypress’ researchers either right before the change in ownership or soon afterward?” Ai asked.

“Yes. Thadwell Mars,” Zai said. “He was a Principal Research Associate but I can’t see which projects he was attached to. He was one of the people killed by the rampage of Hell Beast 1.”

“That’s him,” Ai said. “He’s the one who created the tech that cracked the NME activation code. Hell Beast 1 killed, what, fifteen hundred people before they put it down? Prior to that no one had ever seen a NME in action. This is just a hunch but I bet Bill Harcroft thought he was going to kill two birds with one stone by testing an NME in an environment that could never be tracked back to him or Tython while also removing the one man with enough familiarity with the activation code to identify what was happening. Then he sees what NMEs are capable of and backs off from using the technology again for years.”

“Dr. Raju would have known him, wouldn’t she? Or both of them really. I mean we saw her in a meeting with Harcroft and she had to have worked with Mars. So none of this should be news to her, right?”

“Hmm, how do the dates of Hell Beast 1’s rampage and Dr. Raju’s resignation from Cypress align?” Ai asked.

“They’re not that close,” Zai said. “Dr. Raju turned in her notice two months after the Hell Beast 1 rampage.”

“The Dr. isn’t a fool then,” Ai said. “Two month is plenty of time to make it look like she didn’t know anything about what was going on, while also being brief enough that she could set plans in motion before she lost too much ground to Harcroft.”

“So does that mean she’s in the clear?” Zai asked.

“Maybe, Ai said. “I want to see what story she spins for Harp. I would guess after all this time, she’ll try to cover some stuff up. It’s got to be habit at this point. What she covers up though should be very enlightening.”

“Could Harp still be right though?” Zai asked. “Could Dr. Raju still be working with Derricks and Harcroft as the ‘clean up detail’ for when their monsters get out of control?”

“It’s possible, but if so we’ll know soon enough,” Ai said.

“What will give her away?” Zai asked.

“When and how she tries to kill us,” Ai said.

The train sat in its yard, quiet and empty except for two bodies that stood clutching the support straps with one hand while their other hands were clasped together. The lights were off on the car but neither needed external light to see by. Together they watched the footage from inside Cypress Health and Automation Systems play out through its hundredth loop.

It was well past midnight, and neither dinner nor a show had crossed either woman’s mind.

“We’d need a better recording to do extrapolatory micro-expression analysis on Dr. Raju,” Zai said. She’d been largely silent during the hours while Harp and Ai reviewed the footage, speaking up only when either requested data to add to their expanding web of information regarding what had been a brief and apparently perfunctory meeting regarding assessing basic trial work on a set of new medical protocols.

“Did she choose her seat to obscure her face enough to prevent that?” Ai asked.

“Maybe,” Harp said. “She could have been there because she was gathering data on Derricks.”

“It’s possible,” Ai said, as counter arguments rose unbidden in her mind.

“But why wouldn’t she have known to send us looking for this footage before we found the lab?” Harp asked, voicing one of Ai’s reservations for her.

“Whose idea was it to seek out this footage?” Zai asked.

“Sil’s,” Harp said.

“One of your teammates?” Ai asked.

“Yeah, Silicon Traces, she’s the techiest of us I guess,” Harp said. “We normally rely on Dr. Raju and her associates for our maintenance needs but Sil’s sort of become her apprentice.”

“How did Dr. Raju react to that idea?” Ai asked.

Harp paused for a moment of thought and sighed before she continued.

“She wasn’t a fan of it,” Harp said. “She had good reasons though. We didn’t know which archive the right EyeGrid footage was stored in, we had no options for getting the manifest that didn’t involve a wholesale battle through the GCPD, and even if we got the manifest, none of us had a plan for how to get the archival footage out without triggering hard lockdowns on the data.”

“I’m going to call my batting average .500 in terms of helping you then,” Ai said. “That sounds better than a 50% test score.”

Harp was silent, and the moment of levity fizzled in the silence of the car.

“A request has been logged in the repair system for the cameras on this car,” Zai said. “You’ll probably need to break them before you leave, but I can keep them artificially on the fritz for now.”

“Thanks,” Ai said. “When is the repair crew due?”

“Their earliest slot is in four weeks,” Zai said. “Their repair logs suggest that the job will probably be deferred at least twice before work is actually done on the cameras though.”

“She didn’t ask any questions about who the new protocols were going to be tried on,” Harp said, reviewing the transcript of the conversation again.

“It doesn’t look like it was that kind of meeting,” Ai said. “Derriks was just checking in to make sure everything was on track on Cypress’s end and giving them his approval for the conditions of the lab.”

“Except for the state of the secondary power grid,” Harp said. “But that’s not important, probably.”

“It might be,” Zai said. “From what I can see of the building’s schematics, there wasn’t a need for a secondary grid when it was constructed, so that had to be a later addition.”

“That’s not a cheap thing to retrofit a building with,” Ai said. “What would Derricks have needed one for?”

“Secure backup power?” Harp suggested. “Working with a partially transformed NME would need very tightly controlled conditions.”

“Stand alone units would be more reliable for that though. and cheaper,” Ai said. “For the price of a full building refit, you could attach a platinum class backup unit to every piece of diagnostic augmentation tech you were running.”

“It’s not for a system that was incorporated into the building,” Zai said. “At least not officially. Did the Valkyries find any high capacity cabling running through the building when you discovered it?

“No,” Harp said after a moment spent recalling her personal record of the building’s current state. “But it was picked pretty clean. It might have been uninstalled by the time we got there.”

“Most of the cost of a secondary power system is in the labor, so no one ever bothers with uninstalling one, but if scavengers had access to the interior it’s certainly possible they could have extracted anything that was left around,” Ai agreed.

“There’s another possibility then,” Zai said. “If Derricks and his team were planning to work with Enhanciles, they may have needed holding facilities, and those would need to be highly reliable.”

“Yeah,” Harp said, her shoulders slumping. “Those we did find signs of.”

“So the next question is…” Ai started to ask.

“Did Dr. Raju know about them?” Harp said.

“It’s possible she didn’t,” Ai said. “The tests they talk about in the meeting don’t sound like anything related to the NME activation code. Or a vaccine to ward against it. They were talking about human trials for protocols that would be available by the next fiscal quarter. Those are minor mods at best, even on a fast approval track.”

“Then what did she think the secondary grid was for?” Harp asked.

“Dr. Derriks seems to be rather eccentric,” Zai said. “Humans often don’t question the eccentric as deeply as they do those who fit a more typical mold.”

“So she just ignored a request like that?” Harp asked. “That’s not how she operates. She’s too smart to miss a detail that important.”

“Even smart people can make simple, stupid mistakes,” Ai said.

“If it’s a mistake at all,” Harp said. “It has to be a mistake though, doesn’t it?”

“We can’t tell from the video,” Ai said. “There’s just not enough here.”

“We need to find more video then,” Harp said. “From after she leaves Cypress.”

“We didn’t get that in the data slice that we took,” Ai said. “And I don’t think we can go back for another using the same trick without Tython seeing through both ruses.”

“This is is important,” Harp said.

“I know,” Ai said. “But there’s another way. Talk to her. See what her side of the story is.”

“If she’s been lying all along she’ll have lies ready for when I get back,” Harp said.

“She will, if she’s been lying,” Ai said. “And if she didn’t know that someone she worked with was a part of this, then she’ll have a story to tell too. It may not be easy to tell those two stories apart but she doesn’t know the kind of resources we have, so a lie might not have a strong enough foundation to stand up for long.”

“You’re right,” Harp said. “I have to talk to her. I owe her that.”

“You can call her now,” Ai said. “You said she’d notice if you weren’t back by midnight. Has she tried to reach out to you?”

“No,” Harp said. “Not yet.”

“What about the other Valkyries?” Ai asked. “Would they have noticed you were missing?”

“Yeah,” Harp said. “Sil would have. We have scheduled check-ins so that the others can mount a rescue if they see we’re in trouble.”

“How long would a rescue take to put together?” Ai asked, a chilly thought plunging into her stomach.

“Depends on the situation we think we’re going into,” Harp said. “The cardinal rule is that none of us are expendable, but that means no one is allowed to die or get captured trying to rescue anyone else. If someone can catch one of us, we do not want to be used as bait to lure the others in.”

“That’s a good strategy to have in place,” Ai said. “You’re tracker is still active right?”

“Yeah,” Harp said. “They know exactly where I am.”

“And Zai, the cameras are down in this car still correct?” Ai asked.

“Yes,” Zai said. “And train yard’s security system doesn’t scan or monitor the interior of parked vehicles. No one can see you at the moment.”

“But the train did record us getting on?” Ai asked. “And it didn’t register a departure scan for us?”

“Not yet,” Zai said. “I was going to update the timestamp on the scan it took when you actually left the car to make it seem like you’d left at different stops.”

“Probably still good to do, but I see a problem we may have stumbled into,” Ai said. “How good is Sil at cyber-intrusion?”

“She’s not at ‘sapient-AI levels’ but she’s beaten every system we’ve needed her too,” Harp said.

“So something like the GC Transit system wouldn’t pose a real challenge to her?” Ai asked.

“It hasn’t in the past,” Harp said. “Why would she be looking for you though?”

“You missed curfew,” Ai said. “When they looked for you, they found you in a train yard. When they found you here, the next question would be ‘who are you with’ and the onboarding records would show only one person who could still be on the train with you.”

“We should have gotten off,” Harp said. “I wouldn’t normally stay in one place like this, even if I was trying to blow off steam.”

“I didn’t think of it,” Ai said.

“I didn’t either. We didn’t need to move to review the video and I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“See,” Ai said. “Smart people, dumb mistake.”

“Is this really a problem?” Zai asked. “Can’t you just call the Valkyries and tell them what you’ve found?”

“I just tried,” Harp said. “They’re not answering.”

“Oh, that is not what I wanted to hear,” Ai said. “Tell me if this sounds plausible; Dr. Raju was not happy with my work during the manifest heist. She thought I botched it in an effort to get you captured.”

“Or she was afraid of what we would find if we moved forward and she wanted you removed as a resource who could help us find out what she’d done.”

“Or that, but for the moment, we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt,” Ai said. “If the narrative that she’s embraced is that I’m a deep agent for Tython, then my play would be to feed you the kind of intel that would degrade or remove your loyalty to her.”

“Which would mean providing access to footage that shows that she’s guilty of aiding the enemy from the beginning,” Harp said. “Except that no matter what I saw, I wouldn’t lose my loyalty to the other Valkyries. They’re the closest thing I have to a family now.”

“Right, so after I break your loyalty to Dr. Raju, we’d have a situation where you would still have a connection to the rest of your team, and that’s something I could use to feed them the same corruptive evidence. You’d be the vector into severing the Valkyries ties with their principal backer and the person who understands their technology the best. It’s not a victory play, but it moves the pieces on the board heavily out of your favor.”

“So Dr. Raju has them on lockdown then,” Harp said. “She’s freezing me out?”

“You went against her orders and contacted a potentially toxic agent,” Ai said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you did, but as a security measure, what she’s doing makes sense both if she’s betraying you and if she’s clean.”

“But you’re not…” Harp started to say.

“Trying to corrupt you?” Ai asked. “You can’t know that yet. I want you to trust me, but not without a solid foundation.”

“How can we have that?” Harp asked. “You could always be betraying me, and I could always be using you. Isn’t that what this footage proves?”

“No,” Ai said. “The footage doesn’t prove anything. It’s just information. We need a lot more to see the full picture. Maybe we’ll never get that, and maybe even if we do we still won’t be able to really know who is working for which side, that’s when it becomes leap of faith time. Before we go jumping off any cliffs though, we have to at least try to see as much as we can.”

“How do we do that?” Harp asked. “You say you want me to know I can trust you and then you tell me exactly how you could betray me. What can you give me that will let me know one way or the other?”

“My trust,” Ai said. “Specifically, I can let you go, off to talk to Dr. Raju. Ask her about this. Let her explain what she can. Don’t show the footage to any of the other Valkyries first. If it’s a vector for treachery, then let it sit unseen and ineffective.”

“What if she can’t?” Harp asked. “What if we exist just to clean up her messes that get out of hand?”

“That’s where I have to trust in you, and in your judgement,” Ai said. “I think there are a lot of possibilities for how Dr. Raju could be involved in this either unknowingly, or so peripherally that it barely counts as being connected to it. Let her speak to that. Let her prove it to you as best she can. If she can convince you, then you can either present the footage to the other Valkyries with her explanation, or edit her out of it if that makes things simpler.”

“Why would you do that?” Harp said.

“Because it’s the one thing I can think of that would be absolutely against my interests if I was an enemy agent trying to seduce you away from people who were legitimately on your side.”

“That will work fine is she’s on our side, but if she’s not, if she is using us, she could turn the other Valkyries against me and I don’t think I can fight them.”

“I can’t go with you to talk to Raju,” Ai said. “Anything I said in that meeting would be instantly suspect. But that doesn’t mean you have to go without any lifelines. You have a link to me that you can call on whenever you want. If you’re in trouble, I promise, I will come for you.”