People believe that moments caught on camera have a stark reality to them. A lens has no bias, an image no agenda to advance. It’s so tempting to accept that a picture, or an old video feed, captures the unvarnished truth of the situation it records. Sometimes though the best lies are the ones that show nothing but the truth.

“The data stream is finished,” Ai said. “But even this file sliver is massive. What timestamp does the manifest say to look for?”

“The meeting we’re looking for is sometime after the last time ownership change on the property at this address,” Harp said, providing a live link for Ai to reference.

“And we know who we’re looking for?” Ai asked.

“Not exactly,” Harp said, calling up the video record and setting it to begin displaying 12:01am – the exact second the property transfer had been notarized.

A view screen opened in the air in front of Ai, her internal mods projecting the images on her heads up display.

The location coordinates Harp provided showed the exterior of an old electronics warehouse. Apart from the shadows which painted the nearby buildings and alleys with a funereal gloom there was no movement to be seen, aside from the flickering of the single still functional streetlight.

“We don’t have to watch this in real time right?” Ai asked.

“No, we’re looking for people moving things into the facility,” Harp said.

“What is this place?” Ai asked.

“It’s one of the early labs where work was done on the NME code,” Harp said. “We found the building a few weeks ago when we traced some of the hardware that was used in Tython’s initial experiments.”

“So if this is where Tython started work on their Cure code then we can identify some of the original players from who shows up here?”

“We’re trying to put a face to one of them,” Harp said. “Doctor Fredrick Derricks. We know from the research notes we found that he pioneered the techniques that gave Tython the idea they could offer a widespread inoculation against the NME transformation protocols. He was definitely here, so we’re looking from the date the building last transferred ownership seven years ago.”

“I can help with that,” Zai said and the video blurred as it raced into fast forward.

When it paused a car was pulling into the warehouses parking lot. Four people exited the vehicle and Zai provided data on all of them from facial recognition.

“Corporate security,” Ai said, reading the overlay for each of the brutes.

The security personnel entered the building and Zai switched between the different EyeGrid cameras looking for a better view.

“There’s no record from inside the building,” she said. “Not even the mandatory fire and rescue cameras.”

“In this neighborhood?” Harp said. “You’re not going to find any of those. This place was dwindling even before the first Robo Apocalypse.”

“Does anyone show up before they leave?” Ai asked.

The video zoomed forward again to show a series of trucks arriving and a crew of people in non-descript overalls offloading wrapped pallets and small boxes of supplies. Each worker passed in front of one or more cameras closely enough that Zai’s facial recognition routines identified them easily.

“These are all hourly contractors,” Harp said.

“Who are they contracted with?” Ai asked.

“A company out of Papua New Guinea,” Zai said. “Or at least that’s their current employer.”

“All of them?” Harp asked.

“Who was employing them back when this footage was shot?” Ai asked.

“A different company. All of them,” Zai said. “They were based out of Gamma City then though.”

“Are they actually still alive?” Ai asked.

“Apparently,” Zai said. “They’re all drawing weekly salaries still.”

“Check for video footage at their current jobsite,” Ai said.

Zai didn’t have to pause for even a moment.

“That’s probably not a good sign,” she said.

“No one’s there?” Ai guessed.

“Well, that depends on who you categorize as ‘no one’,” Zai said. “Here, take a look.”

Another window popped up showing a stone quarry in the Southern China Prosperity Region. Ai shook head and stared again to make sure of what she was seeing on the live video feed.

The quarry was a roughly circular column that had been burrowed into the rocky ground. At the bottom roamed a series of fully transformed NMEs. They moved with a jerky stiffness that suggested either intense rusting in their joints, a general loss of power to their systems, or both.

“Those are them?” Ai asked.

“I can’t say for sure,” Zai said. “This is where they’re currently contracted. It’s possible they’re here are guards or in some other capacity, but I’m not finding any sign of a human presence on any of the quarry’s video feeds.”

“It’s them,” Harp said. “We’ve had no luck finding the Tython-related facilities and a lot of the obvious weak spots like the workers on the places that closed just aren’t around.”

“So Tython’s been using it’s own labor force as their lab rats?” Ai asked.

“Is it a surprise? They’ve done far worse than that,” Harp said.

“Worse yes, but inefficient,” Ai said. “Operations like this require some staff to run and generally the staff needs to be vetted for reliability. It seems shoddy to bring in random people and then turn them into machine parts.”

“This might have been part of their startup process,” Harp said. “They needed more help for setting things up than they would have needed later on.”

“These contractors are well paid too,” Zai said. “If someone in Tython is collecting their paychecks then that person is sitting on a decent nest egg.”

“Can we tie the companies that employ them back to Tython?” Ai asked.

“In a legal sense?” Zai asked. “No. To a degree of reasonable certainty though? Yes. Both their old and new companies are unaffiliated shells controlled, eventully, by one or more people in Tython’s management structure.”

“Let’s find out who that is,” Harp said. “When did the next people arrive at the building?”

Zai resumed the feed from the electronics warehouse, pausing at the next set of people (construction contractors – not currently transformed into NMEs and still employed in regular jobs), an industrial cleaning crew (similarly still going about their normal daily lives in the present day), and finally a true oddity.

“Who is that?” Ai asked as man stepped out of a RV that had pulled into the parking lot. Zai hadn’t painted a name over his head and was offering no link to biographic information.

“That could be him!” Harp said. “Derriks. We haven’t caught a sight of him yet so he has to have some trick for avoiding automation detection.”

“Why come here then?” Ai asked. “If he’s a recluse, he should be avoiding public connections to anything like Tython.”

“If he’s going to work here, he may need to inspect the lab they set up in there first,” Harp suggested. “Follow him when he leaves. From what we’ve seen Dr. Fredricks dislikes impersonal meetings, so he’s either onboard with the program already and needs to report on its progress, or this was the offer session and he’ll delivery his answer in person.”

“At this point the project couldn’t have been too big,” Ai said.

“That’s what we’re hoping,” Harp said. “If this really is where the work began, then we might be able to follow it forward and find all of the places where research was done and all of the people who were involved.”

“What’s the danger if some are missed?” Ai asked. “It doesn’t look like any of the illicit labs they’ve contracted with or created have made enough progress for the cure to be marketable yet.”

“Tython hasn’t taken the world hostage, so that’s probably true,” Harp said. “The problem is each of those labs has the NME activation sequence.”

Ai blinked as the implications of that settled in.

“If we take Tython apart, we create a host of rogue players that have something worse than a nuclear option at their fingertips,” she said.

“And the desperation to use or sell whatever tools they have to ensure their survival in a city that’s going to be extremely hostile to them,” Harp said.

“That’s why you haven’t gone directly after Tython yet?” Ai asked.

“That’s one of Dr. Raju’s reasons,” Harp said.

“It’s a solid one,” Ai said. “But there’s more you’re getting out of this isn’t there?”

Harp was silent for a moment, the rapid shifting of her gaze the only sign of an internal struggle. In the end she sighed, brushed a hand in the air to move one of her popup screens away, and turned to face Ai.

“The NME code isn’t designed to produce monsters,” she said. “It was meant for something else. Something better.”

“How do you know that?” Ai asked, suspicions bubbling up in her mind.

“We’ve taken apart some of the NMEs that we’ve found,” Harp said. “There are all kinds of things wrong with the NME code, but among the broken subroutines there’s an old processing thread that could have been a universal upgrade override.”

“Someone was messing with the upgrade process for bio-mods again?” Ai asked. “Isn’t that what caused the last apocalypse?”

“Yes,” Harp said. “It’s an easy thing to mess up, though maybe not as badly as happened years ago. That’s not the important bit though. The important bit is that it looks the code fragment in the NMEs is functional.”

“Functional how?” Ai asked.

“It can allow bio-mods to enhance themselves safely, and outside of the original design constraints,” Harp said. “It’s central to the transformation process the NMEs undergo.”

“I’d like to quibble with the definition of ‘safely’ there when the upgrades result in something like an NME, but I think I see what you’re going for,” Ai said. “I’m guessing if the rest of the code was stripped away from it, that core thread would allow everyone to receive gold tier upgrades to their bio-mods?”

“No,” Harp said. “It wouldn’t be limited to gold tier. It would be any upgrades anyone invented or reverse engineered, ever.”

“How would that work though? We’d be swamped with conflicting upgrade directives,” Ai said. “Our bio-mods would melt down trying to be everything at once.”

“I know of a few…examples that suggest otherwise,” Harp said.

“So why not release the code fragment then?” Ai asked. A few thousand reasons leapt readily to mind, starting with the immediate disintegration of all known economic structures and the likelihood that people would willingly choose to become something akin to an NME because a hulking indestructible form would make them feel safer in a world that had suddenly become a chaotic nightmare.

“What’s left in the NMEs after their transformation is only a fragment. It assembles at some point during the transformation and self destructs in stages as the conversion completes.” Harp said.

“That seems like something that was part of an intentional design,” Ai said.

“It has to be,” Harp said. “But that means that someone has the original prototype version of the universal upgrade override.”

“Didn’t you say that Tython weren’t the ones who created the original NME code though?” Ai asked.

“From what we can see, that’s true,” Harp said. “But they’ve studied it enough that they might have recreated the Override. It would be a key element in making a vaccine work.”

“We might have a clue for where to start looking then,” Zai said. “I found the timestamp where Derrick leaves the warehouse.”

“Do we have the footage for where he went next?” Ai asked.

“Yes, it’s to one of Tython’s proxies,” Zai said.

Video began playing on the EyeGrid window again. Doctor Derrick pulled into the parking lot at Cypress Health and Automation Systems. The video from the external cameras was clear but when he entered the building the scene turned black with a “Private: Authorized Personnel Only” seal blocking out the pictures.

Zai removed the proprietary seal on the data and the video resumed, following Dr. Derricks into a conference room where two people waited for him. Both were dressed in bland business suits, and Zai put the facial recognition data above both of their heads. Ai only needed the name overlay for one of the people though. The other was unfortunately familiar.

“Why is Dr. Raju there?” Harp asked in a small and confused voice.

Officer Eddie Page had blood on his hands. It wasn’t a new occurrence. There was a sting across the knuckles that came with beating someone to a bloody pulp. It left him feeling a little high, and if he’d been the sort of man given to self reflection he might have noticed his dopamine levels spiked up after an “aggressive arrest” to levels that suggested a psychological addiction to the violence he inflicted. That wasn’t something he wanted to notice though. All he wanted was to feel the kick of it, again and again.

Punish the guilty and get a reward. The only thing better than that was punishing another cop. That had been a sublime thing. He would always remember the feel of Joe Greensmith’s face as the bones in it cracked. He hadn’t been there when they’d given Joe’s son the same treatment, but he heard the daughter had joined the force too, so there was always hope for another high like the last one.

The person laying on the ground wasn’t as exciting by comparison, but he was guilty of something. Probably. It didn’t particularly matter to Eddie. All he had do was to say that he’d seen the guy go for a weapon. It was oh so scary on the streets – bad guys were everywhere – and he’d had to keep himself and his partner safe. Instincts had taken over (which was at least truthful, though not in a sense that Eddie would ever confess to).

Once upon a time, a cop like Eddie would have shot the guy laying before him. It was a simple formula; see someone you don’t like, provoke a tense situation, and give free reign to your worst impulses under the cover of ‘self preservation’. Eddie had played that game a few times, and if he’d had a particularly bad week he wouldn’t hesitate to put someone down for giving him too much grief. Or if he thought they looked like they’d give him too much grief.

Fatal shootings always demanded a review though, and those came at the expense of paid time on duty. What was much more effective was the kind of pure physical brutality that left the victim a pile of agony, but which their bio-mods could repair in the course of a day or two. No lasting marks for a judge to see, or a jury to feel sympathetic over.

Not that it ever came to a trial. Everyone knew they could file charges for Criminal Assault in cases of police brutality, but everyone also knew that those cases were virtually unwinnable in the Gamma City Court system, and that was just how Eddie Page liked it.

What he didn’t like was the automated assignments that Central Dispatch assigned to him while he was on the clock. He was rubbing his hands, enjoying both the lingering pain in his knuckles as well as the incoherent groans from the wreck of a man at his feet, when the next pile of work orders dropped into his queue.

“You get anything good this time?” Eddie’s partner Mark asked.

“Don’t know,” Eddie said. “I need to file the report on this one.”

“I got two priority jobs,” Mark said. “Dispatch must be swamped tonight.”

“Nah this is typical,” Eddie said. “Work always comes in waves. Gimme a second to make up something here and I’ll check what they dumped on me.”

Eddie threw together a quick report on the incident that lead to the altercation he’d just been in.

The truth of the matter was simple. Eddie had seen a boy (correction: thuggish looking foreigner of indeterminate age) and had stopped the youth to hassle him about the clothes he wore (correction: had approached the man who was acting erratically, and asked the disturbed individual the standard set of approved questions to determine the state of the individual and the safety of those in the area). When the boy stammered back a “what are you stopping me for? I haven’t done anything wrong!” (correction: The thug became agitated and showed signs of escalating the situation with a violence), Eddie then punched him, breaking the boy’s nose, and asked him what right he thought he had to be in Gamma City (correction: Officer Page followed departmental procedure and resorted to “Hard Empty Hand Control Techniques” to regain control of the situation without endangering the numerous innocent bystanders.)

Eddied continued on in that manner for another few paragraphs, largely copying the text from the hundreds of other incident reports he’d submitted for similar events.

Zai watched him finish filing his report and slipped the work order to investigate Carlton Merriweather’s death into the long list of tasks that awaited Eddie Page’s perusal.

There was nothing unusual about the ticket authorizing Carlton Merriweather’s murder investigation. Like most people of his social standing, Carlton hadn’t left behind enough of a life insurance policy to cover a full investigation into his demise. On a busy night, Eddie didn’t give the work order even ten seconds of attention before tossing it off to his Cognitive Partner for data processing.

In theory, the Cognitive Partner was supposed to assemble the easily verifiable data and present a tentative finding to the officer, who would then follow up on leads, interview witnesses and close the investigation without wasting time on tedious work that an electronic agent could perform better.

In practice, Cognitive Partners could craft a solid enough narrative that it sounded convincing to nine out of ten human jurors and eleven out of ten artificial ones. A good defense lawyer knew the kinds of thing to look for in a CP generated case, but most of the lowlifes Eddie saw himself arresting couldn’t afford anything beyond the free AttorneyBot that the court assigned them. And anyone who could, would probably be able to get away with whatever they’d done anyways. That was why Eddie never bothered rich people.

Or at least never bothered rich people until Zai made him do so.

Everyone makes mistakes. People are built to do that. It’s what gives them creativity and the ability to learn. In Zai’s case the mistakes she made with Carlton’s file were specifically crafted to snarl in the Cognitive Partner’s logic structures and induce it to make the kind of requests it should have never attempted on its own.

Carlton Merriweather died in an area that wasn’t covered by the EyeGrid. He had to die there since he had no actual body to appear before a working camera. As such, there was no reason for Eddie Page’s Cognitive Partner to reach out and try to collect the relevant EyeGrid records surrounding the time and place where the murder occurred.

Zai’s malicious data jumped through a loophole in the Cognitive Partner’s code, a hastily knocked out algorithm which hadn’t considered how to handle a date which was before the dawn of time.  Zai knew exactly how it would handle that input and watched with satisfaction as Eddie’s expert system rolled the number around, truncating bita off to make it fit into a workable date range. Once it had “fixed the date”, it mindlessly spit out a request to the EyeGrid archive system to return a stream of what the cameras had recorded years previously and in a completely different part of the city.

Stealing from the archive in the time window Harp proposed wasn’t possible. Or Ai couldn’t think of a method of safely pulling it off. But why steal when you could take the information you wanted legitimately?

Within the systems watching the EyeGrid archive an alert was raised the moment the request from Eddie Page’s Cognitive Partner was received. There were thousands of requests made of the EyeGrid archive every day. Most of those were for information within a recent time span. The ones which asked for data that had been placed in offline storage were uncommon enough that they rated automatic review. The review bots scanned the datastream as it was transmitted. Facial recognition made several critical matches in the images that were being sent, and a deeper level warning system was engaged.

The deep agents tried to terminate the datastream, but were rebuffed because the request came from a verified source pursuant to an active murder investigation. Had the deep agents possessed the permission to override that lock out they would have but theirs was a subtle mission and the capacity of edit or delete privileged requests of the archive data would have made them too easy to detect and counter.

So they did the next best thing. They alerted their master.

In Tython’s system, an agent which was supposed to remain asleep forever woke at the notification it was never supposed to receive. After verifying the alert was properly signed and involved data relevant to its master, it sent a single innocuous packet to the human it was built to report to.

Zai couldn’t see further into the Tython web than that. She desperately wanted to know who was pulling the strings but had to settle for predicting what the hidden human controller would do with the information they’d just received.

Harp had provided them with a copy of the manifest, and together the three of them had pieced out the relevant backups that they needed access to. Those archive files were streaming into Eddie’s Cognitive Partner at the speed of light and through a backdoor that Zai had burrowed into the unwitting CP, the data was being passed on invisibly to Harp and Ai who were already watching it.

The whole transfer took only a few minutes. The EyeGrid files weren’t especially large but the pipe out of the archive facility was kept intentionally small to prevent widescale theft if the security was ever breached. Ai’s answer to that had been to utilize the data they’d received previously to make sure their theft was highly targeted and would go unnoticed by anyone except those who were actively trying to keep it a secret.

For its part, the Cognitive Partner received the data from the EyeGrid, parsed it for matches to Carlton Merriweather, found nothing, and dutifully deleted the records, supplying a confirmation code of its actions to the archive. As far as the GCPD was concerned, the EyeGrid request had yielded nothing of value, just like most such requests and the case sputtered out for a lack of useful evidence.

Eddie was informed of the lack of actionable data available in relation to the Merriweather murder and confirmed the “Close Case” command indicating that he had “researched the crime to the fullest extent possible and saw no likelihood that it was more than a isolated and non-repeating case of under-socialized psychotic behavior.”

For Eddie, that was as far as the Merriweather case went. Lost amid thousands of other cases Eddie wouldn’t have been able to accurately testify whether he worked on it or not even under threat of pain or death. Plus he’d managed to score a half dozen high paying work orders in the bundle that made the Merriweather investigation forgettable even if the Cognitive Partner had produced an airtight case against someone.

There were other actors though who paid much closer attention to the case of Carlton Merriweather.

From within Tython, barely discrete data probes were launched.

Who had requested the datastream which showed the human master in revealing  company? A cop.

Why was a cop snooping around in data which was that old? Because of a murder investigation.

What did a murder investigation have to do with events which happened years ago? Nothing.

Who was killed? Carlton Merriweather.

How was he connected to their human master? He wasn’t. Extensive checks revealed that he was nobody special, and certainly not involved in anything relevant to their master.

Why did his death warrant a request for archive data? It didn’t. The request was in error.

No. The request had been tampered with. The date on the request was intentionally scrambled to yield access to their master’s data.

Who tampered with the date? The original report had the correct date on it. The request to the archive was for the wrong date.

Conclusion: Officer Eddie Page slipped in a request for data he should never have needed.

Why did Officer Page ask for the data?

Hypothesis: Officer Page is one of the agents within the GCPD who was responsible for the NME incident, and is connected with the organization which is working to expose Tython’s NME Cure program.

Support: Officer Page’s account received an unusual influx of money due to a statistically unlikely collection of high paying cases. This was a prime method for a connected organization to make a payout to an operative.

Several minutes passed and then a response from the master arrived.

Hypothesis accepted.

One second later, Officer Page’s Cognitive Partner went offline. Eddie thought nothing of it. His unit performed poorly from time to time and usually just needed a night to reset itself. In the interim though he was blocked from sending any outgoing datafiles, but as far as he knew he didn’t have anything that he needed to upload anyways.

It was six hours before Eddie got off his shift. Four hours after that, he was alone in his car.

That was the remaining extent of Officer Eddie Page’s life span.

He saw the NME that had been sent after him.

He felt the sheer force it exerted when it ripped his car in half, and that was the last thing he ever felt.

Zai swam through Gamma City’s data streams on a mission to murder a man who never existed.

Carlton Merriweather was a fiction, an identity Zai created from the receipts and subscriptions and overdue notices. He began with an overdue library book. The digital rights complaint was automatically generated against his account without checking the validity of whether the book in question had ever been reserved. There was a significant bit of profit to be found in processing all charges for a publisher’s right to control the works they owned, regardless of whether or not those rights had been infringed on, or even existed in the first place.

Typical individuals paid off small charges without questioning them, and that was exactly what Carlton did in order to “lift the freeze on his account credentials”.  The charges could have been contested of course, but that would have involved hours of navigating through perplexing message menu systems, only to reach support personnel who were guaranteed to be fluent in the caller language and also guaranteed to fail to understand anything that was asked of them.

The digital rights charges were an abuse of power, but like so many others, people tolerated them because doing so was faster and cheaper in the short term than battling against a system designed, implemented and iterated upon with the goal of wearing down even the most determined of “defendants” through mind melting levels of frustration.

Zai took the receipt of payment for the late books and used it to file a request for a lifting of sanctions against Carlton’s account in the city’s “lending service system”.

The “LeSS” responded that no account could be found for Carlton Merriweather, because of course there was none.

But mistakes happen all the time, and an account being deleted when it should have been flagged as suspended was hardly unheard of. It was so common in fact that there were automated retrieval services in place to restore an improperly deleted account to full standing.

The retrieval process was a simple one from an implementation standpoint. “Deleted Accounts” were rarely purged from the LeSS databases. They were simply marked as Inactive and allowed to clutter storage space since they took up a vanishingly trivial amount of space.

Like with any garbage though, accounts that were left to rot in the inactive portion of storage occasionally suffered real losses. IDs were corrupted, or reused by other accounts, sections of the account were overwritten, and so on. The automated retrieval process was able to handle a wide spectrum of these issues as well though. It was much better from the corporation’s point of view to allow the machines to make all the decisions on marginal accounts rather than require a human become involved. Humans cost money, and even a task which would take seconds to resolve could mushroom out to demand an entire department to handle when you were faced with servicing tens of millions of people in real time.

Zai passed a deliberately corrupted account packet to the LeSS retrieval system and like the mindless automata it was, the LeSS account bot spit back a fully repaired and signed library card for one Carlton Merriweather.

Having access to the GCPD case system made Zai’s next step disappointingly easy.

Carlton was barely an outline of a man yet. With one account to support his name, even the briefest of cross checks would reveal that he was less substantial than smoke.

So Zai wove more history for him.

Carlton had been assaulted a few days prior. An automated report to the GCPD’s Bronze Tier Response System indicated that Carlton had suffered a Type 3 Mugging – threat of harm, loss of valuables, but no injuries. No need for an active duty officer to be called in, and no agreement from Carlton to pay for any expedited processing. With Type 3 assault related crimes the victim attested to believing they were in no immediate danger and that they did not believe they had sufficient evidence to merit an investigation or prosecution of a case. Carlton was resigned as so many others were to suck up the loss and move forward, though he did mention in his verbal notes that he was afraid of what would happen if the same group accosted him again and he wasn’t able to distract them by throwing his money away and running in the opposite direction.

Zai felt like her synthesized voice work as Carlton was one of her better performances but she planned to check with Ai in case she’d missed something. And maybe with Harp too, if Ai thought spilling the details of their plan was a good idea.

With the police report and an active City Library account to reference, Zai was able to send out cancellation requests for a wide variety of other accounts Carlton should have possessed.

Drivers license? Check. As one of the primary accounts checked for identity verification, the Driver’s license database had a robust system for reporting losses. The DMV’s computers were at one time a significant weak point in the battle to prevent people from creating fake identities. With the usual level of underfunding government regulatory agencies received that problem was a long standing one well after it was formally acknowledged. Over time though the wheels of change do turn, and, with updated procedures in place, the only method of gaining an active Driver’s account was to show up for one in person bearing a mountain of forms, many of which authorized the DMV to perform direct biological testing on the applicant and keep those results on file in perpetuity.

Zai could do many things but show up in a biologically human body that was no Ai’s was not one of them.

Fortunately she didn’t have to.

The DMV’s rules prevented any but the most determined of souls from creating an active ID. Their safeguards against someone creating a deactivated ID however were noticeably less well thought out. After all, what harm could an inactive account do?

Carlton’s history stretched back 20 years by the time Zai was done abusing the loophole in the DMV’s system. There was even an appointment registered for him to appear with the required paperwork and a readiness for the biometric testing to establish that he was who he said he was. As a ghost, Carlton was just as incapable of making that appointment as a work of fiction would be, and so no one would ever spend the time or energy to notice the difference.

From the DMV’s database, Zai took the expired but otherwise perfectly valid identity string for Carlton’s license and combined it with his similarly perfect library card and registered him with the city tax department.

The city tax records were the lifeblood of the politicians who ran each of the districts and so the security on them was substantially better than in other areas of the municipal web infrastructure. Creating a fake tax history was not the work of hours, or even days. To many changes logged all at once would alert even the least aggressive scans, and too short of a history would appear like a blazing beacon to anyone investigating whether Carlton Merriweather was real or not. Zai could craft Carlton a new history in time for Harp’s midnight deadline.

So she used an old one.

One of the many tasks that was part of creating the Heartless identity she and Ai used to manage their less-than-legal enterprises was the creation of a web of identities to support it. Most of the ones which Heartless used were either fully fleshed out or intentionally blank slates. Zai managed a larger constellation of unused identity fragments though so that she could cobble together which specific personas a need arose for.

It was Ai’s idea to take one of those partial personas and slice it off from Heartless’s sphere. Blending the two worlds was something she always frowned on due to the danger involved, but Ai had deemed it safe enough to use a piece of documentation that hadn’t been touched by Heartless at all in creating the poor, deceased, and never to be referenced again Carlton Merriweather.

Armed with a library card, driver’s license and poor tax history (since no one filed spotless returns each year), Zai turned to finding Carlton a place to live. Or to have lived.

It wasn’t hard to hack the tenancy records of an apartment in Gamma City. Zai wouldn’t even consider creating identities if she couldn’t manage that. What was difficult however was creating memories in people like neighbors or coworkers. Placing Carlton in an apartment that was empty would have been simple. Placing him in one that contained furniture that was lived in and where a person had been seen at least entering and exiting the space was somewhat trickier though.

Unless Zai made Carlton a salesman.

Despite all of the advances in telepresence technologies, all the myriad methods of making people feel “like they were right there!” despite being hundreds or thousands of miles away, there was still an inexplicable human need to meet face to face when discussing matters of financial importance.

Carlton therefor was a salesman, traveling from Gamma City on most days, with a home that existed largely as a convenient layover spot during the days he wasn’t called to negotiate a deal somewhere else on the eastern seaboard of North America.

There were many apartments that were cared for by automation and whose owners were rarely enough seen to make cryptids like Bigfoot seem positively photogenic. That took care of Carlton’s neighbors

With a job, Carlton needed a business to work for and that meant coworkers had to be able to vouch for his existence. Here again, Carlton’s role as a salesman worked to Zai’s advantage. Sales staff frequently have the highest turnover rate of all professions within a company. The unsuccessful ones are quickly fired for being underperforming regardless of the reason, and the successful ones parlay their luck into jobs at other companies who are willing to pay for anyone who can work the magic and bring revenue in.

Carlton was not a successful salesman. He was a typical one. Underperforming in most jobs, with occasional wins that kept him from washing out of the role entirely. Zai inserted him into the lower-middle tier of half a dozen corporations, knowing from Ai’s advice that if anyone researched his history at any of the businesses, people would check their records and “dimly remember some guy who was here for a bit and didn’t work out so we must have left him go”.

For his current employment, Zai set Carlton up with a bottom of the barrel external sales contract. Carlton was responsible for doing pre-convention setup and acting as a live salesman at events sponsored by different companies looking to launch the latest fad products.

Carlton generated no leads at these events, as was typical of someone with pamphlets and a sign board as the sole resources they could work with, but he also didn’t report any injuries, which rendered him indistinguishable from the non-entity that he was.

With all of the pieces of Carlton’s small and uninspiring life in place, Zai turned to murdering her creation.

Carlton existed for one reason. He needed to die to create a specific type of homicide case file. A spectacular murder was out of the question. As his fictional life was barren of the extraordinary, so to would be his death.

Zai created enough a life insurance policy that payment for an investigation could be arranged, but not so much that anyone would be eager to fight through the probate courts to claim it.

With that in place, Zai picked up the carefully drawn pieces of Carlton’s fictional life and placed him within the GCPD reporting system, weaving around the illusion of his existence a very real trap for another officer from Ai’s “Special List”.

No one was harmed by Carlton’s creation or destruction, but when Tython followed the trail to find who had purloined the data they had on lockdown, Zai was going to make sure they found someone who richly deserved what would happen next.

The subway rolled on past Ai’s stop and Ai rolled on with it, leaving her home drifting ever further behind her.

“There’s a lot of questions I could ask you now, but why don’t we start with this one,” Ai said. “We’re going to rob one of the EyeGrid archives – when do we get started?”

“As soon as we can,” Harp said. “I’ve got a seven hour window where Dr. Raju won’t notice that I’m gone. If I miss the midnight check-in though, she’ll activate the search beacon we carry.”

“Can you disable that?” Ai asked.

“Yes, but we might need it if we run into trouble. And there’s a chance that she’d notice the deactivation.”

“And you don’t want her to know that we’re doing this why?” Ai asked.

“She threatened to wipe out the manifest data we got from GCPD central command if we tried to act on it before she declared it safe.”

“And without the manifest, even if we get the data, locating the time segments that you need will be all but impossible,” Ai said, perceiving the nature of the problem.

She couldn’t blame Dr. Raju for being cautious. Off hand Ai could think of several methods of using a falsified manifest as a trap for the unwary. From simple techniques like aliasing all of the indexes within the manifest so that you could discover what the Valkyries were looking when they tried to access it, to more complicated schemes like replacing specific image streams with staged video that showed the Valkyries what you wanted them to believe.

“Won’t she just wipe it if you show up with a copy of the archive before she’s ready to sign off the manifest’s integrity?” Ai asked. Bad data could be infinitely worse than no data, and sometimes safety had to be the paramount consideration.

“I’m not going to let her know I’ve retrieved the data until I’ve seen what’s in the archive,” Harp said.

“What if she’s right? What if there is a trap in the manifest?” Ai asked. “The people we’re up against are not amateurs.”

“If it’s a trap then I want to see what it is,” Harp said. “That’s part of why I’m not involving the others in this. If there’s some kind of worm in the data then I’d rather it fry my brain than any of theirs.”

Ai frowned. She’d heard of friendships like that. Read about them in books and seen them in videos her whole life. Experiencing it personally however had never been in the cards for her. In Ai’s experience people could be pleasant and civil at times but no one really wanted to die for anyone else.

But there was Harp, placing herself in harm’s way so that no one she cared about would have to.

“Who is it that’s pursuing you?” Ai asked. “You’d mentioned before that there were people hunting for you and the other Valkyries and it sounded like they were a serious threat.”

“That’s a long story,” Harp said. “You’ve guessed some of it already though. Tython and any other groups who deal in military supplies would pay anything to get their hands on us. Or to showcase their tech beating us.”

“Those aren’t the people who worry you though,” Ai said.

“No,” Hope agreed. “They’re not.”

“And here we reach the limit of what you trust me with?” Ai asked.

“I’m sorry,” Harp said.

“No, don’t be,” Ai said. “It’s damn healthy to be careful. I just want to be clear on what boundaries I shouldn’t push.”

“Thank you,” Harp said. “A lot of what Dr. Raju is worried about is how many of our secrets you and Zai could turn up.”

“I’m not going to offer any reassurances there,” Ai said. “Dr. Raju’s right to be concerned about us. If I meet another pair like Zai and myself the first thing I plan to do is to hide, and then try to find every weak spot they have.”

“You didn’t hide when I asked you to meet with us,” Harp said.

“You had just saved my life,” Ai said. “And you present a different sort of risk. When you fight it’s pretty clear what you’re doing. When Zai and I go after someone, things just start happening to them. Bad things. If we’re really motivated in fact, it will be the worst things they’ve ever feared.”

“That makes for a good argument in favor of not trusting you,” Harp said, her tone light but seasoned with suspicion too.

“Good,” Ai said. “I’d rather tell you not to trust me and show you that you can with my actions, than the reverse.”

Harp squeezed Ai’s hand tighter.

“You seem like you’re trusting me an awful lot,” Harp said.

“Sorry, I guess that’s a little insulting, isn’t it?” Ai asked.

“Maybe. Depends why you don’t think I’m a threat,” Harp said.

Gut instinct was not a valid answer to that question. Ai reflected for a moment on why she was willing to share secrets with Harp when she’d guarded them furiously for decades.

Harp had saved her, and had saved a lot of people from earlier NME attacks. Ai considered whether she was looking up to someone who seemed to embody what she had once dreamed her father to be?

No. There was an element of that, but Ai knew only too well how that everyone had flaws and petty failings. The Black Valkyries weren’t pure and noble superheroes. They had an agenda of their own. It didn’t mean they weren’t also capable of compassion and altruism, but they had more motivating them than a simple desire to do good.

Did she think her own technical skills and Zai’s digital prowess could safely manipulate Harp and her friends if they became a threat? No. She had some plans forming in the back of her mind if the she and the Black Valkyries came to cross purposes but she’d held off putting any wheels in motion there.

Was she lonely? That was a more difficult question to answer. Zai had discovered a need for recognition that she hadn’t been aware of until she spoke to Harp. Did Ai carry a similar need within herself?

Maybe? It was too large a thought to grapple with in the pause between sentences. Hiding who she was and how she felt all the time was a burden she’d carried for so long she felt like she was numb to its weight.

There was another hunger that drove her though.

“I think you’re a terrible, unstoppable threat,” Ai said. “Which is just the kind of threat that I need.”

“Why? What’s in this for you?” Harp asked.

“You’re the person I can’t be,” Ai said. “I have the power to crush regular citizens, especially if they’re not the ‘right’ race or creed, but I can’t do anything to the people who are really at fault for everything that’s wrong with this city.”

Harp chuffed out a small laugh.

“If you’d grown up where I did, I think you’d have a different take on the kind of problems ‘regular citizens’ can cause,” Harp said.

“It’s a big world and there’s a lot wrong with it,” Ai said. “People like the ones who run Tython though are the ones who have a vested interest in keeping it that bad or making it worse.”

“And you think I can do something about that?” Harp asked.

“I think you’re able to work openly in a way I can never afford to,” Ai said. “Before, my only hope of changing anything was to work so quietly that no one ever saw what I was doing. You can afford to be a lot louder and more direct though.”

“I can’t be your wrecking ball. Not exclusively,” Harp said. “We’ve got more to take care of than destroying Tython, and I’m not even sure that’s a good idea given how big it is. Is that going to be a problem?”

“If I said I was building a house, and you offered to help put the bedroom together would it be a problem that you didn’t also put together the living room and the kitchen? No. Same idea here,” Ai said. “At the moment, we’re useful to each other. I’m willing to work with that, and if we’re mutually useful again in the future, then it’s all to the better.”

“And if we’re working on elaborate schemes to sell each other out?”

“If we’re that stupid then we’ll probably get everything that’s coming to us,” Ai said.

“As long as we can make sure everyone else gets what coming to them too, I’d be ok with that,” Harp said.

“You’ve led a much less sinful life than I have then,” Ai said.

“Probably not,” Harp said. “I just never saw the point in feeling guilty about a lot of the things I’ve had to do.”

Ai let a wistful smile trace crumple her lips. Most of the sins she carried weren’t things she’d had to do. Like with Eric Andrews, the cop she’d turned into a techno-monster, all she’d needed was an excuse and the opportunity to do something she’d desired on a primal level for a long time. If Harp was willing to move forward though, Ai decided it wasn’t worth dwelling on the past that much.

“So which EyeGrid archive is our target?” she asked.

“The GCPD storage facility in the Unity Blue district,” Harp said.

“What kind of intel do we have on it?” Ai asked.

“Very little,” Harp said. “Unity Blue is a high security district, and over the last year it’s been on almost continual lockdown because of the NME incidents.”

“Were any of them in or around UB?” Ai asked.

“No,” Zai said, rejoining the conversation. “The EyeGrid archive is one of a hundred and twenty seven secure facilities in Unity Blue though and with the High Guard’s inability to predict anything about where or when the attacks will occur the entire district has been running on high alert to avoid any catastrophic losses.”

“How can the city afford to keep the EyeGrid archives there?” Ai asked. “They can’t even afford decent fake sugar in our breakroom. The rent on a permanent high alert facility has to be breaking their bank.”

“There was a special funding initiative passed to cover it,” Zai said. “And it looks like the people supplying the funds are a collective of shell companies put together solely for that purpose.”

“And those are owned by?” Ai asked.

“No one,” Zai said. “They’re actually empty shells. No assets and no financial transactions in or out of them.”

“How are they providing the funding for the high alert costs then?” Ai asked.

“Hard asset transfers,” Harp said. “That’s a bad sign.”

“They’re bartering for the extra protection?” Ai said. “Who does that?”

“On that scale? People we absolutely need to avoid being noticed by,” Harp said.

“Interesting,” Ai said. The hesitation in Harp’s voice made the mission seem significantly more dangerous, and that woke something in Ai’s heart. Dangerous puzzles were her domain and her intellect rose to devour the problems before her with a gleeful zeal.

“I did say we needed to quiet as ghosts for this mission right?” Harp asked.

“That you did,” Ai agreed. “So no more bashing problems with NMEs. You said we have seven hours to get you back to Dr. Raju right?”

“At the outside,” Harp said. “Is that going to be possible?”

Ai began running scenarios in her mind. Being able to think at hyper-accelerated speeds was useful. It allowed her to work through the numbers enough to discard complex non-viable options with a speed that even Zai had a hard time matching. The real benefit to her enhanced state though came from the technological memory she shared with Zai.

As a baseline human, she’d suffered from losing her train of thought as much as anyone else. One good idea would arise and before she could follow it to its logical conclusion, three more would pop up and inevitably one or more would be forgotten.

Since the upgrade, as long as she was able to maintain the right focus, she could balance her biological mind’s creative spark with the solid reliability of electronic memory and synthesize something greater than either could produce on their own.

“I can do better than that,” Ai said. “I’ll have you home early enough that we can enjoy a dinner and a show to celebrate our success before Dr. Raju catches you breaking your curfew.”

Harp asked for a meeting that was secure, private and in-person, so Ai met her on a commuter car during rush hour traffic.

“Not exactly what I had in mind, but points for cleverness,” Harp said without audible words.

“Thank you. I spend too much time thinking of stuff like this,” Ai said.

Speaking through an internal link was so common for Ai that she barely registered that she wasn’t verbalizing her words. The warmth and pressure of Harp’s hand in her own was new, though in this case “different” was also reassuring.

The broadcast communication scheme they’d worked out for Harp’s infiltration in the GCPD command center was secure from all but the most advanced levels of snooping. Normally that would have been sufficient for any sort of private conversation they needed to have. The only problem was that Dr Raju and the rest of the Valkyries knew the channels they had set up and could easily notice if Harp held an extended encrypted conversation with someone over them, and, for reasons Ai hoped to learn before the ride was over, Harp wasn’t fond of that notion. They needed a more discreet option for their conversion, so Ai suggested the most private mode of communication she knew of.

“How did you know I had a direct data link port in my hand?” Harp asked, holding Ai’s hand firmly to ensure the data ports at the base of their palms remained in contact. Anything that was transmitted wirelessly or across a network could be intercepted. Signals sent via direct contact however could only be detected with extremely sensitive equipment. Equipment which would have been horrifically overwhelmed by the sheer volume of electronic noise pumped out by the subway car’s countless and outdated advertising screens.

“If you’re modifying a human body for digital traffic, they’re too useful to pass up,” Ai said. “And I figured if you didn’t already have one, you’d be able to kitbash something together over the last few days.”

Waiting for their meeting had been a grueling trial. Ai hadn’t heard anything more from Harp beyond her original message except for a single “ok” confirmation when Ai transmitted a coded reply with their meeting time and location.

“It’s difficult to modify our existing systems,” Harp said. “But I probably could have managed.”

“I would have thought your mods would be highly configurable?” Ai said, letting the conversation flow along naturals paths and fighting back the urge to jump to her questions immediately.

“Within themselves they are,” Harp said. “They interface with external systems pretty well too, but trying to make additional modifications to our bodies isn’t easy. We have too many digital antibodies, if that makes sense?”

“It does,” Ai said. “Zai and I had to work through the failure mode where our bio-mods wanted to incorporate every device we made contact with. They were programmed to integrate with each other so well that when we unlocked them they started trying to integrate with everything else they could make a connection to.“

Harp shook her head.

“I still find your story hard to believe,” she said. “The two of you seem too incredible to be real.”

“I don’t know if we’re as uncommon as we seem,” Zai said, stepping into the conversation as easily as she did with any other digital stream she had access to. “I think the trials around human and machine intelligence cohabitation missed some fairly fundamental requirements.”

“Like that the human and the machine intelligence actually enjoy each other’s company,” Ai said.

“Yeah, which tells me that there have to be other people in Ai and my situation, probably hiding for the same reason we’re not trumpeting my existence to the world,” Zai said.

“Maybe,” Harp said. “I think you’re smarter than you give yourself credit for though. I know it’s what Dr. Raju is worried about.”

Ai held still, fighting the urge to lean into Harp and literally press her for more information.

“She sounded less than happy in her last message,” Ai said.

“You scared the hell out of her,” Harp said. “Both of you.”

“Everything turned out ok though didn’t it?” Zai asked.

“I’m guessing that the final strike Harp did was from a weapon system they were trying to keep under wraps,” Ai said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Valkyries break out something like that before?”

“We haven’t,” Harp said. “It hadn’t even been field tested, but I figured that was a good occasion to see what it could do.”

“I’m sorry you had to go that far,” Ai said. “And about activating the NME. It sounded like a much better plan in my head than it turned out to be.”

“Yeah, it was a bit of surprise,” Harp said.

“I take it that’s why Dr. Raju doesn’t want to work together anymore?” Ai asked.

“That’s a part of it,” Harp said. “She’s very protective of us.”

“What’s the rest?” Ai asked. “I mean apart from the bit where we couldn’t turn off the NME after it started rampaging.”

“She’s concerned that we don’t know what your agenda really is,” Harp said. “You were not only willing to sacrifice the cop who transformed but you had a plan in place to do so that predated the mission going off the rails.”

“I can’t deny either of those things,” Ai said, wishing she could pull away. Clasping hands was feeling less comfortable the more personal their conversation turned. “Do they bother you as much as they bother her?”

“I can’t claim to be comfortable with them,” Harp said, not pulling away at all.

“But you’re still here?” Ai asked.

“I am,” Harp said. “I think Dr. Raju is wrong. Not about trusting you, but about us working together.”

“Don’t we have to trust each other to some extent to do that?” Ai asked.

“To some extent, yes,” Harp said. “I don’t think we need complete trust though. You did a good job with the EyeGrid manifest. We’re weeks ahead of where we would have been without your help.”

“Nice to see the effort paid off,” Ai said.

“I wish Dr. Raju saw it that way,” Harp said.

“Why? What is she doing?” Ai asked.

“She’s holding us back and making us quadruple check everything we find because she’s worried the manifest is part of a larger scheme,” Harp said.

“By who? Me?” Ai asked. “What would I have to gain?”

“She won’t say. I think she’s worried that you’re trying to get us to expose ourselves so that we can be picked off by some of the people who are hunting us.”

Ai blinked, her mind trying to incorporate the idea that there were people who were a serious threat to the Valkyries. People who were hunting Harp and posed enough of a threat that the Valkyries cared about them.

Before she could respond, a pale face bearing a weak artificial tan and the kind of cosmetic bio-mods that said the owner was trying too hard for an aesthetic goal they cribbed off a bad action movie, appeared in the corner of Ai’s vision.

“I’m getting off at the next station, wanna get me off before then?” the swaggering salaryman asked.

Ai knew where this was going and turned a half step to give the guy a shove with her shoulder. Predictably this broke her and Harp away from him after the guy threw his arms around their shoulders. Also predictably, her action didn’t convince the salaryman to leave them alone.

“So you like it rough do you?” he asked.

“GCPD, step away,”, Ai said flashing her badge in the perps face. Occasionally that was enough to send them packing but more often than not, as with this guy, they doubled down on their stupidity.

“That’s a cute little fake badge you got there, want to play…” He didn’t get to finish the sentence.

Ai shot him in the face.

Only with a taser round unfortunately. Ai had considered “accidentally” suffering an ammunition misload, but a regular bullet would pose a danger to the other people in the train. As it was, people crushed tightly together to allow the perp to fall to the floor of the subway car.

Where Ai shot him again.

The first taser round only immobilized the subject for a few seconds. The cumulative effect from two rendered the subject unconscious for minutes. That was plenty of time for Ai to zip tie him. She could have registered his ID for official pickup by an on-duty officer. That would have placed him at the mercy of the courts, but since the courts didn’t particularly care about crimes of that magnitude unless they happened to someone with far more visible wealth and status than Ai had, filing official charges would amount to nothing.

Instead,  Ai transferred his browsing history and personal credit statements to a shared network drive and then flagged his account as being in violation of corporate privacy mandates to ensure the wrong people would see it as soon as possible. In 24 hours he’d be unemployed and turned out of his apartment. Ai dashed off a reminder to herself to check in on him in two days to see if he deserved a harsher punishment.

When the doors opened for the next station, she dumped the still unconscious perp on the platform and resisted the urge to shoot him again.

“That was efficient,” Harp said, when their clasped hands again.

“No, that was disgusting,” Ai said.

“You didn’t kill him?” Harp asked.

“Stun round only,” Ai said, her adrenaline surge diminishing preternaturally fast thanks to Zai’s intervention.  

Harp smiled and glanced over at Ai briefly.

“That’s why I think Dr. Raju is wrong,” she said. “I’m used to either holding back or playing a lot rougher.”

“I was holding back,” Ai said. “A guy who’s willing to act like that in a public area is a serial offender. Without exception. Part of me is still questioning if I should have ended him right there.”

“Why didn’t you?” Harp asked.

“Because I could have gotten away with it,” Ai said. “I’m a cop. People don’t question us, and the law only cares about punishing us when there’s a political or monetary need to do so. Or when we turn whistlerblower.”

“And that made you not kill him? Even when you guessed he might deserve it?” Harp asked.

“No,” Ai said. “I’m…I’m not that good.”

“What do you mean?” Harp asked.

Ai warred with herself. She knew what the truth was. It was simple enough. She held “Officer Greensmith” to a standard above the rest of the police force only because it allowed her to act more freely as Heartless with less chance for anyone to connect the two. She didn’t see any inherent worth in the life of people like the perp, even when she knew intellectually that she should.

“I’m more useful to you if I’m not under any suspicion. If the department thinks I play by the rules all the time, they’ll look for smaller infractions and not believe I’m capable of things like wrecking central command,” she said cleaving close to the truth but omitting the harsher elements. Why she didn’t want Harp to see those eluded Ai. Coming from Madtown, Harp had to be inured to the casual disposal of human life. She might even find Ai’s willingness to embrace the world’s cold hard realities appealing.

“I was there when you did wrecked cop HQ and I still don’t believe you’re capable of it,” Harp said. “The important thing though is that I think we can help each other still, if you’re willing to work together again.”

“I don’t think Dr. Raju will be happy about that,” Ai said.

“That’s why she’d not going to find out until we’re done,” Harp said.

“So, wait, this is just you and me?” Ai asked.

“We worked ok as a team before,” Harp said. “And I’ll still have a line to the other Valkyries in case things turn sour.”

Ai felt a flutter of excitement dance up her throat. The aggravation and nerves she’d felt over her previous misjudgments evaporated in the face of Harp’s willingness to look beyond them.

“What do you need me to do?” she asked. Her stop was coming up, but she would ride the subway around the city a dozen times if that’s what it took to hear what Harp had in mind.

Fortunately Harp’s answer was simple and to the point.

“We need to rob one of the EyeGrid archives. You and me. In and out. Silent as a ghost with no one the wiser. And we need to do it before midnight tonight.”

It was difficult to be miserable in the face of Agatha’s apple pie, but Ai was making a valiant attempt at hanging on to her frown.

“Now I know things can’t be that bad,” Agatha said, dropping a dollop of what couldn’t possibly be homemade vanilla ice cream on Ai’s plate beside the slice of apple pie.

“It’s not,” Ai said. “Things are fine really.”

“For values of fine that include ‘we made it out of Madtown alive and without organ damage’. Personally I’m chalking that one up as fantastic,” Zai said.

“Funny how things can fine and still suck isn’t it?” Agatha asked.

Ai smirked and mixed a piece of the oven-warm pie with a bit of ice cream.

“It’s just work stuff,” she said.

She hadn’t invited Agatha down, but she was, as always, grateful for her landlord’s habit of keeping tabs on the building’s tenants.

“Work stuff means cops,” Agatha said. “Can’t say I’m surprised you’re having trouble with them. Not a clean badge anywhere in the city, yours excluded of course.”

“You’re not wrong about that, but this time it was with a…consultant,” Ai said. She trusted Agatha but Harp’s secrets weren’t ones she felt she could share with anyone.

“Was this consultant particularly attractive?” Agatha asked, showing no concern for the specifics while trying to understand the larger shape of the problem Ai was wrestling with.

“That wasn’t the difficult part,” Ai said. “They were a bit skittish to be working with me. They’d had some issues with cops before.”

“Well that narrows the pool to everyone who lives in Gamma City,” Agatha said.

“The Platinum Tier and above folk don’t tend have a lot of complaints,” Ai said.

“Sure they do,” Agatha said. “Listen to them on the feeds sometime. GCPD costs too much and does too poor a job.”

“Chalk that up to the laws that prevent Platinum tier and above neighborhoods from having warrants drawn against them,” Ai said. “Not that we could serve a warrant against an estate that has a private militia guarding it.”

“So what happened with this consultant?” Agatha asked. “It’s not like you to scare off a skittish prospect.”

“I messed up,” Ai said. “We were working on a project and I thought I had my part of it under control. Turns out I did not.”

Agatha rolled her eyes and smiled.

“Oh, have I ever been there,” she said.

“I’m torn,” Ai said. “I want to make up for letting things get so far out of hand, but the consultant dropped out of contact.”

“Not returning your calls?” Agatha asked.

“Sort of,” Ai said, feeling foolish.

“How does someone sort of not return a call?” Agatha asked. “Unless of course you haven’t tried calling them?”

“I don’t think they want me to,” Ai said, remebering the cold finality of Dr. Raju’s last message.. “Working with me isn’t exactly safe, so it’s probably better if they stay well away.”

“Is the consultant a child?” Agatha asked, “Because that’s what making that choice for them says.”

“I know,” Ai said, frowning through her next bite of the apple pie.

“But it’s still hard to reach out, isn’t it?” Agatha asked.

“In theory it’s easy, but I just don’t see it going well in practice,” Ai said.

“It might not,”  Agatha said. “Some people come into our lives, and just don’t fit. Or they expect things from us that we can’t give them.”

“In this case it was more a matter of them expecting a level of competency I should definitely have been able to manage,” Ai said.

“That’s not entirely fair,” Zai said. “We had to move fast and we did the best we could with the information we had.”

“There was more information there though,” Ai said. “I just overlooked it.”

“The nitrogen atmosphere in the room?” Zai asked, “I missed that too, and so did Harp and Dr. Raju. That’s not your fault alone.”

“It was my plan though, so I get the responsibility,” Ai said. “Plus that wasn’t my only mistake. Thinking that we had the shutdown codes for the NME when we didn’t could have been fatally stupid rather than just embarrassingly brainless.”

“How is that not my fault?” Zai asked. “I was the one who hacked the first NME. I was the one who found the shutdown code. Shouldn’t I have known it wouldn’t work on the ones we activated?”

“That’s not your job,” Ai said. “I’m supposed to be the one who understands how humans think. You’re still working on it. Once I found out that Tython was working on a cure, I should have considered what it meant for the NMEs that could be traced back to their labs.”

“Or I could have asked the simple question of why the NMEs were giving people so much trouble when there were security holes in their code that you could drive a tank through,” Zai said.

“I don’t think your competency is the problem,” Agatha said. “Everybody makes mistakes. Take this ice cream, it’s the second batch I made today. Turns out, it tastes a little weird when you mix up the sugar and the salt.”

“When a mistake comes close to getting someone killed though, I think it’s understandable to treat it a little worse than salty ice cream,” Ai said.

“Oh certainly,” Agatha said. “Some mistakes are so bad there’s no fixing them. It’s been my experience though that there’s a whole lot more mistakes that people don’t even try making up for.”

“Can I have another slice?” Ai asked, as she swallowed the last bit of the first one Agatha had given her.

“I certainly hope so,” Agatha said. “Second helpings are the best compliment you can give a baker.”

“So you think I should reach out to her?” Ai asked, trying to picture Harp’s likely responses. The best case scenario she could envision was Harp thanking her politely for her efforts and letting her know that the Black Valkyries would be conducting the rest of the campaign against Tython with the same discretion that had kept their motives and operations secret from a news hungry city for over a year.

Ai’s own quest to tear down those ultimately responsible for the state of the city and the world would benefit from the Valkyries as a group unconnected to her but working towards a common goal.

In activating the NME and taking revenge against one of her brother’s killers, Ai’d left an enormous clue regarding her connection to the events at central command. It really was for the best that she and the Valkyries part company on as good terms as they had. Harp would be better off. Everyone would be better off.

But part of her was still hoping for Agatha to tell her to call.

“Call her? Don’t call her? I don’t think it matters,” Agatha said. “Not until you decide what you really want to do.”

“What I want and what’s good for me are rarely the same thing,” Ai said.

“Welcome to life on Earth,” Agatha said. “I’m just saying that doing something because you think you should or not doing it because you think you shouldn’t is like letting someone else live your life for you. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes that’s a good thing. None of us know everything, so letting someone else take the lead can save us a lot of trouble. Other times though, much as it sucks, trouble can be just what we need.”

“I know the Valkyries have disappeared, but I’m pretty sure I can get a message to them,” Zai said. “They may not be talking, but they’re probably still listening.”

“What do you think?” Ai asked. “I mean, I don’t think I’m wrong that it would be better if we each kept working on things separately right?”

“Define better?” Zai asked.

“More likely to succeed, less likely to both get caught,” Ai said. “Tython does have a first rate set of data analysts, and there’s plenty of information to pick up from the wreckage of central command and the abandoned office complex.”

“Wouldn’t you both be better off with the other watching your back? I mean I do what I can, but as you pointed out, I have some blind spots. For now anyways.” Zai asked.

“Harp has Dr. Raju and the other Valkyries to look out for her,” Ai said.

“True, but she still wanted to work with you,” Zai said.

“Wanted, past tense,” Ai said. “They’ve got the manifest now. Whatever they think they can find in the EyeGrid archives they’ll be able to locate and pilfer without worrying about exposing their secrets to an outsider.”

“Is that what you think their next step is?” Zai asked. “A break-in at the EyeGrid archives? For what?”

“Confirmation,” Ai said. “They have to know what they’re looking for already. There’s just too much visual data to sort through otherwise.”

“Ok, but isn’t that something that we need to know too?” Zai asked.

“Maybe,” Ai said. “We’ve got a lot of work to tackle, and we’ve gotten really close to this one. It wouldn’t take many other slips ups to paint a target on us that was visible from space.”

“I guess I can see that,” Zai said. “It’s just weird though.”

“Why?” Ai asked.

“Well, Harp is the first person, aside from you, I ever spoke to as myself,” Zai said. “I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of people as Heartless, or pretending to be you, and I know it was sort of a special situation but it was nice having someone else that knew about me.”

“I’m sorry, Zai,” Ai said, a fresh pang stabbing through her,”I didn’t know that was bothering you.”

“I didn’t either,” Zai said.

“If we can find anyone trustworthy, I wouldn’t at all mind letting you speak through me, or you could use direct messaging like you did with Harp,” Ai offered. “We wouldn’t even have to look far. Agatha would probably be able to keep the secret.”

“Thanks,” Zai said. “I’ll think about it. I don’t think we’ve been wrong to have me hide away up till now. It’s not like my existence has suddenly become legal, and anyone we tell could wind up in a lot of trouble too if we’re discovered.”

“Yeah, but the last thing I want is for you have to suffer silently, waiting for a perfect moment that may never arrive. You deserve better than that, and we can make it happen.”

“In all the old movies about robots taking over the world, why did none of the humans try being like you?” Zai asked.

“Because the movies weren’t really about virtual and fleshy people. They were either about humans and forces of nature masquerading as science, or humans and other humans pretending to have mechanical bodies. When moviemakers wanted to write about people and other people, they just wrote about humans and other humans.”

“So I know starting with desert undermines my authority as a voice of age and wisdom,” Agatha said, “but I’m having some of the residents over to help celebrate the buildings sixtieth anniversary. I can promise you a full belly and some pleasant conversation. You might even meet someone there to take your mind off your consultant issue.”

Ai considered her options. She normally avoided people like the memetic plague carriers they generally were. Ones who Agatha vouched for though? Those might be a decent enough crowd to mingle with for an evening. Especially for the promise of a full meal of Agatha’s cooking.

Then the message app on Ai’s heads up display pinged with a new arrival. The message had no sender, and no recipient. It was pure gibberish as it scrolled across her vision.

“Zai?” Ai asked as a wild flurry of nervous energy shot from her stomach to her fingertips.

“It’s encrypted,” Zai confirmed.

A moment later the meaningless text was replaced by a simple, decrypted message, courtesy of Zai’s efforts.

“Sorry about before. If you’re willing, we should meet again. No need for another garbage truck ride though, I can come to you this time. Just say where and when. -H”.

Stars that rise in a blaze of glory often fall just as fast. In Harp’s case though, she fell considerably faster.

“The NME’s starting to reconfigure itself,” she said. “I’m going to need a landing point.”

“We’re putting together a profile on the surrounding blocks now,” Dr. Raju said, joining the conversation on a pre-selected channel. “The rest of the team is inbound now as well.”

“Hold them off,” Ai said. “I’ve got a deserted block seven kilometers away from your current position, you’ve got the position data now. You shouldn’t need to even fight there though. We’ll send the shutdown codes to the NME if you’ll rebroadcast them for us.”

“Do it fast,” Harp said. “It can’t gain mass while I’ve got it in the air, so it’s refining its existing systems.”

“Shutdown codes are in your data stream,” Ai said.

“Transmitting now,” Harp confirmed and then added, “no change in activity level. It’s electrified its dermis and it’s spiking its internal temperature. How long is the shutdown going to take?”

“It should have been instantaneous,” Ai said. “Are you in any danger?”

“No,” Harp said. “Its electrical and heat output are well below what my armor can handle. That’s going to change in a hurry when it gets access to some more mass though.”

“Can it absorb you?” Ai asked.

“It’s trying that but my armor’s teaching it a lesson,” Harp said. “As fast I can rot it away though it’s reassembling itself, and it’s growing some new limbs. So that’s going to be fun.”

“That should definitely not be happening,” Zai said. “Harp, can you run a trace program on it?”

“Little busy here,” she said. “Need to put this thing down before my jets overheat.”

“Connect my channel to an external data feed,” Zai said. “I’ll handle it remotely.”

“What are you searching for?” Dr. Raju asked.

“She’s going to see why the shutdown isn’t working,” Ai said. “It worked on the NME that assaulted us earlier, and it didn’t look like they had unique command pathways, so it should have worked on this one.”

“Zai, you’re connected, take this thing apart if you can,” Harp said. “I’m going to free fall to the target site.”

Ai watched the responses from Zai’s scan pour in. Decompiled code flowed across one of the display windows she had opened up with most of the text being effectively gibberish even in a decompiled state.

“Well that’s not good,” Zai said, and Ai saw the error message that shouldn’t have been there.

“Why’s the shutdown not working?” Harp asked.

“This one’s different than the one I cracked into before,” Zai said. “The last one was from someone who was infected with a different strain of the bio-mod virus. It had all sorts of backdoors and unsecured functions in its command structure. This one is much more tightly locked down.”

“Oh, of course it is. Why didn’t I see it!” Ai said on their secure channels, remaining silent in the police cruiser as a new song that fit Curtweather’s horrible taste started to blare out from the old fashioned car speakers.. “The last NME transformed from someone who was infected by contact with Eric Krauss. Krauss was poking around Tython and got exposed to the version of the virus they had there, but they were working on a cure for the general virus, so of course it’s security was shot full of holes. They were trying to make it easier to delete!”

“That doesn’t sound like shutting it down is going to be an option,” Harp said.

“Not via an external signal,” Dr Raju said. “The rest of the team is off standby.”

“No, hold them back,” Harp said. “This one only received a partial activation. I can handle it solo.”

“We don’t work alone,” Dr. Raju said.

“I can handle this battle,” Harp said. “And it’s going to be a lot easier for me to slip away without High Guard following if the others are able to provide a distraction. If we’re all here, the High Guard’s going to be able to follow where at least one of us goes.”

“We can deal with that when the NME is safely disposed of,” Dr. Raju said.

“We can’t risk it,” Harp said. “I’ll be fine. Really. High Guard’s been getting too close as it is. They might be able to penetrate our cloaks now. Let me protect the team. It’s what I’m here for.”

“She doesn’t have to fight alone,” Ai said.

“What do you mean?” Dr. Raju asked.

“The abandoned site I selected?” Ai said. “It’s an old housing complex that is under renovation. The block’s still working on funding the effort so the machines are there but idle.”

“I see them, we’re a second away from impact,” Harp said.

“I have your landing coordinates mapped,” Ai said. “Make some distance when you land. I need some room to swing.”

The telemetry that Ai was following showed confirmation of Harp’s impact as she slammed the NME into the ground. While the crash didn’t exactly crater the landscape, it did kick up an enormous cloud of dust and debris.

“I’ve got the control systems for the construction machines unlocked,” Zai said. “Do you want to drive or shall I?”

“You grab the fleet and do something creative with them,” Ai said. “I’ll take the primary crane.”

“What are you going to do with the crane?” Dr. Raju asked.

“This,” Ai said and sent a link to the crane’s onboard video feed so that everyone could watch in short wave infra-red as the NME struggled to its feet and cast around looking for Harp to resume its attack on her.

Then a wrecking ball hit it in the everywhere.

The crane’s swing carried the ball through the wall of the one of the dilapidated apartment buildings causes walls, floors and ceilings to collapse as the NME was driven through sheetrock and metal and concrete.

“That looked fun,” Harp said.

“It was,” Ai agreed.

“It’s not going to put that thing down though,” Harp said.

“Didn’t think it would,” Ai said, who was a little disappointed nonetheless, “How are your jets doing?”

“Still pretty hot,” Harp said. “I’d love to snipe this guy from the air but I should probably save some flight time for getting out of here.”

“Your team members are rebelling,” Dr. Raju said. “They’re threatening to head in regardless of what I say.”

“You idiots, give me thirty seconds and this will be wrapped up,” Harp said, broadcasting on a wider series of channels so that the other Valkyries could listen in directly.

“Thirty one seconds and you’re buying drinks tonight,” one of the other Valkyries said.

“That should probably go on my tab,” Ai said, sending the message only to Harp. “I really thought this was going to be easier to keep under control.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Harp replied.

“Because it shows I can learn from my mistakes?” Ai said.

“No, because my team can drink like fish,” Harp said. “Hope you’re feeling independently wealthy.”

“I’ve been advised that I should look into taking more bribes,” Ai said. “Just have to find someone nice and rich to shakedown.”

“God, you are such a bad cop,” Harp said, the laughter in her voice singing even through the flat text medium she was restricted to.

“Never claimed otherwise,” Ai said. “Heads up though, I’m getting movement from inside the building. I think the NME ate the wrecking ball.”

“That was inevitable. You could have dropped him in a desert and he’d still have vacuumed up new material for his body.”

What emerged from the wreckage of the building gave clear evidence that both Ai and Harp were correct. The NME had been only slightly bulkier than the human it transformed from. In consuming the mass from the wrecking ball and sundry bits of the building it had more than tripled in size. Gone too were the misaligned growths of partially formed plating. In flight it had corrected for its thwarted early growth spurt and reconfigured itself along sleek curving lines.

“That is a lot of extra armor,” Ai said. “Where is it getting the power to handle converting that much mass at once?”

“The Rosario field,” Dr. Raju said. “It’s the only tech we have developed that can delivery that sort of power in that form factor.”

“But you can’t run a Rosario reactor, even a nanoscale one, at that output without melting,” Ai said.

“There are some efficiency tricks the general public isn’t aware of,” Dr. Raju said. “Even with those however, you’re right. Harp what’s the surface temperature of the NME?”

“Not cold, it’s around 400 degrees and climbing,” Harp said.

“Nothing human can survive that,” Ai said.

“There’s nothing human inside that thing anymore,” Harp said. “And I don’t mean that metaphorically.”

“In heavy combat situations, the human component is often self-consumed once the necessary neural circuitry has been copied from the host brain,” Dr. Raju said.

On her remote camera, Ai saw the NME lash out at Harp with jet of plasma that leap across the dozens of meters that separated them in an instant.

Harp dodged the beam and took briefly to the air a moment before a forklift speared through NME.

The truck had been launched off the top of the apartment building which wasn’t partially collapsed and aimed with the kind of inhuman precision that left no question as to its driver.

“That’s going to leave a mark!” Zai said. “I hope.”

With a tremendous scream, the NME ripped the forklift in half and tossed the pieces away from itself. The left prong was still embedded in its chest, but it didn’t bother trying to remove the spike. Instead its arms reconfigured themselves and a hail of bullets fired by the long railguns that extended from the NMEs shoulders pounded the sky around Harp.

“Twenty seconds,” the other Valkyrie said.

“Just giving you time to get in place,” Harp said.

“I’ve got a couple of cement mixers setup for cover,” Zai said. “They’re behind the building to your right.”

“Thanks, but it’s time to end this,” Harp said and landed ten meters from the NME, directly in its line of fire.

Bullets slammed into her, but she held her ground with no more concern than Ai would have had for walking into a particularly stiff rainstorm. Around her hands a globe of crackling electricity began to form and Ai’s monitoring sensors shot off the charts.

The NME switched back to the plasma lance but before it could bring the weapon to bear, Harp finished charging her attack.

It was one strike. A single ball of radiant light, crackling and expanding as it flew. It devoured the air as it flew, releasing still more blinding light until it hit the NME and exploded with a brilliance that was visible across half the city.

“What the hell was that?” Ai had to startle “awake” in the police cruiser as Curtweather swore and pulled over to the side of the road.

“That’s one I don’t get to use often,” Harp said. “Usually there’s too many people around to risk it.”

“I’m not seeing any sign of the NME!” Ai warned.

“No worries there,” Harp said. “I can see it just fine. It’s over there, and there, and way over there too.”

“Sweep it clean and then get out of there,” Dr. Raju said. “I should have known you were going to use that.”

Ai wasn’t sure from the text feed but she didn’t get the impression that Dr. Raju was at all happy with their victory.

“That didn’t go exactly according to plan, but we’ve got the manifest, so we can move forward at least,” she offered.

“Yes. We can. Thank you for your help Officer Greensmith,” Dr. Raju said. “For your own safety and ours, please do not seek us out again.”

And just like that, the secure communication channels went silent.

Not all problems have solutions. Sometimes the answer is that failure isn’t an option, it’s inevitable and mandatory. It is the refusal to accept that however which leads people to find the narrowest paths to victory when every reasonable argument suggests that all is lost.

“Can you get the bot I’m in out of here?” Harp said on her private sub-channel.

“It’s still following its programmed cleaning pattern. It won’t leave the room for another ten minutes,” Ai said, replying on her own hidden sub-channel.

“Ten minutes is a long time to hold my breath. Can you block the sensors so I can bring my bio-mod systems back online?” Harp asked.

“Sorry. The bio-mod scanners have a hard coded alert system and active polling,” Zai said. “I could spoof the responses but we would need to have set up a physical splice into their transmission path.”

“I can blast a path out of the building,” Harp suggested.

“That won’t work,” Zai said. “The moment the sensors detect active bio-mods in the data vault the servers will power down and be locked with judicial encryption. The whole trip would be for nothing.”

“That would suck, but if it comes to that, do it,” Ai said. “If they successfully arrest you we’ll never see you again.”

“Queueing up my weapons platform then,” Harp said.

“Be ready, but hold off for a moment,” Ai said.

“Do you have an idea?” Harp asked.

“Zai, give me an overview of the High Guard Tactical Response Teams’ current rapid deployment zones,” Ai said.

A map of Gamma City replaced the map of the GCPD central command on Ai’s display. Highlighted in a green were the various areas which the High Guard could be deployed to in under a minute. Ai found it amusing but not surprising that GCPD’s central command was one of them. For all of the rivalry between Gamma City’s police and military forces, the higher ups in the law enforcement division were just as interested in being protected from NME related catastrophes as the rest of the citizenry was.

“What is calling in the High Guard going to do to help us?” Harp asked.

“High Guard deployments are costly,” Ai said. “GCPD command won’t voluntarily call them in for anything short of a in-building NME assault.”

“That sounds good. Fighting the military without my mod active seems only slightly more suicidal than staying in this room with no breathable air,” Harp said.

“How are you holding up so far?” Ai asked.

“If I could run anything more than the communication mods, I’d be doing a lot better,” Harp said.

“The comm mods are the only ones the sensors can’t be calibrated for. Too much communication flows through the building, they’d be ringing all the time if they tried to pick that up,” Zai said.

“Zai, can you get me the current position of the officers on the Special List?” Ai asked.

The display of the city lit up with blue dots showing the last reported position of a particular subset of the GCPD.

“Special list?” Harp asked.

“I’m not the first member of my family to join the GCPD,” Ai said. “I am the only one who’s currently serving though. The people responsible for that are a resource of sorts.”

“I think I can guess where you’re going with this,” Zai said. “Won’t that endanger your alibi?”

“A little,” Ai said. “Sometimes it’s worth courting a little danger though.”

“Worth it, or you’re frustrated that you missed the nitrogen room?” Zai asked.

“Let’s call it both,” Ai said. “I need someone for this and the Special List was pretty much tailor made for it.”

“What are you going to do?” Harp asked.

With their comms working via direct mental monitoring, Ai and Harp were communicating several times faster than speech would have allowed. That meant Harp wasn’t starting to suffocate yet, but there wasn’t a lot of time to burn before that became a serious or irreversible problem.

“I’m going to set off every alarm at GCPD command,” Ai said.

“That’s going to seal every lock in the building!” Zai said.

“Right. That’s why I’m also going to give the High Guard a reason to use the master unlock code,” Ai said. “Only an NME attack will bring the big guns rolling into town? Good, then they’re going to have an NME attack to deal with.”

“A simulated one you mean?” Harp asked.

Ai selected her target. Eric Andrews. He’d used a rusty pipe on her brother in the footage she’d watched. She knew the length of the pipe, and its weight, and how much force each of the nineteen swings had held. She’d held onto that knowledge for a long time. Locking in his name felt like grasping the forbidden fruit.

“No. Not simulated at all,” Ai said. She flipped a virtual switch to trigger the GCPD alarms and watched a moment later as an automated message rolled in declaring central command a Class Five danger zone. Hundreds of links to the alarm systems were bundled with that announcement. Each signaled that another part of central command had become a technological fortress.

“All hell just broke loose here,” Harp said. “And that loud clang didn’t sound too good either.”

“That was the battleplate dropping to seal the room you’re in,” Zai said.

“That’ll be coming up in a few seconds,” Ai said, and hit the “Commit” button that hovered over Eric Andrew’s name in her display.

The forbidden fruit was delicious, and Ai had to fight to keep her face from breaking out in a vengeful grin.

“NME transformation has begun,” Ai said.

“Wait, you were serious about that?” Harp said. “You unleashed an NME in here?”

“Will be unleashing one,” Ai said. “In about twenty seconds. The initial transformation takes longer than that for full efficiency but I just need something that looks, sounds, and fights like an NME.”

“People are going to die,” Harp said. “Your fellow cops I mean.”

“They’re not my fellows,” Ai said. “And they’ve got a twenty second head start. They’ll be fine.”

“I hear what sounds like metal retracting,” Harp said.

“High Guard’s got the confirmation of an NME transformation taking place. They’re launching for a combat drop now,” Ai said. “And most importantly, they’ve unlocked all of the secured doors to allow the command center staff to escape the combat zone.”

“Does that mean I can leave?” Harp asked.

“Yes,” Ai said. “Get out of the maintenance bot now and move it to prop open the door. I’ll put the recycling fans up to maximum to make sure we get you some breathable air in there.”

“Working on it now,” Harp said.

“There’s going to be consequences to this,” Zai pointed out.

“I know,” Ai said. “At the moment I’m more concerned about getting Harp out of there with the data we need, but we’ll need to circle back to consider what the fallout will be.”

“The bots are all in shutdown mode. We won’t be able to send her out the way she came in,” Zai said.

“The building is emptying rapidly though,” Ai said. “There’s a lot less chance of someone seeing her than there was before.”

“People yes, but the security systems are all on high alert,” Zai said.

“The security systems only work as long as their intact,” Ai said. “The Andrews NME is going to make scrap out of a pretty wide swath of them, and the ones he misses the High Guard will probably slag with their heavier weapons.”

“Do we really want to send Harp into that though?” Zai asked. “If she uses Valkyrie mode that’s going to raise a number of questions won’t it?”

“The timing will be a little tight I admit,” Ai said. “We’ll need to have her move through the destroyed areas before the fight’s over so that High Guard will still be distracted but not so close to the fighting they she gets caught in the crossfire.”

“I’ve got the data extractor running,” Harp said. “I just heard some major ordinance being deployed though. Nearby.”

“The NMEs active,” Ai said. “Partial transformation only, but it’ll be enough to put up some decent resistance to the High Guard’s troops.”

“Who’s it shooting at now?” Harp asked.

“Monitors mostly,” Ai said. “It only had time to load the basic kill protocols, I think. Any movement it sees, it fires on.”

“What are the command staff doing?” Harp asked.

“Fleeing,” Ai said. “Even SWAT command doesn’t want to tangle with an NME.”

“Good,” Harp said. “Then I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

“What, exactly, do you mean by that,” Ai asked.

“We haven’t let High Guard claim any unerased samples of the NME codebase,” Harp said.

“That was you? You’re the reason all the NME debris has been inert?” Ai asked.

“Yes,” Harp said. “We’ve either disabled it during the fight, or burned it out afterwards while it was being transported from the battle site.”

“Why? I mean, there’s probably a thousand good reasons for that, but, why?” Ai asked.

“I’m supposed to say so that no one else can get infected by it, or something heroic like that right?” Harp asked.

“That would fit with the rep you and the other Valkyries have built up,” Ai said. “If that’s what you want me to believe, I’ll accept it too. But I’m guessing it’s something more personal than that?”

“It’s a lot of things more personal than that,” Harp said. “Tell me why you activated an NME. I’m presuming Zai worked out the unlock code right? But why did you make that choice? I could have escaped in a lot of other ways.”

“For a lot of personal reasons,” Ai said, and paused.

She didn’t speak of her family. Not with strangers and not even with close acquaintances like Agatha.

But she’d already mentioned her father and brother as the reason.

Harp wasn’t a friend. She was at best a temporary ally. One who could turn on Ai the moment their interests no longer aligned.

That wasn’t what held Ai back though. She could spin her answer into a form that elicited sympathy. She could try to buy more trust with an admission of the pain she carried. Tactically there were several highly valuable reasons to tell Harp an edited version of her motivations.

But Ai didn’t want to.

She didn’t want Harp to see the thing that drove her. Her hesitation surprised her. It wasn’t like she wasn’t justified in what she was doing.  Eric Andrews deserved the hell he was in. He deserved worse, as did so many others.

Harp didn’t need to see that though. The Black Valkyries were heroes. Whatever else they were, whatever other motivations drove them, Ai had watched the videos of their battles over and over again enough to see the unnecessary risks they took to protect civilians who were caught on the scene. She’d watched Harp emerge from battles leaking precious fluids from more holes than she could count because it had meant that a father got to go home and see his family, or a child lived to see her next birthday, or even so that a homeless woman didn’t meet her end face down in a gutter consumed by plasma fire.

Ai admired the Black Valkyries in the abstract. She was glad that people with the power they had chose to use it to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. It wasn’t the path that Ai herself could walk down, but she was glad there was someone who could.

But that wasn’t what held her back.

“We’ll have to compare notes later,” Harp said after another moment passed in silence. “The battle sounds like it’s getting closer.”

“Has the data extractor located and downloaded the manifest?” Ai asked.

“Yes, it just dinged completion,” Harp said.

“Time to get out there then,” Ai said. “I’ll plot you a route.”

“There’s no need,” Harp said. “I’m out of the data vault. There’s no bio-mod sensors out here right?”

“None currently active,” Zai said.

“Good, then I don’t have to hold back anymore,” Harp said.

Ai saw a swath of sensors within central command drop offline. A camera feed from outside the GCPD building showed why.

Like a star returning to the heavens on a trail of fire, Valkyrie 1 ascended skyward carrying the thrashing form of the NME that had once been Eric Andrews above her.

Tython was too massive an entity to die to any single blow. It had offices around the world and employed tens of thousands of people. It drew resources from mines in Africa, farms in Thailand, universities in Brazil and sweatshops in the Pacific Northwest. Gamma City was special in that it was the close closest Tython came to having a ‘head office’, or a central heart, that directed the rest of the vast corporate organism’s unchecked growth.

“Unfortunately, we can’t be sure that the one who’s directing their NME Cure project is based locally, so our access to them may be limited,” Harp said.

“We believe the principal research on the cure is being carried out here though,” Doctor Raju said.

“If Krauss stumbled on the NME tech-virus before he got garbage truck mangled then that seems like a solid guess,” Ai said. “Since you haven’t moved on any of the active labs yet, I’m guessing that you’re still hunting for them?”

The surface of the table they were seated at projected a miniature map of Gamma City with highlight tags at various locations.  The spots where the Valkyries had fought NMEs were highlighted with dark red flags. Tapping on one called up a basic event summary including the date, time and duration of the fight. There were links to after action reports by Harp and the other Valkyries but they were locked and inaccessible to Ai.

“Their security package looks pretty tight,” Zai said. “Want me to get to work on it?”

“Not yet,” Ai said. “If their anti-intrusion is strong, their detection may be even better and I’d rather avoid bruising the bit of trust they’ve extended so far.”

“It’s not within any of the Rusty slums,” Harp said. “We’ve searched a few of the wealthier blocks as well but that’s a long and tedious process with the need to stay hidden.”

“That brings up an interesting point; why are you keeping your identities secret? Your tech is well beyond anything on the market today. You could make a killing if you went public with it,” Ai said.

“If they could find us, every security force in the northern hemisphere would be vying to take us apart and see what makes us tick,” Harp said.

“That would end poorly for them,” Ai said.

“We’re not invincible,” Harp said.

“Tell that to the NMEs that had the misfortune of running into you,” Ai said.

“They’re not a good test case,” Harp said. “They’re tough, but that makes they hard to stop. The damage they do is limited by their lack of judgment and intellect. If a group of serious tacticians were dedicated to putting us down and they had the full resources of Gamma City to draw on, our lives would not be pleasant.”

“Our cause it also better served by keeping our aims unclear,” Dr. Raju said. “The prevailing theory on the Valkyries seems to be that they are an elite combat unit being put through a beta-testing stage before offers are made to the general public.”

“Since we spare the Highguard resources and embarrassment, the GC City Council isn’t interested in pursuing us,” Harp said.

“Tython should be though. They know you’re after them,” Ai said.

“Possibly not,” Harp said. “The data trail for the NME Cure project runs back to Tython. We know that, but Tython probably doesn’t.”

“That depends how far up the line responsibility for the project goes,” Ai said. “If it’s an off the books project by an ambitious middle manager then virtually no one else there would need to be aware of it. That seems unlikely though.”

“We agree,” Dr. Raju said. “Even for a company as big as Tython, the resources required for a project of this scope would be difficult to divert without significant influence within the company.”

“Which brings us to our need for you,” Harp said. “We need to make sure that any move we make against Tython directly is targeting the right people.”

“Those responsible for the project must be identified so that all traces of it can be removed quietly,” Dr Raju said.

“GCPD doesn’t have much visibility into the inner courts of a company the scale of Tython,” Ai said.

“This isn’t the sort of project which can be handled openly within a company,” Dr. Raju said. “There will be private servers and untraceable connection streams.”

“I can’t necessarily help you with those either,” Ai said.

“You don’t need to identify those responsible directly,” Dr. Raju said. “All we need is Eye Grid’s archives.”

“Which ones?” Ai asked, beginning to piece together a scheme for liberating a selection of the Eye Grid’s massive (and massively well guarded) data.

“All of them,” Dr. Raju said. “Going back to at least two years before the first NME sighting in the city.”

“That’s not possible,” Ai said. “That data is scattered across multiple physical archives. Even if we could gain access to them, copying and transporting that much data would flag every alarm the GCPD owns.”

“We don’t need you to steal the information,” Harp said. “We need you to smuggle one of us in so that we can connect to it. We can handle the data filtering from there.”

“Each archive is stored in an offline mode though,” Ai said. “I’d need to smuggle you into every data storage facility the GCPD has.”

“Not if we have a manifest of the data which is stored at each,” Dr. Raju said.

“That’s held at central command,” Ai said.

“This sounds like fun,” Zai said.

“It’s not, you might be able to crack their electronic security but to get you access to it would require getting past a number of lethal physical barriers.”

“There are certain risks involved,” Dr Raju said.

“I can’t help you there,” Ai said. Seeing Harp’s reaction she hastened to add, “Not directly. My profile is too high as it is already. Even reporting in at central command would raise the kind of flags that I cannot have on my account. What I can offer though is some remote assistance.”

“Will it get us the manifest?” Harp asked.

“That will depend on you, and how much you can bring yourself to trust me,” Ai said.

***

Ai had considered a career in police forensics when she was younger. From her father’s description of them, she thought they were responsible for most of the actual detective work that the GCPD did. In the years since she’d learned the value of being out in the world and talking directly with people, but a part of her was still enamoured with the idea of interacting with crime scenes through an expertly piloted scanning and sampling drone.

As a beat cop for the GCPD, solving crimes via a remote drone wasn’t a part of her remit. Committing a crime via a drone though was well within the wheelhouse she’d constructed for herself.

[Are we in place yet?] Harp asked, sending the message as a coded string in one of the city’s trashier personal news feed.

[I’m afraid not,] Ai transmitted, coding her message to travel along the noise in the central command maintenance drone positioning system.

[These cleaning bots are a bit cramped,] Harp responded.

By speaking on separated channels, the chance of anyone intercepting their messages and understanding them was vastly diminished. Ai had still planned to keep their communications brief and circumspect, but she could sympathize with Harp’s situation.

“So you’re pulling double shifts for a week are you?” Curtweather asked from the driver seat of their latest patrol car. “Captain James must just love how what you’ve done to the department’s equipment budget.”

The best place to command a crime from was the front seat of police car. With Curtweather handling what little driving was required, Ai was free to silently direct the pieces of her plan as they moved around the board she laid out.

“The double shifts were my idea,” Ai said, as she turned her attention to the map of GCPD central command that Zai projected onto her vision.

The maintenance bot that Harp was huddled inside was trundling down its standard room sweeping path and failing to broadcast the error codes that its processor was desperately try to send.

The automated workforce that serviced central command was protected by a series of theft deterrence systems. The hole Ai had seen in their defense was that the theft deterrence systems were all designed around people trying to steal or reprogram the cleaning bots. So she didn’t steal the cleaning bot. She stole the theft system.

The theft system had wireless links to the bots’ components but the trigger for an alarm to be sent was keyed to the components leaving the building. Zai had suborned a delivery drone and used it to to disassemble the first isolated maintainence bot she could fit.

On the bot’s next trip to the loading docks, Harp had been waiting to climb onboard. The bot new that it was badly in need of repair, but it didn’t have any sensors to detect that someone had climbed inside it. That wasn’t a scenario that had been covered in the original design specifications and therefore the engineers hadn’t wasted money designing in components to cover it.

“Why would you volunteer for double shifts? It doesn’t come with any extra pay,” Curtweather said.

“The budget’s stretched thin right? And I’ve got red marks all down my balance sheet. I haven’t done anything actionably wrong but if I let things stay as they are then when the next funding review comes up who’s going to be first on the chopping block?” Ai asked.

“Darn, was kind of hoping you wouldn’t notice that,” Curtweather said.

“I notice everything,” Ai said, specifically referring to the security bot that was about to intercept Harp’s location.

[You’re about to hear an alarm. Try to keep your heart rate low], she texted to Harp.

[My gear is all in lockdown mode and I’m twisted into a pretzel to fit into this smelly can.] Harp replied. [None of that is conducive to keeping my heart rate down.]

[Think happy thoughts.] Ai suggested and triggered a proximity alarm inside one of the closets the security bot was traveling past.

The alarm had an audible component but its primary function was to alert the building’s security web that a potential breach had occurred. Cracking a system as complex as the GCPD central command meant knowing more about it than the original engineers did. Fortunately, Zai had both their documentation and the ability to absorb the entire design and correlate its components on a level the human engineers both couldn’t manage or hadn’t been paid enough to try.

“Forty milliseconds to sensor burnout,” Zai reported. It hadn’t been a lucky break that the promixity alarms had a failure mode where they literally smoked out if set to their highest power setting. The designers hadn’t thought to test what would happen if a sensor that had to scan a 2 meter square room was fed enough power to scan a thousand yard area. Every design has unrealized flaws of that sort. The lucky break was finding it in a timely fashion, and that was the sort of luck which Zai made for herself.

The security bot that had been heading towards Harp’s hideaway turned to investigate the closest. It would find the destroyed proximity sensor and add it to the repair queue behind the two dozen other sensors that had failed earlier thanks to Zai’s need to establish a pattern of complacency before the tactic put into effect.

With Harp’s path clear, and Curtweather providing all the alibi that Ai would ever need, the plan to grab the manifest for the Eye Grid archives seemed destined to succeed without a hitch.

Which, of course, is when everything went wrong.

[The two doors you just cycled through were the entrance to the entrance to the principal data storage area,] Ai texted. [Let the bot come to a rest and you can climb out and directly access them to grab a copy of the manifest.]

[There might be a problem with that,] Harp texted back. [My sensors are reading elevated levels of nitrogen in the air.]

[How elevated?] Ai asked, a sick feeling starting to grow in her stomache.

[There might be other gases in here but I can’t detect them,] Harp said.

Ai felt her jaw clench. It wasn’t a security system. It was fire suppression. An all nitrogen room so that nothing could burn.

And, of course, no one could breathe either. Harp was going to suffocate without ever feeling a thing.

Ai liked the idea of destroying a large multinational corporation. Tython wasn’t particularly worse than any other megacorp but it wasn’t any better either. The key element in Ai’s view was making sure that when the bonfire of history consumed Tython the flames would spread to all the companies that colluded with it.

“We’re going to need to be thorough,” Harp said, leading Ai into a vault in the basement of the billiards hall. The door swung shut behind them. “We were safe from prying eyes and ears upstairs but safety’s never absolute.”

“That door looked like it was a foot thick. I take it the walls here are too?” Ai asked, surveying the inside of the room Harp had lead them too. Apart from the vault door, there was an exit from the room on the far well. It was simpler and led to what Ai guessed was the other half of the vault. The decor on the half she could see was starkly at odds with the rest of Madtown’s aesthetic. Warm dark wood with polished wood fittings and large overstuffed cushions graced the couches and chairs in the center of the vault. Around the walls there were

“I couldn’t blast in or out of here if I wanted to,” Harp said.

“That should be kind of creepy after I let you lure me down to your basement,” Ai said.

“We need the privacy,” Harp said.

A thousand crude jokes her father and brother would have made rose to Ai’s lips but she refrained from giving them voice. Harp would probably take them as teasing and Ai had little interest in offending someone she was trying to win as an ally.

“Can you emit the dampening field even when the armor is retracted like it is now?” she asked instead.

“No, our transformed mode acts as the final assembly for a lot of our more exotic systems,” Harp said. “It makes it a lot harder for scans to pick us out of the general populace.”

“I guess I can see that, but you’re still dripping with tech,” Ai said. “I can’t imagine it’s easy to stay hidden. Are you cooped up here all the time normally?”

“No,” Harp said. “We have normal lives. Looking like this means not a lot of people give you a second glance.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Ai said, taking another long look the various bit of seemingly miswired tech that adorned Harp’s rail thin body.

“What do I look like to you?” Harp asked.

“Amazing,” Ai said.

“Do I look like I belong here?” Harp asked.

“I guess so,” Ai said. “Whoever modeled the exterior mods you have was brilliant. They matched the look of the…mods the…people…here have.”

“You mean the junk the Rusties here are stuck with,” Harp said. “All of this though,” she gestured up and down the length of her body, “what you see now is exactly how my mods looked before I was reborn.”

Ai looked at Harp again. She blinked and tried to will away her wonder at the incredible engineering that she knew lay just beneath Harp’s skin. Another blink and she pushed back her awareness of Harp’s history and humanity. The woman who was left standing before her could have been any Rusty from among a crowd of hundreds or thousands.

It was brilliant camouflage but not for the intricacy of the technical design. It was brilliant because Ai wouldn’t have looked twice at Harp if she passed her on the street. Wouldn’t even have looked once if she could avoid it.

“Don’t like what you see as much now do you?” Harp asked, reading Ai’s expression.

“You still look amazing,” Ai said, shoving the uncomfortable insight into her own prejudices down for the moment at least. She’d need to revisit the idea or it would drive her to distraction. She could already feel questions arising around it, like how much of her antipathy towards being poor translated into disgust at the poor themselves.

Harp shook her head but a slight grin dimpled her cheeks.

“I stand by my assertion that you’re dangerous,” she said.

“But badly in need of some insight,” Ai said. “How do you think I’ll be able to help you?”

“Tython has a special project underway concerning the NMEs,” Harp said. “I know that’s not news to you, but perhaps this will be; their project involves the search for a cure.”

Ai shook her head slightly.

“There can’t be interference here affecting your ears can there?” Zai asked.

“No, but if she’s right then we’re farther behind than I thought,” Ai said.

“A cure might not be exactly the right term,” Harp amended her statement. “A better description might be a vaccine.”

“I’m not sure I follow that either,” Ai said. “There’ve been a lot of NME attacks, but even so your chance of being injured in one falls somewhere below being eaten by radioactive sewer alligators.”

“The vaccine isn’t targeted at defending you from being attacked by an NME, it’s to prevent you from becoming an NME,” Harp said.

“There’s all kinds of problems with that though,” Ai said. “The narrative the newsfeeds have out doesn’t mention that it’s normal people who are primarily affected. Most people are content to swallow the theory that it’s ex-military personnel whose gear was compromised.”

“Veterans are an important group to market to, but that’s not the segment that Tython is going after. They’re scaling up for mass distribution of the vaccine even before they have a working alpha version complete.”

“I can’t imagine that’s something they’re doing out of the goodness of their hearts?” Ai said.

“Insofar as they have neither hearts nor goodness that is correct,” an older woman said. She appeared to be in her early sixties but small tells from the ease with which she walked, to the lack of winkles near her eyes or on her hands, suggested that she was much older and had access to very good bio-mods.

“Doctor Raju?” Harp asked, spinning inhumanely fast to face the door on the far end of the vault where the older woman had entered from.

“I know, I know. We talked about my staying out of this for now, but you must forgive an old woman, my dear, my curiosity got the better of me,” Dr. Raju raid.

“Wow, if that’s who did Harp’s tech work then I’m impressed,” Zai said.

“You were able to look her up? I thought we were cut off?” Ai asked.

“We are,” Zai said. “I have info on topics and people of interest saved locally with you though.”

“And Dr. Raju made that list?” Ai asked.

“We used a few of her papers in redesigning me,” Zai said. “So, yeah, she’s kind of important in my view.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you in person Dr. Raju,” Ai said.

“I’m surprised me haven’t met sooner,” Dr. Raju said. “Where did you do your graduate work? We can’t find a record of it.”

“I didn’t do anything after my Bachelor’s,” Ai said. “I enrolled in the GCPD instead.”

“That is most interesting,” Dr. Raju said. “We will have to speak later. For now though please excuse my rude interruption.”

Harp was tense and making furtive glances at Dr. Raju and the door to the back half of the vault. Ai wasn’t sure if Harp wanted to drag the doctor back to relative safety of the mystery room or scream at her for leaving that safety. Instead of either action though, Harp settled on glaring at Dr. Raju as the doctor sat down at a table near the rear of the room and gestured for Harp and Ai to join her.

“Tython is trying to find a preventative for the malicious code that converts people to NMEs?” Ai said. “I’m going to guess that means they already learned how to trigger the infection?”

“Yes, that was the angle that we were researching when you and I first met,” Harp said.

“Their research seemed senseless from what we could determine,” Dr Raju said. “They have sacrificed thousands of lives on experiments that were all variations of creating active Enhanciles.”

“Thousands?” Ai asked and immediately regretted the question. Yes, it could thousands or tens of thousands. So long as they were people no one would miss, people with barely any official presence in the city’s social grid, the losses would either be unreported or would fall into the bucket of “Discretionary Community Engagement” just like all of the other cases that no one had the money to mount an actual investigation into.

“We thought Tython was trying to develop their own NMEs,” Harp said. “They were so successful at making them though that we couldn’t see why they hadn’t moved forward to the next stage of deployment.”

“But of course they couldn’t move forward, because the next stage wasn’t deploying the NMEs. It was finding the vaccine to sell so that they could ramp up the threat of the NMEs and then make a killing on sales once the story broke that normal people could be transformed without prior notice.” Ai could see the staggering profits a manufactured plague like that could reap. In retrospect it was only surprising that Tython was the first to dare those waters. Once the news got out, illicit research firms would dive on the concept like maggots on the corpse of whatever morality remained in Gamma City.

“That’s what Gabriel Krauss told us,” Harp said. “Or his corpse did anyways.”

“The guy who got mangled by the automated garbage truck? The one Tython paid for an investigation of?” Ai asked.

“He was employed by Tython at one of their labs. More importantly though he was also employed by Trimuricus Worldwide Holdings, one of Tyson’s principal competitors,” Dr Raju said. “Corporate espionage has always been a profitable game to play, though a great deal less so when the spy’s identity is discovered.”

“Someone within Tython authorized Krauss’ killing, but only realized their mistake when someone raided their data stores in response to the information Krauss had unearthed,” Harp said.

“Wait, weren’t we the ones who raided their data?” Zai said. “And we didn’t have any contact with Krauss before you stepped in a pile of random bits of him.”

“Yep, but just because there was no real connection between the two events doesn’t mean the paranoia of the guy running the top secret and super illegal project couldn’t invent a narrative that tied them together.”

“Did we get unbelievably luck then?” Zai asked.

“Not so much,” Ai said. “We moved them to an unwise action, but generated a lot more interest than we meant to. We’ll need to hold Heartless’ tools completely away from this or the connections to us will be inevitable for people to discover.”

“They had you run an identity check on Krauss’ corpse so that it could come to light that he’d been spying on them. The data from the raid is still under judicial review, so they can’t be sure what information Krauss directed the robbery teams towards. With a new case on the line the data from the robbery can be called as evidence and the judicial lock will be removed.” Harp said.

“Which means Tython can see the broad scope of what the thieves were looking for,” Ai said.

“Right, our belief is that they killed Tython before they knew that he’d made a transmission out. Their only option for stopping the spread of the news about their NME program is to discover who the information has spread to and silence them immediately.”

“Is that why they attacked me?” Ai asked.

“They were probably after your partner, but that seems to be the general idea.”

“From everything you’ve just told me they’re running scared. Whoever’s in charge is this project is behaving like their life is on the line, which, given what they did, it probably is.”

“That’s our read on the situation too,” Doc Raju said.

“Excellent, then what we need to do next is show them that they’re nowhere near terrified enough yet,” Ai said as wheels began to turn in her mind.