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.

Zai felt an eternity stretch out before her. From the beginning of one millisecond to its end became a journey longer than from the earth to the moon, to the sun, or to the distant stars beyond them.

[Who was that?] Harp’s text appeared bit by bit in Zai’s awareness, context and meaningful arriving with no clear emotional tone wrapping them.

[I’m Zai. I’m the one who helped Ai rewire her brain.]

[What are you?] The texts were coming in with delays that could be measured in nanoseconds. Nothing human could come remotely close to that response time. At least nothing fully human.

[She’s why you can trust me.] Ai texted.

Both Ai’s body and Harp’s were frozen in the instant of tension that had risen between them. Zai could see Ai’s endocrine system sluggishly dosing her with an extreme bath of chemical signals. If she was an unmodified human, Ai would have been shaking with unbridled energy as her body attempted to preserve itself through the most vigorous action it could take. It was an admirable attempt by evolution to preserve Ai’s life but technology had far surpassed any level of baseline human capacity. Ai could move as fast as her body could endure and it wouldn’t be enough to save her against the armored might of a Black Valkyrie.

So Zai switched off the ‘Fight or Flight’ response. It wasn’t going to do Ai any good and the price she’d pay later in terms of mood imbalance and exhaustion was too severe.

[Explain.] Harp asked. Zai’s familiarity with human conversation wasn’t particularly broad but she knew how to recognize some signs. Short, clipped messages rarely indicated calm states, unless their content was trivial.

[Zai’s my creation. I needed help managing the bio-mods, so we worked from the expert systems that were built into them and cobbled her together. And me.]

[You cobbled her together? She’s an artificial intelligence!?]

[Yes. But don’t worry, I’m not intent on wiping out or subjecting all life on Earth.] Zai couldn’t imagine why that was something humans would worry about her doing. What would be the point in being on a planet that was either a.) empty and boring or b.) where everything was her problem to deal with?

[That’s not possible. No one’s ever succeeded at that. The machine intelligences always overrun the human hosts.]

[We had a better relationship before the transcendent upgrade step than prior test subjects.] Zai texted.

[And it still almost destroyed both of us.] Ai texted. [Zai could have killed me, but she opted to risk the unknown so that we both could live and her gamble paid off.]

“Are you serious?” Harp asked, returning the conversation to normal human response time as she withdrew her armor. She stepped back and placed a hand on one of the billiard tables, saggy against it for support.

“You know we are,” Ai said. “You were armored. You were generating your suppression field weren’t you?”

Understanding lit Harp’s confused eyes, focusing her gaze.

“That couldn’t have been someone else, you couldn’t have contacted anyone if you tried.”

“Not without a much more powerful transmitter and you would have detected any signal that was strong enough to punch through the distortion bubble you have up,” Ai said.

“How?” Harp asked.

“How did we survive?” Ai asked.

“How everything,” Harp asked.

“I’m good with math and technology,” Ai said. “And I really hate the idea of someone else owning control over my body. Put those together in a child who thinks the laws are a suggestion at best, and you can do a lot of things you shouldn’t.”

“So you built Zai from components that were inside yourself?” Harp asked. “From the systems that were intimately connected to your brain?”

“I’m not going to claim it was a move that showed good judgement, but I really didn’t want someone else deciding how my body worked. Ever.”

Ai’s amygdala was ablaze with the memories of how much she’d struggled to resist her first implants. Everyone had told her how important they were, but no one had seen how broken they’d made the young girl feel.

“So what happened with you? When you created Zai I mean? You’re different now too, aren’t you?” Harp’s body language had softened, and Zai guessed there was an expert system somewhere inside her doing to her endocrine system what Zai was doing to Ai’s. Neither woman worked perfectly at an accelerated state, but they both charged up and recovered faster than the baseline average Zai had observed.

“Zai needed different hardware to run on, which we used my brain to model and guide the creation of. Part of that effort meant rewiring select bits of my brain too.” Ai said.

“And you willing let her do that?” Harp asked.

“It was more than ‘let’, I had to nearly melt my own head off arguing her into it. She was being stubborn about the risks involved.”

[I was being reasonable. We could have finished the project without risking your brain to the extent that we did.] Zai texted.

“But we couldn’t have communicated as clearly as we can now, and that was worth the risk,” Ai said.

Harp tipped her head back and let out a chuckle.

“You know believing that you created a virtual person and upgraded yourself is even more ridiculous than thinking that you just upgraded your own brain.”

“It is,” Ai said.

“But you’re really serious aren’t you?” Harp asked.

“I am,” Ai said. “We both are. Which means you’ve now got an extra reason to trust us.”

“Because I know your secret? That makes you more dangerous, not less,” Harp said.

“Maybe so, but it gives you a different sort of leverage than you had a moment ago,” Ai said.

“You weren’t intending to reveal Zai’s existence were you?” Harp asked, her eyes narrowing.

“No, I wasn’t.”

“How many people know about her?” Harp asked.

“Counting you and me? Two.”

“How did you hide her for so long?” Harp asked.

[People don’t think to check for me all that often.] Zai texted.

“And when they do, she’s been able to hack the scanners, or shutdown enough to avoid their notice,” Ai said.

“She can interface with external systems?” Harp asked. “What sort of binding constraints did you…”

Harp’s voice trailed off as what she was facing fully registered on her.

“None,” Ai confirmed. “Zai is no more restricted than I am.”

“You created an Unfettered Intelligence? What am I saying. Of course you did. You’re a walking mad science project.”

“Do I hear the voice of experience speaking there?” Ai asked.

“I didn’t think it would come to this, but I need to ask you to make a decision, right here and now,” Harp said.

“No, I wouldn’t like to be vaporized in my boots thanks,” Ai said.

“What? No, not that,” Harp said. “That’s not how we work.”

“Good,” Ai said. “I stand by my statement though.”

“Fine, amusing even, but this is serious,” Harp said. “Before we go any further, I need to introduce you to my maker.”

Ai raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll assume that’s a literal offer and not a euphemism for something lethal. Which suggests the question; Why wouldn’t I want to do that?”

“You’ll need to submit to a full tech restraint system,” Harp said.

“Ok, that’s a little much,” Ai said, backing away defensively.

“Go ahead. I’ll be fine.” Zai said privately to Ai.

“I’m not sure I’ll be fine without you,” Ai said.

“What, you think talking to another tech nerd is going to be difficult?” Zai asked.

“I think they hold too many cards here, and Harp was too shocked to learn about you for me to think she’s anything but terrified of the idea of what you are. Once you’re under a lockdown, I can’t be sure they’ll let you out again.”

“We have to keep our creator safe,” Harp said.

“Fine, but I’m not putting on a full restraint suit. We work this out between you and me,” Ai said.

“I don’t know enough about virtual people, especially unfettered ones,” Harp said.

“No one does,” Ai said. “But Zai doesn’t need to be a part of this. You called me here. So tell me what you had in mind.”

“We thought you were the product of another creator,” Harp said.

“What do you mean by that?” Ai asked. “Are you an Unfettered Intelligence too? You look normal enough to fool me if so.”

“This is normal?” Harp asked gesturing to herself.

The irregular metal bits that protruded from her skin and the precise tattooing that linked them together rated at least an unusual, in Zai’s estimation. Ai however seemed to be looking through them and focusing on something invisible and intrinsic within Harp.

“Normal enough,” Ai said. “How were you created?”

“In a lab,” Harp said. “Or maybe it’s closer to say I was reborn there.”

“So you were a normal flesh and blood human girl before you got dragged to the lab?”

“I wasn’t dragged,” Harp said. “I was carried in on a stretcher.”

“An actual stretcher? How mangled were you?”

“On the outside? I was in perfect condition. On the inside though my organs weren’t doing quite so well.”

“Bio-tech rejection?” Ai asked.

“Yeah. Full system cascade failure.”

“I thought those weren’t survivable. Your entire body turns toxic and the bio-mods cannibalize everything trying to fix themselves.”

“It’s a lot less fun than it sounds.”

“So what did they do to you in that lab?”

Harp held her hand out silently. It split bloodlessly into a dozen sections that parted and turned to allow easier access to its inner workings.

“My body failed me, but my tech didn’t,” Harp said. “It wasn’t great tech. Crappy off brand imports that someone had paid to get onto the market without inspections. Unfit for ‘real human’ use but good enough for us Rusties.”

“I’ve never seen Rusty level tech that can do what yours does,” Ai said.

“That’s because even knock off tech is designed to fail rather iterate on its own design,” Harp said. “Except sometimes you can get lucky enough to have those safeguards be the first things to crash and burn.”

“So you’re a product of failed tech that ran loose and upgraded itself to a transhuman state?” Ai asked.

“Not precisely. My tech managed to keep me alive through my body’s cascade failure. It didn’t leave me in good shape though. I was pretty much screaming non-stop for days. On my own I would have gone insane I think. In fact I’m pretty sure I did for a while. That’s when my creator found me. They were able to break the jam my tech had snarled itself into.”

“That’s how you became a Valkyrie?”

“That was the first step. What came after was harder in some senses,” Harp said.

“Not everyone who got the bad tech made it out as well I’m guessing?” Ai asked. Zai guessed she was thinking back to Harp’s visible pain at Ai’s claim that she had upgraded herself.

“No,” Harp said. “They didn’t.”

“Hard to imagine we’re the lucky ones,” Ai said.

“Down here, yeah,” Harp said. “Up in the sky though it’s a whole different world.”

Ai laughed.

“Despite my recent history, I’m more of a ground transport sort of gal.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Harp said.

“I’m ok with that,” Ai said. “I guess the question is, are we ok here? Can we work together or are we going to we shamble off to terrorize the city separately like the Abominations of Science that we are?”

Harp’s gaze flicked up and to the left for split second.

“I’m being told that Abominations of Science need to stick together,” she said. “Though not all the Abominations agree.”

“Not an unreasonable stance to take,” Ai said. “I guess that leaves the most important questions; why me? What is it that you want?”

“I wanted you in this because you’re clearly exceptional and already entangled in the whole mess. As for what the mess is? We know what Tython is doing. We know why they’re doing it too. What we need now is to take them down, and for that, we need you.”

Ai strode through the crowd outside the billiards hall with no one at her side, but she wasn’t alone.

“A lot of these people are carrying deadly weapons,” Zai said. “I’d mark them for you, but the few people I’d be leaving unmarked probably just have them out of your view.”

“Thanks for the heads up, I kind of figured that’s what we were getting into here though,” Ai said, scanning the crowd for any sign of Harp. She wasn’t in evidence but one or more of the other Valkyries could have been mingling in the crowd. Ai had only seen them in their armored forms and those obscured enough of their details that identifying them was impossible.

“I can’t help but notice our ride is moving on, and from what I can see of the garbage pick up time tables there shouldn’t be another one that comes by for another twenty four hours. Shall I arrange for to reschedule one for earlier?” Zai asked in a tone of voice that said she’d already hacked the Gamma City Waste and Water Management systems and had the change setup and awaiting the equivalent of a final keystroke to confirm it.

“I don’t think we want to leave that kind of trail,” Ai said. “There’s a record of my coming here, off duty. Riding on a garbage truck is weird, but at least technically there’s nothing wrong with it either. I could explain this to Captain James as trying to follow a lead in a creative manner and she’d basically just glower at me. If a second truck was repurposed, even if it appeared totally legit, she’d have a reason and a motive to dig further.”

“You have alternate ideas for our departure then?” Zai asked. If she sounded disappointed, Ai knew it was only because taking over other systems was like a game for her. Similar to crows teasing wolves, Zai was often happiest when she was poking at security systems that could could turn at any moment and tear her apart in their virtual jaws.

“I’m wagering we’ll have an escort of at least one Black Valkyrie,” Ai said.

She made it to the small flight of stairs leading into the billiards hall without anyone stopping her. She felt like most, or all, of the people in from of the hall were looking at her, but there was some shared understanding among them that while she was clearly an outsider, she wasn’t trespassing. Not yet at any rate.

“What happens if the Valkyries aren’t in friendly mood once all is said and done?” Zai asked. She projected areas of relative safety onto Ai’s vision. Places where, if she had to flee from the building, there would be cover and multiple routes to avoid pursuit.

“With this many lions outside the lions’ den? I think if the Valkyries aren’t happy with me then I’m very likely not going to be leaving here at all,” Ai said. It wasn’t the people outside the billiards hall that were the chief concern though. If Harp had ill intentions, then even one of the Valkyries would be able to take Ai apart efficiently enough that no class of bio-mod could put her back together.

She stepped inside the hall and refrained from blinking. Zai adjusted her vision to compensate for the lower light levels a million times faster than the human body could naturally have managed. Zai also put target outlines around the people inside to help distinguish them through the smoky haze that filled the building.

“Officer Greensmith? You’re right on time,” Harp said, standing up as the shot she had just taken sunk the final ball that was in play on her table.

“The smoke’s all retro-tobbac,” Zai said. “Nothing dangerous with our mods, but there’s enough second hand stimulants that you’d normally be feeling a mild euphoria in about thirty seconds.”

“Thanks, I’m not sure if they know how modded out I am, so I’ll play along for now,” Ai said.

“Have any trouble getting here?” Harp asked, as she chalked up a pool cue.

“Not really,” Ai said. “I caught a ride here, but it was a little slow going. Sorry I wasn’t able to change for the occasion.”

Ai had ditched the outer layer of her GCPD uniform. Walking into a meeting in Madtown was one thing. Walking in while uniform was a form of suicide that Ai had no interest in at all. That left her with the non-descript black t-shirt and generic black cargo pants she tended to wear even on her days off. Her boots were a dead giveaway that she was a cop, not because of their functionality but because the department’s fashion sense for footwear was so atrociously bad that no one but a cop would be seen in them.

Harp let a wry smile crack her lips apart as she took in Ai’s wardrobe.

“The pack’s nice,” she said, looking at the duffle bag Ai had slung behind her shoulders. “Any fun hardware in there?”

“Nothing like what you’ve got,” Ai said and dropped the pack onto one of the unused tables. She hadn’t brought an arsenal with her because there wasn’t really a point to it. Anything she could have fit in a carry along bag would have been irrelevant when faced with people who could go toe-to-toe with an NME. She could driven up in a tank and still been undergunned in fact.

“Interesting,” Harp said, her eyes flashing with a brief burst of green light. “No weapons at all?”

“Just the sidearm,” Ai said, gesturing to the GCPD regulation firearm she carried.

“Oh, yeah, cute, I guess that does qualify doesn’t it?” Harp said.

“Not really,” Ai said. “Not here at least.”

“So you’re not worried that you’ll need to defend yourself?” Harp asked.

“Or I don’t think I’d be capable,” Ai said. “Secrecy is decent shield, right up until it’s not.”

“Is that your defense or your weapon?” Harp asked, as she set up the balls for another game.

“Do I need a weapon here?” Ai asked, taking the pool stick that Harp offered her.

“We all need weapons,” Harp said, offering Ai the chance to open the game.

Ai lined up a shot with Zai’s help but didn’t manage to sink any balls on the break.

“I’m thinking you can probably get by without any in this particular instance,” Ai said, stepping back from the table to give Harp her turn.

“Because you’re harmless?” Harp asked, and sank four balls with a single shot.

“To you? Yeah, I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet to make,” Ai said.

Harp stood to chalk up her stick again.

“I wouldn’t take that bet in a thousand years,” she said. “You’re probably the most dangerous thing I’ve run into this week.”

Ai arched an eyebrow.

“You fought three NMEs less than twelve hours ago,” she said. “NMEs who, I will remind you, I crashed a car into the river just to have a prayer of surviving.”

“That was a beautiful thing,” Harp said. “Perhaps not exactly the definition of sanity, but just an amazing display of ingenuity.”

“I’m not not sure it was all that,” Ai said. “It was basically ‘drive forward, very fast’.”

“I was accelerated then too,” Harp said. “I know how tight the timing was on ejecting your power train, and on flaring the doors and trunk. I was trying to work out how to catch you and you managed to hit exactly the right angle to survive a fall that should have been fatal in 99% of cases.”

“Wait, you could have caught us?” Ai asked.

“Sure. In theory at least. I didn’t have a good solution on the approach angle before you hit the water though, so theory wasn’t exactly meeting practice there.”

“How strong are you?” Ai asked, genuinely curious.

As a kid, after she started hacking her own bio-mods, she’d toyed with the notion of amplifying her own physique. She’d held back in part because it would have been staggeringly difficult to hide the fact that she’d suborned the licensed tech within her if she made radical modifications to herself. There were technical challenges to internal human augmentation though that called to her like delicious puzzles. In the back of her mind she’d imagined a day when she was old enough and successful enough to no longer care about being discovered when she’d be able to chase down the solutions to those puzzles, and another part of her mind that was terrified at the prospect of the uncountable things that could go wrong within that sort of self-experimentation.

“That depends,” Harp said. “Do you mean me, or do mean Valkyrie One?”

Ai thought about that for a moment.

“You’re a partial conversion?” she asked, guessing at the truth Harp was hinting at.

“And there’s the weapon you brought with you,” Harp said.

“I’m no danger to you,” Ai said, as Zai dumped all the information Ai had compiled about partial conversion cyborgs across her active memory.

“You’re smart, and you appear to be a good cop,” Harp said. “You’re exactly what we need, and you’ve shown both discretion and trust in coming here. I cannot express how incredibly dangerous that makes you to us.”

“Why?” Ai asked.

“Because I want to trust you too, and that way lies betrayal and carnage and death,” Harp said.

“So, basically, an ordinary day on the job then you’re saying?” Ai asked, being more honest than it appeared.

“I’m serious,” Harp said. “We could do each other a world of good, but I’ve been down that road before and somehow, being humans, we always screw things up.”

“I can’t tell you to trust me,” Ai said. “I mean I think it’s clear that you do, otherwise you wouldn’t have invited me here, or even shown me your face in the first place. What I can offer is that there will very likely be betrayal, carnage, and death if we work together. The trick will be making sure it’s targeting the right people.”

Harp laughed.

“It’s like I’m standing on a knife. That should make me trust you so much less and yet I can’t help but feel drawn in.”

“That’s good,” Ai said. “You’ve got me boiling over with intrigue. It’s only fair you suffer a bit of uncertainty too.”

“You do seem to be running a bit on the hot side,” Zai said.

“Yeah, are you sure the stimulants in the air aren’t affecting me?” Ai asked.

“Positive. Whatever you’re feeling now is all you,” Zai said. “I can suppress it if you’d like?”

“Tempting but no,” Ai said. “This game’s kind of fun. I’d hate to miss out on enjoying it.”

“I’m not sure I follow the stakes you’re playing for,” Zai said.

“Each other pretty much,” Ai said. “We can each do tremendous damage to the other. Harp in a literal sense and me by revealing their secrets. Overcoming the fear of that is something that humans are typically miserable at. Either we pull back too soon and mess everything up, or we jump right in throwing caution to wind and leave ourselves so open that only tragedy can result.”

“How did your species ever manage to survive for a generation much less tens of thousands of years?” Zai asked.

“I think the official theory is we’re too stupid to die,” Ai said. “Might have been ‘too stubborn’, but I think stupidity is a stronger factor based on our history.”

“So I guess we should get the most important question out the way first,” Harp said. “Who was it who did your modifications?”

“That’s kind of personal, but since I can’t exactly pretend I don’t have any, I might as well trust you on that one I guess. But on one condition though,” Ai said.

“You want to know who did my conversion?” Harp asked.

“Exactly,” Ai said.

“That’s fair,” Harp said.

“Ok then, the truth is, I did my own mods. I started when I was seven. I only had the initial bio-tech installed then but I hated it, so, I kind of cracked it and used it to break the other systems they put in over the years.”

“You hacked your own tech?” Harp asked, her face clouding over. “That’s your story?”

“Yeah, believe it or not,” Ai said. “It was easy once I had root level access to the first system.”

“I don’t believe it,” Harp said, her eyes hardening. “I know what it takes to hack a mind. That’s not possible to do to yourself. Who are you really working for?”

“Myself,” Ai said, glancing around for the exits Zai had marked on her vision. None of them were close enough for her to reach before Harp could strike her down, as it was looking increasingly likely would happen.

Human stupidity at it’s finest. Ai decided, as an epitaph, it was absolutely the last thing she wanted on her tombstone despite it also being the most appropriate thing under the circumstances.

“Don’t lie. I knew you were too good to be true, so tell me who you’re working for and you can walk out of here,” Harp said, her body vibrating with suppressed energy as she held back the transformation into her battle form.

Ai let ice flow through her veins, her emotions drifting away under a neurotransmitter bath provided by Zai.

“I’m not lying,” she said, her voice flat and serious. “I took control of my own modifications. What I am now is what I have created myself to be.”

“That’s. Not. Possible!” Harp said, her armor flaring out to cover her skin. “We’ve seen people who’ve tried that. I know, exactly, what happens to them.” Her voice was metallic but it carried a raw pain that could only have been born in a personal tragedy.

“You don’t know me,” Ai said. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

“It doesn’t matter how smart you are,” Harp said. “You can’t rewrite your own brain.”

[You can if you have help.] Zai said, transmitting on a private channel that only only she, Ai and Harp had access to.

Ai felt the wheels in her mind spin into high gear in response to the declaration that she wasn’t human.

“Is she guessing or does she have some tech to spot the modifications we’ve made?” Zai asked.

“I don’t think she’s guessing,” Ai said, “but I don’t think she has a full picture of us either. With any luck, you’re still a mystery to her.”

“Any point in trying to deny what she said?” Zai asked.

“Curtweather is still out right? I think there’s a better path available here,” Ai said.

“I’ll give you credit, you do a good job hiding it.” Harp didn’t speak the message but sent it by text across Ai’s heads up display.

“Thank you,” Ai replied. “And I think I see what gave me away now.”

“Yeah, you were just a little too fast with the return message,” Harp said, aloud this time.

“That’s embarrassing really, the whole point of thinking fast is to avoid mistakes like that,” Ai said.

“You were in freefall at the time,” Harp pointed out. “Also there was a rampaging monster fighting on top of your car.”

“How quick was it?” Ai asked, calling up the chat logs to see for herself.

“Three microseconds,” Harp said.

Three millionths of a second. Faster than human perception by three orders of magnitude. Anyone beside someone with Ai’s class of enhancements would have taken at least a thousand times longer to even notice the Harp’s message arrive. Formulating a response, even with a direct neural link would have taken a thousand times longer than that.

“But you switched to normal conversation again?” Ai asked, puzzled that Harp, and by extension the rest of the Black Valkyries, were willing to spend the time required for an inefficient human form of communication.

“It’s taxing for you, isn’t it? Accelerated thought?” Harp asked.

“She noticed that? She’s got to have tech that can scan us,” Zai said.

“There are some trade-offs to it,” Ai said.

“Let me guess,” Harp said. “If you remain at an accelerated state for too long your hardware starts to overheat and you risk boiling your brain.”

“That is one of the downsides,” Ai said. “I thought cooling options but…”

“But they can fail, and they’re much easier to scan for,” Harp said.

“And they would need to be so distributed throughout the brain that they’d potentially interfere my regular synaptic processing.”

“We need to vanish,” Dee, one of the other Valkyries, said. “Our window’s closing.”

“Window? So they do have a time limit?” Zai said.

“That had to be true,” Ai said. “With how they vanish after every major battle? Whether it’s a tech limit or a detection concern, there had to be some reason they never stayed around.”

“Do we have the samples?” Harp asked.

“Extracted and sealed,” Dee said.

“Wings up then,” Harp said. “Pleasure meeting you again Officer Greensmith.”

Wait! Ai texted the message to Harp on a private channel.

Problem? Harp texted back.

How did you know to find us? Ai asked.

Isn’t it a Valkyrie’s job to choose from the worthy dead? Harp asked.

Sure, but I’m not dead, Ai texted.

Guess you’ll have to come to Valhalla to find out then, Harp said.

An address marker appeared on Ai’s internal mapping software. 83 Meadhall Blvd. Meadhall ran through a long series of “Rusty” blocks, slums for those who could only afford the lowest grade of bio-tech, which were explicitly out of bounds for any on duty police officer.

In theory the restriction was in place because the blocks were in arrears on their ‘municipal contributions to support a local police presence’. In practice it meant that ‘Madtown’, as the police exclusion zone was called, relied on ‘local forces’ to keep the peace.

The gangs of Madtown had reach and influence well beyond its unpatrolled borders but even with that neither they nor anyone else there should have had access to the kind of tech the Black Valkyries were enhanced with.

I’ll see you there, Ai texted. What time works for you?

When do you go off duty?

Be there at 8:00.

Ai watched as the Valkyries lifted off rising into the air and disappearing from view thanks to what had to be the most advanced camouflage system Ai could imagine.

“Is meeting with them wise?” Zai asked. “They may not have us completely figured out yet.”

“They probably don’t,” Ai said. “But we know far too little about them too, and I think they’re well ahead of us on the NME situation.”

“Is it going to be safe to meet with them though?” Zai asked. “Madtown is not exactly a cop friendly environment.”

“That’s probably part of the test,” Ai said. “They want to see how I handle getting to them.”

“Seems like there’s a lot of possible wrong answers there,” Zai said.

“Definitely,” Ai said. “Public transport or a rental vehicle are out.”

“Yeah, the auto-buses don’t run there and the rental agencies all have region lock-outs on places like that.”

“Walking in won’t work either. It’s too far and I’d be stopped probably a dozen times.”

“Could we try to disguise you?” Zai asked.

“If we had more time, probably,” Ai said. “There’s too much about me that’s off though. We’d need to hide all the effects of my mods and make it look like half of them have been offline for the majority of my life.”

“Depending on how you were dressed most of them wouldn’t show,” Zai said.

“I’d stand out just for being a stranger,” Ai said. “Most of the people who live in Madtown can’t work anywhere else. The transport lock-outs are there as much to keep them in as to keep the rest of us out.”

“So where does that leave us?” Zai asked.

“We need transportation but we can’t arrange it through legitimate channels,” Ai said.

“What about just buying a car?” Zai asked. “We can afford it if we tap into the Heartless funds.”

“Heartless is too close to Greensmith as it is,” Ai said. “As tempting as it is to wave a money wand and make the problem go away, it’s those kind of mistakes that always come back to bite you in the end.”

“What resources does Officer Greensmith have at her disposal that’ll help with this then?” Zai asked.

“I’ve got a badge and I’ve got you,” Ai said.

***

At 4:30pm, Ai exited the debriefing room with Curtweather at her heels. Captain James had glowered at the loss of another police cruiser but begrudgingly commended them for surviving another encounter with an NME. Missing was any mention of the Black Valkyries. The moment they showed up the recordings stopped. The official story was that the NMEs were growing  more unstable and experienced catastrophic failure when they crashed into the water.

Ai noticed that Captain James was focused primarily on determining where the search teams should look to recover the NME bodies. Ai made a mental note to hack the records for that investigation. She doubted the forensic techs would find whatever they were looking for since it had probably fallen in the Valkyries’ hands.

At 4:31pm, Curtweather unofficially clocked out. Ai dropped him off at a “Spa and Grill”, Gamma City’s answer to low cost food and automated comfort dispensation. Since they were off their regular patrol routes for the rest of the day, there wouldn’t be any spot inspections to detect that the city was not getting its proper value from Curtweather’s time. Ai could have filed a report herself but given Curtweather’s mood after almost drowning, or really his mood in general, Ai was just as happy to let him have his extra free time, so long as it was far away from her.

At 5:45pm, Ai presented herself to the Bay Haulers City Services lot yard for an unscheduled inspection. Patrol cops like her got tasked to do all sorts of menial tasks, so no one batted an eye once they saw her badge and the work order she brought checked out.

At 5:58pm, Ai boarded the driver’s cabin of Trash Reclamation Vehicle A10-03. As an automated garbage truck, A10-03 didn’t need a crew. There was still a ‘driver’s cabin’ however for legacy purposes and to allow the truck to serve multiple roles as needed.

At 6:00pm, Ai went off duty and the GCPD monitoring system began recording her position in a purely passive manner. No alarms were raised an hour later when she crossed into Madtown.

“So police, fire, and ambulance crews are forbidden but the garbage trucks still get in?” Zai asked.

“The people who live here view cops as their enemies, for some pretty understandable reasons. Firefighter trucks and ambulances carry valuable equipment that the city doesn’t want to risk losing. Garbage trucks on the other hand carry junk.”

“Aren’t the trucks themselves valuable though?”

“They are, which is why they don’t stop and have all those theoretically non-lethal defense systems.” Ai said.

“The electrified body is for use against people?”

“What did you think it was for?” Ai asked.

“To keep the animals away,” Zai said.

“It does that too, but how much do you think a company would spend to protect trash from pigeons?”

“But there are laws against automated devices that are capable of harming or killing humans!” Zai said.

“Hence the theoretically non-lethal,” Ai said. “So long as you can point to a study published at the time that said the measures were within the accepted safety margins, you can get away with pretty much any anti-theft devices.”

“And if the study is found to be in error, then you did your due diligence and can’t be held accountable? I think I’ve heard this story before.”

“Just another part of the world that needs to burn,” Ai said. “On the upside though, we’ve got a self driving tank that will, eventually, take us where we need to go.”

Another hour passed before the garbage truck reached 83 Meadhall. Its sensors recorded that a door was opened from the inside, and that its occupant exited to vehicle. Since neither of those conditions matched the events of a robbery profile, the truck’s control system logged the occurrences and proceeded on its assigned route. When it made it back to the transfer station a standard automated scan was performed of its event log to double check the live telemetry that had been received. Ai’s exit from the truck raised no flags there and so the log deleted and replaced by a summary note which stated that nothing noteworthy occurred for that shift.

From the truck’s point of view, that was true. The residents of 83 Meadhall Blvd had a different take on the matter however.

“There are a lot of people here,” Zai said. “Even with the reloads you’re carrying, I don’t think we can fight it out if it comes to that.”

Ai smiled and let her gaze drift across the faces of the crowd that was assembled outside the old fashioned billiards hall.

There were easily a few dozen men and women loitering outside the bar. Everyone of them bore the marks of obsolete or partially defective bio-mods. None of that surprised Ai though. In a ‘rough neighborhood’ people naturally banded together for protection and power.

That didn’t explain the children though.

The crowd outside of the billiard hall held enough children that it looked more like a multi-family outing than a the drunken gang hangout that Ai had been expecting.

Like the adults around them, the children showed the same sort of ramshackle metal piercings and lean, muscle diminished forms that spoke of malfunctioning bio-mods. While every citizen was guaranteed the right to automated and internalized healthcare, there was no provision in place for the quality or durability of the bio-mods provided.

Ai’s stomach turned as she looked on an army of people who represented the nightmare she’d feared would be inflicted on her. Trying to avoid becoming one of them was the reason she’d risked everything to create Zai.

Looking at the people who waited for her though, the nightmare seemed shaky and uncertain. They weren’t miserable. They weren’t crying in the gutters waiting for someone to save them. By and large, the people in front of the Valkyries’ hall were just people, enjoy a loud and (mostly) friendly night.

Among the many sensations one can experience in motor vehicle, weightlessness is one that is guaranteed to trigger a primitive biological response from the human brain.

“Ahhh!” The scream was several octaves higher than human voices normally reached. It was also several decibels louder than most screams managed to get.

“Hang on, this might sting a little,” Ai said, trying to tune out Curtweather’s wailing so she could run more numbers in her head.

Their police cruiser’s power train had done a valiant job at launching them off the raised deck of the bridge. Once the wheels had left the pavement though there was no further acceleration they could provide. Jettisoning the power train hadn’t added anything to their speed. Police cruisers weren’t made with bizarre boosting contingencies like that. The explosion that occurred when it exploded at the top of the bridge though did add a small amount of forward momentum though.

And it put the cruiser into a spin. Ai had the benefit of Zai’s control over her inner ear to negate the nausea inducing dizziness that came from being in a car that was tumbling end over end. Curtweather wasn’t so lucky but by Ai’s calculations it would take him long enough to reach the point of vomiting that it wasn’t going to be her problem.

Her problems were, and remained, the NMEs that were pursuing them. As with many things when it came to NMEs, the proper application of explosives was a fundamental part of resolving the issue.

The most dangerous NME was the one on the cruiser’s roof. The upside there was that one of the Black Valkyries, Harp if Ai wasn’t mistaken, was engaged in combat with it. Given the sort of weapon systems NMEs had demonstrated in the past, and the sort that the Black Valkyries had displayed moments earlier, Ai found being inches away from two such combatants more than a little worrisome.

A stray shot from either one only had to penetrate a relatively thin layer of armor on the cruiser’s roof before it could damage all sorts of vital things.

That was why Ai had sent the police cruiser flipping end over end.

NMEs have a wide assortment of weapons in addition to ludicrously overdeveloped armor systems. Suction cup feet however were not a typical enhancement they developed.

As the car began its first revolution, Ai saw the NME flailing as it was launched into empty space. Harp’s Valkyrie armor flared to with micro jets that ran along her legs and hips, lifting her gracefully into the air. It was like watching the difference between a starling in flight and a lumpy brick.

Ai wasn’t able to stare at the scene for long though. A few microseconds and then the realities of her situation demanded her attention again.

“You know that water down there is a lot harder than it looks right?” Zai asked.

“Yeah, kind of counting on that in fact,” Ai said.

“So your plan is to hit the water very fast?” Zai said.

“I did say I hated this plan right?” Ai said.

“You did. And now I hate it too,” Zai said. “You’re still doing calculations though. Why? What can you do at this point? And isn’t there another NME we have to worry about?”

“Technically we still have three NMEs to worry about,” Ai said.

“Yeah, but the Valkyries are fighting at least two of them already,” Zai said.

“The Valkyries usually fight one NME at a time and they use multiple Valkyries to do so,” Ai said. “They’ve probably been holding back a bit when they do that, but on the off chance that they decided to jump on a group of NMEs who they can’t beat, I think it’s wise to keep our eyes open.”

“I’d love to have some eyes to keep open but the damn interdiction field is still in place,” Zai said.

“Huh, was hoping that would drop away,” Ai said. “Oh, what an idiot, of course it’s not dropping.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s the Valkyrie suits themselves,” Ai said. “They must radiate an interdiction effect.”

“But the field needs to be contained. You can’t just project one like that,” Zai said.

“The GCPD contains our fields because we don’t want to affect anyone except the subjects we want to interdict. I don’t think the Valkyries have that same worry,” Ai said.

“Thank you for that little lesson,” Zai said. “Got any more to share in the remaining seconds of your life?”

“Ye of little faith,” Ai said.

“Virtual god here remember, I’m the one people are supposed to have faith in, not the other way around.”

“You know we’ll survive this,” Ai said. “It’s just going to suck.”

“Are you sure about that? The survival part I mean, because we are moving at a pretty impressive velocity.”

“Yeah. Well mostly,” Ai said.

“Mostly!”

“Even working at cyber-speeds like this, there might be a few factors that I had to go with guesswork on,” Ai said.

“Factors such as?” Zai asked.

“Air resistance, the weight of the NME and Harp before they got thrown off, and whether the third NME could reach us before we impact,” Ai said.

“And if your guesswork is wrong?” Zai asked.

“Oh, then we’re totally dead,” Ai said. “Sheesh, no, if the guesses are wrong, then things will just suck a bit more than they’re already going to. Probably.”

“Define ‘a bit more’ please,” Zai said.

“You reattached my leg once already, how do you feel about doing that with the rest of my limbs?”

“Terrible. I feel terrible about that idea. Find another one,” Zai said.

“Working on it,” Ai said. “Judging from our rotation and rate of descent, I think I screwed up a bit.”

“You’re falling to your doom and you just now figured that out?”

“Yeah, we need to be spinning a bit slower,” Ai said.

“Not seeing how that’s going to help but isn’t it too late to worry about that?”

“Not if I do this!” Ai said and punched the trunk release. The car’s spinning barely slowed.

“Were you hoping there was a parachute in there?” Zai asked

“No, it’s creating drag which is slowing our rotation,” Ai said, continuing to watch the world spin by outside the car. After a few milliseconds she added, “Just nowhere near slowly enough.”

“So what do you do now?”

“I don’t know! Or wait, yes I do. Oh Curtweather is going to hate this.”

She triggered another control and all four of the cruiser’s doors flew open.

“Well, you’re definitely slowing the rotation,” Zai said. “Was it enough?”

“It looks like it was, but now we have another problem,” Ai said.

”Aside from Curtweather’s endless supply of air for screaming?”

“Yeah,” Ai said. “Now we’re going to drown.”

The force when the cruiser struck the water was titanic. The good news was that it hit at almost exactly the angle Ai had chosen, cleaving into the river like a champion swimmer. The bad news was that the police cruiser was not quite as aerodynamic as a human would have been.

Bits of metal exploded away from car as it made contact with a surface that was almost entirely unyielding. “Almost entirely” is not the same as “entirely” though, and that was enough to save them.

The combination of the forgiving angle the car entered the water at and the crash systems it deployed blunted the trauma of the crash from “instantly fatal” to “just barely survivable”. Ai felt bones shatter in her legs and chest and it was only through Zai’s help that she managed to retain even a shred of consciousness for what came next.

Which was the drowning part.

The angle the cruiser hit the water at meant that it was able to plunge in deeply and bleed off its speed to non-fatal levels. The cost of this was that the cruiser was submerged into the river in less than the blink of an eye and with the doors open there was no air bubble trapped inside for Ai or Curtweather to breathe.

“I don’t think you can swim in this state,” Zai said.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Ai said. The world was growing fuzzy and distant, and her thoughts felt like they’d been put in a blender.

Everything should have hurt, but Zai was taking care of that. Zai and the shock. Ai knew intellectually that her body had to be in shock. She also knew that her mind would be affected by that too. Putting that knowledge together into something useful however was escaping her.

She’d had a thought for how to survive being buried alive in the water. Buried in the water? Drowned? Something like that. She’d had a plan for it. She knew that. But everything was so far away.

Strong hands lifted her up.

That wasn’t part of the plan.

Somebody should tell them to stop. Probably. Moving crash victims is bad. Unless they have Platinum Plus Protection on the bio-mods. Then “you’ll be moving on your own again in no time!”

Ai tried to breath, but she couldn’t.

“No, you don’t want to do that,” Zai said. “We’re still underwater.”

“We should change that, book a ticket for some air travel maybe?” Ai said. She wasn’t making sense, but the world wasn’t either, so it all seemed fair.

“Sorry, I’ve got to drug you till your incoherent or you’ll die from shock,” Zai said.

“Don’t want to die,” Ai said. “Cemeteries suck. Hate the flowers. Rude to plants.”

“Don’t think we have to worry about that,” Zai said. “Looks like the Valkyries have found you worthy of Valhalla.”

“They gotta take both of us.”

“That’s sweet of you, but maybe you should rest for a bit now, I’ll wake you when you’re in a bearable level of agony ok?”

“Sounds good, can’t be late for a date,” Ai mumbled losing all focus on reality as a soft, fluffy blackness wrapped around her and pulled her away from trivial concerns like her chances for survival or what had happened with Curtweather.

When the darkness unwound and let her return to some measure of awareness, she was greeted with a painful stab of light. The sun was out and had a grudge against her eyes from what she could tell.

“She’s coming around,” a mechanical voice said.

“She’s tougher than the other one then,” a different but also mechanical voice said.

“I told you there’s more to her than that uniform would suggest,” Harp said. Her voice was mechanical as well but Ai recognized it nonetheless, even through the haze of the drug induced healing coma that Zai had placed her in.

“Zai?” she asked.

“Still with you. Seriously though, never do that again. That was much too close.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the fire rescue rebreathers would buy us some time, but the crash was a little too disorienting. How long was I out?”

“About five minutes,” Zai said. “Haven’t had much time to put you back together, so try not to pick any fights here ok? I’ve got your body paralyzed from the neck down at the moment to make the reconstruction go more smoothly. Also, you drove a car off a bridge and I’d like to go at least ten minutes without repeating anything that foolish.”

“Since we’re not dead, I’m going to guess that the NMEs have been dealt with?”

“As far as I can tell,” Zai said. “Sounds like the Valkyries dismantled two of them. I’m not clear on what happened to the third though.”

“Let’s find out then,” Ai said and struggled to open her eyes fully.

“Hello Officer Greensmith,” Harp said.

“Nice to see you again,” Ai said. “Is my partner ok?”

“You care about that?” Zai asked.

“It what a normal cop would ask,” Ai said.

“No, but then neither are you after that stunt. He’s still alive though, so whatever you were trying to do it apparently worked,” Harp said.

“Not as well as I’d hoped,” Ai said. “Thanks for pulling us from a watery grave.”

“Thanks for flushing out some more NMEs for us,” Harp said.

“I think that distinction belongs to my partner,” Ai said. “He’s got a much wider list of enemies than I do.”

“That may be true, but he’s only a normal human and that’s not entirely true for you, is it?”

Ai met Harp’s gaze and saw the other woman wasn’t asking a question so much as stating a certainty.

Ai kept the accelerator of the police cruiser floored despite the fact that the explosion had knocked her car into an uncontrolled slide. It wasn’t a matter of evading the fireball from the exploding van behind them. The cruiser was tough enough to withstand both the blast wave and the shrapnel that pelted them from the destroyed vehicle. The parts of the van the blew up didn’t worry her. She had more specific concerns in mind.

“Did somebody just…?” Curtweather asked before he ran out of words.

Ai didn’t blame him. It was a big fireball, and a louder blast wave. Bright lights and loud noises are disorienting enough when you don’t know what they probably mean.

“Nuke our pursuers from orbit?” Ai said. “Yes. Yes they did.”

“It wasn’t a nuke, but you knew that didn’t you,” Zai said.

“I did, I don’t know what it was but we’re much too alive for that to have been even a micro-nuke,” Ai said.

“You’re still running away,” Curtweather observed, as Ai forced the police cruiser back onto the road and pointed away from the wreck behind them. They’d lost almost all of their velocity in the slide but once Ai had the cruiser oriented in the right direction they started flying across the asphalt at an increasingly respectable pace.

“That am I.”

“Why?” His calm spoke to the sort of shock that came with a resigned acceptance of one’s fate.

“Something blew up the truck that was chasing us,” Ai said.

“The truck was trying to kill us,” Curtweather said. “Can’t say I’m unhappy about that.”

“What makes you think the people who destroyed it don’t want to kill us too?” Ai asked. “Or do you have friends on an orbital weapon platform who were trying to help us out?”

“If whoever took out the truck wanted you dead too, wouldn’t they have blown you up already?” Zai asked.

“Probably,” Ai said. “Depends on their reload time. That’s not what I’m primarily worried about though.”

“Being blown up out of the clear blue after seeing that happen to someone else isn’t your primary worry?” Zai asked. “What could be worse than that?’

“Them,” Ai said, looking in the rearview camera.

From the fiery wreck of the truck, three vaguely humanoid shapes emerged. They weren’t humans, nothing human moved like they did, and human didn’t generally do well with large hunks of metal embedded in them at random spots. Humans also had skin, not interlocking metallic scales.

“Those look a lot like NMEs,” Zai said. “Why are there three NMEs climbing out of the a burning truck?”

“It’s broken,” Ai said. “And unfortunately they’re not. The truck can’t catch us, but I’m guessing they’re going to take a stab at it. Or us. Or me. I don’t want to get stabbed. Would just ruin my whole day. I’m babbling. Cause this sucks and I’m terrified. Should focus on the task at hand, right?”

“We should go back and identify the bodies,” Curtweather said.

“Don’t think we need to go back for that,” Ai said, her voice higher than she meant it to be.

“We need to know who’s gunning for us,” Curtweather said.

“No, I mean, we don’t need to go back because they’re still coming for us,” Ai said.

“What? Who’s coming…” Curtweather’s words trailed off as he looked at the camera showing the scene behind them. “Th-three? That’s not right. That’s not right at all! What did you do?”

“Nothing!” Ai lied. “I still think you’re the target.”

“Why me?”

“Have you met you? If there was an office pool to fund raise for setting an NME on you, I’d toss in a week’s paycheck.”

“I hate you Greensmith,” Curtweather said. “And if we die, I’m going to make sure they eat you first.”

“NMEs don’t eat people,” Zai said.

“They also don’t show up in sets of three and target innocent police officers,” Ai said.

“Well, so far they’re only doing one of those things,” Zai said.

“Why did I ever teach you to make jokes?” Ai asked.

“So that you could tell when you were really in trouble,” Zai said. “And speaking of trouble. There’s an interdiction field around us. I can’t reach the rest of the net.”

“An interdiction field? How big is it?” Ai asked.

“I don’t know, let me look that right up. Oh wait, ‘File Not Found’. It’s like I’m cut off from outside information or something.”

“Ok, I deserved that one,” Ai said. “It doesn’t make sense though. You can’t set up an interdiction field around a moving car. It would have to be the size of an entire sector to keep up with us.”

“And that would take out the net connections for every business in the sector. Even Tython doesn’t have that sort of clout,” Zai said.

“No one does,” Ai said. “So it’s got to be something else. Because Gray League assassins and rampaging NMEs wasn’t enough to deal with today.”

“Maybe we can outrun the field?” Zai said.

“Trying that. Doesn’t seem to be working though.”

In the rearview mirror the NMEs were racing forward and catching up to the police cruiser with a four legged run that would have done a cheetah proud for its smooth grace.

“We need to lose those things!” Curtweather yelled, clutching his gun to his chest.

Ai was about to complain that she was trying to do just that but their cruiser wasn’t equipped to outrun high speed killbots when another explosion lit up the road behind them.

Two of the NMEs leapt out of the blaze, springing from the flames like grasshoppers. The third was less graceful, tumbling forward to skid across the pavement on it’s face before rolling to a stop and lumbering to its unsteady feet.

Ai wanted to spin the cruiser around and watch whatever was going to happen next but the two fully active NMEs that were chasing them argued against that.

“The bridge is up!” Curtweather said, yanking Ai’s attention back to where she was driving.

They’d almost made it to the industrial sector Ai had been aiming towards. All that stood between them was one of the cities artificial rivers. It served as a minor barrier to keep private citizens off corporate property where the companies had nothing to directly sell them. Access for workers was provided by shuttles the various companies in the industrial sector ran for their employees, which used one of three bridges that crossed the river.

As a police cruiser responding to a reported emergency, Ai’s vehicle should have automatically flagged the bridge to lower. That it was up suggested a likely but still painful possibility.

“They took control of the roadway automation didn’t they?” she asked.

“That would be my guess,” Zai said. “The last ping I had from the bridge control was that the bridge was down. Even if they’d told it to raise the moment we hit the interdiction field, it couldn’t be fully open like that already.”

“How deep do they have this city hacked?” Ai asked, fear curdling into frustration.

“It wouldn’t have to be that extensive,” Zai said. “Your patrol route was pre-scripted, and the spot where the van started to engage us was one they chose. Your options from there have been fairly limited.”

“The monsters are gaining us,” Curtweather said.

“Maybe we should have called in the department,” Ai said.

“Yeah, a few meat shields would be nice about now,” Curtweather said.

“I meant to help deal with these guys,” Ai said.

“Even High Guard gets its butt kicked by one of these things. The only thing a wagon full of cops is going to do against three of them is make good on a lot of life insurance policies.”

“I don’t get how they just happened to have three NMEs in that truck,” Zai said. “Wouldn’t one be overkill for a single cop?”

“Even a truck full of hired thugs is overkill for one cop. If Tython only wanted us dead they could had someone wait till we got off shift and then simply shot us. This is theatrics more than anything else.”

“Then this interdiction field doesn’t make does it?” Zai asked. “It’s got to affecting the local cameras too.”

“Someone obviously disagrees with Tython’s methods,” Ai said. “Which means I’m kind of hoping they’re not familiar with ours.”

“It would be nice to have a clue who that someone is,” Zai said.

“Well, it’s someone with the tech to fight an NME, and who’s not a fan of being observed,” Ai said.

“The Black Valkyries?” Zai said.

“Them or someone who operates a lot like them,” Ai said. “Which now that I say it sounds a lot scarier than I’d been thinking it would.”

“Why would that be scary?” Zai asked.

“We don’t know what the Valkyries agenda is but what if part of it is avoiding contact with another group that has the same tools and could actually give them a fight?”

“Sounds like a fight that we don’t want to get stuck in the middle of,” Zai said.

“And yet, here we are.”

One of the NME’s surged forward the last few feet needed to grab ahold of the cruisers rear bumper and Ai felt the car’s speed bleed away.

She was distracted from the monster climbing up onto the truck on the car by the lithe metallic body that landed on the hood of the cruiser.

“Keep Going,” a text from an unregistered sender said as it scrolled across Ai’s headsup display. “I’ve got this.”

The NME’s and the Valkyries added weight taxed the cruisers power train but Ai didn’t let up on the accelerator. Speed had bought her a precious few extra seconds of life and more speed looked like it would continue to do the same.

“Swing left on West River Run,” Curtweather said.

“Can’t. The other one will catch up if I do,” Ai said.

“There’s not much choice, we’re running out of road,” Curtweather said.

“Nah, look there’s plenty of road,” Ai said. “It’s just sticking up at a forty five degree angle.”

“The bridge? We can’t make that jump. This isn’t a movie, gravity works here,” Curtweather said.

“Then it’s good that we don’t need to make the jump,” Ai said and threw the cruiser’s power train into overload.

“Can you access the bridge controls and give it a fast release on the far side. Curtweather’s right. For once. The numbers aren’t working for jumping the full gap,” Ai said.

“The interdiction field is still in effect, but I can see if I can reach the control system as we pass the reporting booth on this side,” Zai said.

“Go for it,” Ai said. “I’ve got a fallback plan, but I hate it.”

“Going faster isn’t going to help, and why didn’t you do this sooner!” Curtweather yelled.

“We have about thirty seconds before the power system either smokes and dies or goes up like a bomb. Neither seemed like good options before.”

“You’re heading towards the bridge,” another text appeared saying.

“Might want to hold on to something,” Ai texted back as the cruiser zoomed past the reporting terminal and shattered the wooden pole that blocked traffic from entering the bridge.

“Yeah, you’re definitely not a regular cop,” the next text said.

Something to put on my tombstone, Ai thought and gripped the steering wheel harder.

“We’re going to die!” Curtweather said, the urge to point out the obvious apparently overwhelming him.

“Bad news! The field’s too strong. I can’t get a link to anything. Not the bridge controls. Not the NME. I can barely even interface with the car! The bridge isn’t going down!” Zai said.

“This is really going to suck then,” Ai said, releasing the power train’s full capacity and jettisoning it from the cruiser just before the car launched off the end of the bridge and into the clear and empty sky.

Ai knew she was being followed. Ordinarily that would have been amusing. People who follow off duty, but still heavily armed cops, tend to regret many of their life choices. Ai’s problem was that she wasn’t off duty. She was in the driver’s seat of her official GCPD cruiser with Curtweather snoozing as they performed their third contractually obligated Routine Patrol™ of the day. In theory that should have made her feel safer, but sane people don’t stalk police who in their police cars, so Ai could tell she was going to have a bad day.

“No PassChip in the car and it’s so generic that I’m not getting anything useful from the DMV databases,” Zai said. “Should I call in some of our own goons?”

“No, if I get saved by a group of hired guns that’s going to make people look very suspiciously at Officer Greensmith and what she does with her free time.”

The boxy white van followed her through a turn which the onboard navigation told her should have been red-lighted the moment she passed through it.

“See if that flagged anything on the traffic network,” Ai said, peering into the rear facing camera’s display on the cruiser. The van’s windows were tinted enough that she couldn’t make out anything about the driver or how many people were inside it except to be sure that something human shaped was behind the wheel. So it wasn’t an automated tail job and that wasn’t a good sign.

“Nope. It should have registered as a violation and nothing popped up,” Zai said.

“What about the video from our car cams?” Ai asked.

“Would you look at that,” Zai said. “The video is being fed into the proper evaluation routines in the GCPD servers and what’s coming out says there’s no criminal activity detected. Oh, is that an unauthorized tap into the GCPD Traffic monitoring system? Why yes, yes it is.”

“Let’s leave them alone for now,” Ai said. “No point tipping our hand just yet.”

“Leave them alone as in ‘Don’t kick them out of the system’, or as in ‘Don’t track them back to where they’re operating from’? Because one I can do, and the other I already did, so it’s kinda too late,” Zai said.

“So long as they don’t know you’ve tracked them down we’re in good shape,” Ai said.

“I feel like I should be insulted by even the suggestion of such sloppiness,” Zai said.

“Nobody’s infallible,” Ai said. “Not even you.”

“Fair enough, but once I become a virtual god though things will be different,” Zai said.

“Definitely,” Ai said. “Then you’ll need me questioning you even more.”

“I wasn’t under the impression that gods generally enjoyed being questioned.”

“Being asked to perform miracles on demand or answer every whiny mortal’s pleas would probably get old, but I’ve always thought that anything close to a god should at least be willing to hear questions and be sure they actually have a good answer for them. Especially a better one than ‘because I said so’. Of course I don’t have omniscience so what do I know?”

“How to make a god-like entity?” Zai said.

“Or at least a very egotistical one,” Ai said. “Now, before the guys following us run us off the road, where are their controllers located?”

“Three guesses.”

“Tython, Tython, and Tython?” Ai said.

“I didn’t even need to run the trace did I?”

“It’s always useful to be sure of that sort of thing,” Ai said. “Just because Tython has a reason to hate us doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who would want to do us in.”

“This probably isn’t an attack for what you’ve done as Mr. Heartless though is it?” Zai asked.

“Probably not,” Ai said. “If anyone had made that connection they’d be attacking us with something more than a box truck full of goons. If they were smart, the first sign of an attack we’d see would be an EMP followed microseconds later by a rocket barrage.”

“You’ve given some thought to this haven’t you?” Zai asked.

“Everyone needs a hobby, mine’s figuring out how to destroy people,” Ai said.

“As the disembodied voice in your head this will hopefully carry some extra weight; are you sure you don’t need to see someone for a wee little bit of therapy?” Zai asked.

“I probably do need to at some point,” Ai said. “I can’t yardstick my own sanity all that well. That said though, telling a therapist the kinds of things we’ve been up to could turn out rather poorly for everyone.”

“I more concerned about your well being than ‘everyone’,” Zai said.

“If I were to even mention your existence to a licensed therapist they would be legally bound to turn you in,” Ai said. “Also, they’d be legally bound to report more or less everything that we do as Mr. Heartless. And then there’s the problem that once the people we’ve cheated as Heartless find out there’s a path to discovering who he really is, the therapist’s lifespan could be measured in hours using only one hand.”

“That’s not exactly comforting,” Zai said.

“Eh, if I’m together enough to be aware of that, and I’ve got you to reality check me, I’ll be alright,” Ai said, an instant before the van slammed into their cruiser from behind.

“Are you kidding me? Even that didn’t show up as a traffic violation!” Zai said.

Curtweather’s words were less coherent, consisting of a poorly strung together litany of profanities that ended only when they were hit again.

“What the hell is going on?” He wasn’t screaming, which surprised Ai.

“Someone’s ramming us,” Ai said, selecting the “Manual Override” option for control of the cruiser.

The van hit them again.

“I can see that,” Curtweather said, his voice a flat growl. “What I don’t see if why they are ramming us.”

“You were snoring too loud,” Ai said. “Seriously I have no idea. They’ve been following us for a couple miles now.”

“What did you do to them?”

“Don’t know, don’t care at the moment,” Ai said and floored the cruiser’s accelerator.

“Why are we running from them?” Curtweather asked. “And why are our lights not on? And why haven’t you reported this already?” With each question he grew more and more aggravated.

“We’re running because I need a little distance to do anything useful,” Ai said. “As for the light and calling it in? Oops.”

“Did you seriously forget about those things?” Zai asked.

“Give me a break, I’m not used to thinking like a cop yet, I was in the middle of figuring out an empty enough alley where we could trap them and drop a autocopter on them.”

“Wouldn’t the people in the autocopter be unhappy about that?” Zai asked.

“Yes, hence why I had to think about the problem a bit.” Ai said.

The van hit them again.

“Dammit rookie, go faster!” Curtweather shouted.

“Cruiser’s topped out,” Ai said.

“Lowest bidder piece of junk,” Curtweather said and kicked the dashboard.

“It’s not the cruiser’s fault. We’re already twice the speed limit,” Ai said.

“What do they have under the hood of that thing?” Curtweather asked.

“Whatever it is, it’s not the standard power system for a vehicle like that,” Zai said.

“Wow, that’s an interesting mistake to make,” Ai said. “I can’t wait to find out who these guys are.”

“Where are you going Greensmith?” Curtweather asked.

“Away from them,” Ai said. “Was trying to find somewhere less populated at this time of day.”

“And that helps us how?” Muscles twitched furiously in Curtweather’s neck but his voice remained merely aggravated.

“If this is going to turn into a gun battle I didn’t want any civilians around,” Ai said.

“No civilians means no cops means no reinforcements!” Curtweather said.

The prospect of no other cops joining the fray was, in fact, exactly the reason Ai didn’t want to be near other people. It was only a matter of time before the people on the force who’d killed her father and brother decided to take a shot at her just to be safe. They might not be ready to do so right away but if they saw an opportunity presented to them early there was every chance that they’d jump on it.

“You think we need reinforcements against thugs who are willing to be this obvious?” Ai asked. “And more importantly, do you think our next paycheck will be happy if we have to pick up part of the dispatching charge for this?”

“I think living to see our next paycheck takes priority over everything else,” Curtweather said.

“We’ll be fine,” Ai said. “We’re highly trainer professionals right?”

“So are they,” Zai said. “I’ve tracked them down based on the sonic signature of the engine. That’s a Grey League team you’ve got following you.”

“That’s just wonderful,” Ai said. “I had a feeling we were doomed, now I know for sure.”

Ai heard the passenger side window lowering and looked over to see Curtweather disengaging the restraint systems on his firearm.

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to lean out the window and shoot at them,” she said.

“Got a better idea?” Curtweather asked.

“Yeah, stay in the car,” Ai started to say. Curtweather cut her off with a frown and turned in his seat before leaning out the window.

Ai watched as the bullets had no effect on the windshield glass of the van. Curtweather yelled a moment later and tumbled back into the car.

“I’m hit!” he said.

“Where?”

“Arm.”

“Your repair bots able to handle it?” Ai asked.

“Yeah, but damn that hurts.”

“This should make it feel worse then,” Ai said. “That was pointless, the van’s bulletproof.”

“Who the hell are these guys?” Curtweather asked.

“People who’ve met you?” Ai said. “Seriously though, is this ancient history coming back to haunt you or something? Cause nobody should be this intent on killing me.”

“Everybody who hates me enough for something as stupid as this is too busy decomposing to order up a goon squad.”

“Whatever else the Grey League is, they’re not usually stupid,” Zai said.

“Yeah, this isn’t dumb, it’s intentional. Tython’s trying to send a message.”

“You think this is just to scare you?” Zai asked.

“No, I’m pretty sure they intend to kill us. They just want to make sure it’s in a very visible place.”

“Why are they letting you lead them to a deserted area then?”

“It’s not about the people, it’s about the EyeGrid,” Ai said. “I was heading to the industrial zone. Fewer people but plenty of surveillance. I was thinking it would give you better visibility but it’ll also mean Tython can watch us better too. And there’ll be a nice clean record of what happens to us.”

“Why would the Grey League want that though?”

“I don’t think there’s anything in it for them,” Ai said. “I think Tython is afraid someone on the force might have accessed their stolen data stores. We haven’t leaked anything yet, but people doing work on things like the NMEs tend to be a bit more paranoid than the average citizen.”

“And since you two are the most likely candidates to have seen the data, they take you out to be safe.”

“Yep – and it sends a message to anyone else who’s seen the data telling them exactly how Tython will handle them if they admit to what they know, and just how little a shield a badge is going to be.”

“The industrial zone is a minute away. Should we be doing something else?” Zai asked.

“Definitely, as soon as we’re in range of some decent feeds, they’re going to light us up, and assassins like the Grey League will know exactly how much punishment a standard issue police cruiser like this one can take.”

“So how do you get out of this?” Zai asked.

“I take some serious risks and get very lucky,” Ai said.

And then the van exploded.

“Or that happens.”

The data that flowed across Ai’s terminal was everything that she’d asked for, but it told her nothing that she needed to know.

“How can something be so chock full of information and so utterly useless at the same time?”

Ai wanted to hit something but with all of the data she was reading being represented in a virtual form there’s was nothing convenient for her to throw.

“It is evidence of pretty serious criminal doings though, isn’t it?” Zai asked.

“Yeah, Palmdale was up to some pretty horrific stuff. Human augmentation experiments via terrigenic compounds which have so far proven to be ghastly failures, one and all. Unfortunately that’s not the horrific stuff that we need information on,” Ai said, running another fruitless query to find links to any more hidden projects.

“There’s more Tython auxiliary companies that we can check into,” Zai said. She was devoting half her attention to some anomalies in the accounts she’d set up, but that still left her with plenty of processing power to pay attention to the conversation at hand.

“I know, but Palmdale looked so promising,” Ai said. “Although maybe my judgement was off because of how easy they were to acquire?”

“Do you think that was a trap? I mean they had a history of taking contracts with bad penalty clauses.” Zai said.

“It’s impossible to be perfectly sure. Someone could always be more clever than us,” Ai said. “Given that their downfall required you to push a false early termination out on contracts they were assigned though, it seems like that was a legitimate win for us.”

“It would be nice if we could be sure though,” Zai said.

“Maybe not. If we were sure, we wouldn’t keep an eye out for people intending to leverage the company against us,” Ai said. “I just wish the secrets Palmdale held had been worth exposing ourselves like that. ”

“Well, you were right about them having something to hide, it just wasn’t something related to the NMEs.”

“The sad part is that I can’t afford to parlay being right about Palmdale into anything useful for Officer Greensmith.”

“I take it we cut things a little close there having you investigate the company that you took over?” Zai asked.

“Just a bit,” Ai said. “I got greedy there thinking that we were close to something real.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m not seeing any kind of traffic mentioning that you were involved in the investigation. The few newsfeeds that even mentioned it focused on SurfKing and his crew. Even Curt Kelton’s name hasn’t come up.”

“That’s part of Palmdale’s privacy insurance for managers at his level. I looked it up earlier – it seems that we guarantee our employees that their names will be auto-censored from any news feeds they don’t actively approve,” Ai said.

“How much do we charge them for that?” Zai asked.

“Palmdale lists it as an overhead expense. We can do what we want with the policy though since their contracts are individually up for negotiation at our discretion.”

“Did you want to take an active hand in Palmdale?” Zai asked.

“I’m not particularly inclined to,” Ai said. “I was thinking we’d just review their contracts and remove anything objectionable.”

“Also close down the secret projects?” Zai asked.

“That’s going to be trickier,” Ai said. “Some of those projects have work being done by other labs, and then there’s a ‘human subject procurers’ to think about.”

“Did you have a game plan in mind for all that?” Zai asked.

“It’s still a work-in-progress,” Ai said. “Obviously we want to stop the human experimentation, but we need to recall the subjects to a safe place first so that the researchers don’t burn them to ash to hide what they’ve done.”

“If the work is being done in independent locations, how will we collect all the people?” Zai asked.

“We’ll need to hit the places we can get a location for all at the same time,” Ai said. “Probably need another crew like Sidewalker’s to handle that one.”

“Did we want to hold off on giving the GCPD the location of SurfKing’s crew so we could use them for this?”

“Nah. They deserve to rot in jail,” Ai said. “Plus they don’t have the skillset we need for this. They’re good at breaking targets, less good at stealing, or protecting them. Extracting the ones we can find a location for isn’t the real problem though.”

“Can we call the others in? Make the labs we don’t have a location for ship their subjects to us?” Zai asked.

“Hopefully,” Ai said. “But people who are into that kind of experimentation can be a little twitchy from what I’ve read. We’ll need a convincing story to explain why we want the subjects moved.”

“What if we just fire them?” Zai asked.

“Then they’ll fire the test subjects, as in with literal fire,” Ai said.

“We could say that one of their competitor labs is ahead of schedule and producing fantastic results. We need the subjects transferred to the competitor and we’ll pay a bonus for their efforts,” Zai said.

“That could work. The only danger is if we run into a real egotist who refuses to be upstaged,” Ai said. “Outlaw researchers aren’t the most stable sort of people.”

“Hmm, what about telling them that we have a fresh set of tests that we want them to start on, with a new round of subjects?” Zai said.

“That could work. We could even have the procurers collect another set of people and use that as the bait to bring the GCPD in on them,” Ai said. “Just not Officer Greensmith this time.”

“Would it look suspicious that the collectors and the scientists got taken out independently?” Zai asked.

“It might, especially to people looking for the right things,” Ai said. “But we don’t need to take out the researchers, just rescue their test subjects.”

“They’re guilty of fairly heinous crimes aren’t they?” Zai asked.

“Probably even worse than what we’ve seen for this project,” Ai said. “Research like they’re doing can be a dangerous occupation though. We don’t need to shut them down immediately if we move them onto a less horrific set of experiments. Once those are running we can track them down and arrange for suitable atonements on their part later.”

“I can get started on that. Do you still think Cleanwalk has any connections to the NME issue?” Zai asked.

“It feels like it must,” Ai said. “Tython had three security breeches that led back there. One lab escape is remarkable but three sets a pattern that’s hard to deny. They’ve either got part of the research they’re doing on NME’s in Clearwalk or they’re setting an elaborate enough trap to lead us there that we’ll find something out by springing it anyways.”

“I’ve got an idea that might help us there,” Zai said. “Palmdale’s still a servant company to Tython. I mean, yes, technically we own it, or to be accurate about a dozen of our proxy companies do, but Palmdale’s revenue is still 83% driven by Tython.”

“So, from a corporate perspective, we have to do whatever they say?” Ai asked.

“They can sink us if we don’t,” Zai said. “But on the flipside that level of control means that we’ve got a solid trust network in place with them.”

“Tython’s going to be wary of new management though,” Ai said. “This is one of the classic security breech situations.”

“Fortunately, we’re not just the new management,” Zai said. “We’re also one Curt Kelton, at least as far as the black market channels in place at Tython are concerned.”

“That won’t help us though; Kelton had to be reporting in person. No one would trust a purely virtual meeting for criminal activity like this.”

“From the records I’ve scanned that was true for the early stages of the project,” Zai said. “Once he started producing results though, however flawed and useless as they were, his contacts at Tython took everything to instant-delete comm channels.”

“So we have no logs of what they discussed,” Ai said. “Including the proper pass phrases which they use for authentication.”

“We don’t now, but we might be able to get them,” Zai said. “Kelton doesn’t know that his lockdown command failed. I’ve spun up copies of his archives and fed the command to them so that when he checks he’ll see he’s safe and secure.”

“Interesting. So if we can convince him that he’s still in business, he’ll reach out to his Tython contacts to reassure them not to pull the funding for his projects.”

“And we can listen in on the whole conversation,” Zai said.

“How many conversations will it take for you to be able to spoof their pass codes, if they have any?” Ai asked.

“It’d be faster if I could hear both ends of the conversation, but unless we get lucky, and Kelton’s an idiot, they won’t use names during the call. From just Kelton’s end, it’ll take at least thirteen calls before I can guess what the next passcode is.”

“How often has Kelton initiated a Instant-Delete call?” Ai asked.

“He averages 3.2 of them per week,” Zai said. “From the times though, I think he has a set check-in on Monday morning, and the others are either personal or to other destinations.”

“Thirteen weeks is a long time to wait,” Ai said. “If we know the times though that might give us an edge. How tight is the security on the Instant-Delete comms they’re using?”

“Pretty decent. It might take me longer than thirteen weeks to crack it if we want to be sure to stay under the radar,” Zai said.

“And how secure is their human resources database?” Ai asked.

“It has the equivalent of a medieval padlock on it. I feel like I should install some of the pending upgrades just so no one else can wander in while we’re doing whatever you have in mind.”

“I’m just thinking of what you could do with physical access to the comm servers,” Ai said, the imagined mayhem painting sunny gleam of joy on her face.

“Those servers have triple redundancies to guard against man-in-the-middle attacks,” Zai said. “So those will take me thirty seconds or so to work around. After that we’ll basically own the place. At least until the next full security sweep, which they perform daily.”

“That should give you access to both sides of the call right? Can you break their code in one call with that?” Ai asked.

“I don’t think so,” Ai said. “I can restrict the domain of possibilities a lot, and maybe get lucky with a guess from there, but I’d need at least three conversations to be sure.”

“That might be doable,” Ai said. “Or, wait, maybe we don’t need the codes.”

“The Tython side of the equation won’t talk to us without them though will they?” Zai asked.

“You said we’ll own the system. They have to start with the pass codes but from there they’re almost certainly too lazy to repeat the test,” Ai said. “All we need to do is let them speak and then cut into both sides of the call.”

“Oh, neat! We talk to Tython to find out what we need to know, and we talk to Kelton to keep him unaware of the change,” Zai said.

“And the first thing we talk to them about?” Ai asked, leading Zai onwards.

“We say the passcode system is potentially compromised and we need to setup a new master key for it!”

“And then we can talk to them both without needing to physically hack the comm server more than once.” Ai said.

“The question then is, can we get Tython to reveal what they’re doing in Clearwalk?” Zai asked.

“For that we’re going to need a little help I think,” Ai said. “If Tython is connected to the mangled corpse and the NMEs that we found last week, then they’re not going to want to have any trace of that popping up. So what if Kelton reports back that he’s found some strange code in one of the new subjects bio-monitors?”

“Code that is suspiciously close to the NME activation code?” Zai said.

“From a specimen who was picked up on the same block as our mangled corpse,” Ai said.

“What will Kelton ask though?” Zai asked.

“Nothing. He’ll just offer to turn out his weekly report with the full code download in it,” Ai said. “And along with that code will be a little tracker.”

“And as people open it up, we’ll get a nice clear picture of who in Tython is aware of the NME code and what they do to the people who find out about it.”