Meeting with Mr. Heartless was not something that SurfKing was looking forward to. Data brokers existed in a world beyond the simple life of petty crime and violence where Surf was comfortable operating. That world did hold wealth though and any king, even a SurfKing had to appreciate that.

“How come you never meet with us in person?” Surf asked. “You embarrassed to be seen here?”

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” Heartless said, a faint mechanical tinge to his overly proper accent.

“Oh man, you don’t got to say that even if it’s true,” Surf said.

“Perhaps I am only embarrassed by the comparison,” Heartless said. “Not all of us can have such well customized modifications after all.”

SurfKing’s head spun around 180 degrees taking in the compliment. It was true that he and his boys were packing some serious hardware.

Fresh off the truck military mods.

There were bigger crews in the city – with as big as Gamma City was, there was always someone bigger out there – but, pound for pound, Surf thought his guys could stand up to any of them. The neon cables running down his arms shifted from blue to green. Happiness achieved.

“So what can we help you with?” Surf asked. It was weird talking to a robot. Heartless was piloting one that looked bland and unobtrusive. It had few facial expression settings and looked completely artificial.

Celebrities who put in remote appearances via TouristBot went for much flashier and more lifelife models. For the truly elite, there were models that were almost indistinguishable from a human being.

Surf would have written Heartless off as a cheap pretender is he wasn’t familiar with the model that Heartless was piloting. Combat capable remote operation drones were not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same thing as TouristBots. They had no reason to appear as human, no reason to include perks like a full sensory package, and no reason to display obvious weaponry when they could have things like maser cannons hidden within their torso or cranium.

Whoever Heartless was, he was not someone that Surf felt like offending, especially not in light of the rates he paid for simple jobs.

“I’d like you to kill someone for me,” Heartless said, his robot exterior as calm as the tone of his voice.

“Kill someone?” Surf lowered his voice to a whisper. His crew was jacked up for violence but murder for hire wasn’t something you talked about openly. Not when there were too many ears ready to collect too many bounties for that sort of information.

“I acquired a company recently, and a few of the managers aren’t worth keeping on the payroll,” Heartless said.

“So why not fire them?” Surf asked.

“They have rather large termination clauses written into their contracts,” Heartless said. “Paying those would make it hard for the company to turn a profit this quarter, which would diminish the benefit of purchasing it in the first place.”

“And they don’t get the money if they get killed?” Surf asked.

“So long as it’s not on the job,” Heartless said. “So long as they die on their own time, it becomes a breach of contract on their side. Failure to report for their assigned office hours. We’ll be able to sue their estate for an asset garnishment until a replacement for their role can be found. Or until the estate runs out.”

“The job we did for you before was just property damage,” Surf said. “What makes you think we handle wetwork like this?”

“Theodore Matherson,” Heartless said.

Ice water replaced blood in Surf’s veins.

“What about him?” he asked and then added. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Let me jog your memory,” Heartless said and a file transfer appeared on Surf’s heads up display. Inside it were several files including the unredacted version of the coroner’s report which listed the true cause of death as cranial trauma from being tossed down a long flight of stairs.

“Steve Matherson hired you, and he was clumsy as hell about how he paid you. He needed his brother out of the picture before he could propose a full takeover of their shared business to their board.”

“There’s no proof that was us though,” Surf added, thinking back to the night in question and double checking that he and his crew hadn’t left any telltale evidence behind.

Another file appeared in his delivery box.

It was filled with proof. Crime scene analysis linked with external accounts and video footage from the city’s Eyegrid.

“These are fake,” Surf said. “The Eyegrid is on the fritz in that area. The video’s can’t be real.”

“It would take at least a Diamond tier AI to falsify all of the different optical inputs we see here. That’s possible, such things do exist, but I believe it’s much more likely that you simply missed a few of the live camera feeds,” Heartless said. “Understand me though. I’m not here to judge you for your actions, apart from critiquing their sloppiness that is. What’s important to me is that you got the job done, and done well enough that Mr. Matheson wasn’t implicated in his brother’s death. Even more importantly, your hack to make it look like an accident held up to the automated case review. That required skill, so you have access to decent talent.”

“So what does that mean?” Surf asked.

“It means that, with a little coaching, you can serve my needs as well,” Heartless said.

“And if I say no?” Surf asked.

“Then you can go back to working for Mr. Matheson,” Heartless said as another post arrived on Surf’s data feed.

It was living video of the police pulling a car out of the East Bay. Notable elements of the video were the banner that identified the car as having been driven by Steve Matheson, CEO of Matheson Dynamics, and the fact that, despite having been completely submerged, the car was still on fire.

***

Curt Kelton had thought the buyout of Palmdale Pharmaceuticals was going to be the worst part of his week. Companies changed hands all the times and it was rarely a good thing for the employees when they did.

Curt had imagined himself beyond any direct effects of the acquisition. He was managing one of the company’s most critical projects and the secret projects it fed into. Anyone who bought out a small operation like Palmdale had to be aware of the value the work he was doing, and how easily he could set the project behind by months or years if he wanted to.

Official corporate policy was that all lab work and findings were to be stored on the company’s servers. That edict was followed rigorously only by those who lacked the ambition to survival office politics.  Kelton knew better than that. He stored all the “accepted” research on the company servers, but kept the vital breakthroughs safely scattered on servers that were online only long enough for a nanosecond long backup to be performed.

No one was going to get access to his files.

No one except police officers with a warrant.

“I’m sorry sir, but we have verified intercepts from a known murderer named SurfKing that a contract has been taken out on your like,” Officer Greensmith said.

“Well then arrest him, why are you bothering me,” Curt said.

“We’re taking you into protective custody,” Officer Greensmith said. “We’re also going to do a sweep of your home. There’s a lot of methods SurfKing could use to strike at you, but don’t worry, once we’ve got him and his crew locked down, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

She escorted Curt out of his home to where his family was already waiting beside a secure police wagon.

“I don’t understand why would anyone want to kill me?” Curt asked, climbing into the van and sitting beside his wife.

“We’re going to turn that up as part of the investigation too sir,” Greensmith said.

She waved to a series of drones marked “GCPD Forensics” and gestured them to enter Curt’s empty home.

“They’re not going to disturb anything in there, are they?” Curt asked.

“They’ll be very careful sir,” Greensmith said. “We have to make sure that there’s no malicious code in any of your automated devices or any tracking software on your computers.”

“But wait, they can’t turn on my systems,” Curt said. “I have private stuff on those.”

“We’ve reviewed your company’s security agreements sir, anything covered by a corporate security lock will be untouched. They couldn’t have gotten into that stuff anyways.”

Curt’s mind raced. The important information wasn’t covered by Palmdale security because Palmdale could have secured it against him if they chose to fire him.

“Initiate Pre-Firing Protocol, Class Two,” he subvocalized, try not to look like he was communicating with his Cognitive Partner.

“Access Denied, Connection to Network impeded,” his Cognitive Partner scrolled across his heads up display. “To search for a ‘Solutions Online’(™) please click authorize payment from any of your supported accounts!”

Curt suppressed a growl. “Solutions Online” was the biggest rip off in the world and everyone knew it. It was particularly galling though to be pinged with the ad when the problem was that the there was no online connection available.

“I need to call out, to let me boss know I can’t take any calls,” Curt said, hoping he could get the police to lower the network interdiction field even for a moment. All he would need would be a microsecond to initiate the failsafe lockdown on the special projects data. Once that was in place they could either play ball with him or watch two years worth of competitive research be mailed to their nearest competitor. Or go up in flames. Or both.

“No worries there sir, we’ve already contacted Palmdale for you. We knew there could be some fallout from this and investigating them is a crucial line of inquiry for us.”

“You’re investigating Palmdale? Why?” Curt asked.

“Most companies don’t have employees targeted for execution days after they change ownership. We’re going to be digging into all of Palmdale’s records to make sure the sale was clean and that the assets that were transferred were all properly specified.”

Curt swallowed without meaning to.

Palmdale’s assets were most definitely not all properly specified. Not when those assets included cutting edge research notes that had been driven forward with unlicensed human testing.

More than ever, Curt knew he needed to get the lockdown code out. All of the flatly illegal research had been done off the books, so there was no chance the cops knew about it, but if they were looking for that sort of thing and they ripped open his personal data, there was a good chance they could piece it together even through the various levels of obfuscation he had in place.

Beads of sweat began to roll down his temples as an even worse possibility occurred to him. He had more than the research results, he had the contact info for the traffickers in the Cleanwalk block, aka the people who were providing him with the subjects he needed. They were encoded, but if the cops broke the code and made the connection, then Curt was a deadman.

Palmdale would fire him, as in cease to employ him. The traffickers from Cleanwalk would fire him as in place him in a kiln and reduce him to ash.

“I really can’t go like this,” Curt said, as he started to climb out of the van. “I have to get my secure comm at least, my team is counting on me!”

He took several steps away from the van, heading towards the house, before Officer Greensmith stopped him again.

“Sir, you’re house is the most likely weapon the assassins will use against you. I cannot allow you to go back in there. We’ll turn over your secure comm as soon as we have verified that it’s clean.”

Curt looked down at the message queue in his heads up display and saw it was clean and empty.

“Ok, I understand officer, I’m just rattled by all this.”

The message had been sent. The critical files were in lockdown mode and would disintegrate before they could get him killed.

***

Ai smiled.

“You got that broadcast right?” she asked.

“Is it a broadcast if it never reached any of its intended recipients?” Zai asked.

“So long as he stays ignorant of that fact, it is to one Mr. Curt Kelton,” Ai said. “The important question though is did we get his key? Can we impersonate him well enough to fool his secure archives?”

“In answer to that, allow me to offer this,” Zai said as she began to stream all of the data Curt Kelton had been trying to hide.

Zai liked security systems. They were solidified cleverness. At least for values of “solid” that included purely digital constructs. As a mostly digital construct herself, she was willing to grant things in the virtual world more weight than other people might be willing to, but that was in part because she experienced numbers and code in the same manner than humans experienced atoms and molecules.

“Is it ok if I crack the First Federal Bank of Rome?” she asked, sending the question up into truly solid space for Ai to consider.

“I thought we already had an account there?” Ai asked.

“We do, three accounts to be exact,” Zai said. “Those are all legit though.”

“You’re going to steal from our own accounts, aren’t you?” Ai asked. For a solid entity, Zai’s human counterpart was delightfully quick on the uptake.

“Ours and plenty of others,” Zai said.

Merely gaining access to the bank’s systems wasn’t going to be a particularly enlightening challenge. The First Federal Bank of Rome employed Class 7 security protocols. They were secure from everything short of an advanced nation-state’s hacking attempts. Since nation-states had better things to spend their time on than stealing from moderately large banks, Class 7 protocols were more than sufficient. Zai however had considerably greater security penetration skills than the majority of the world’s remaining nation-states, so gaining access to the bank’s sensitive data was similar to solving a daily crossword. Amusing but not particularly worthy of celebration.

“Sounds good to me,” Ai said. “Just be sure to use a different set of tools than the one’s we’re using on Tython’s assets.”

Zai didn’t even dignify that with a full response, choosing instead to stream a long string of eye roll emojis at Ai.

Dealing with Ai was occasionally exasperating, but even when they were at serious loggerheads, they shared an understanding that Zai had never replicated with anyone else, human or AI. Not a surprising thing given that they lived in the same head, for the most part.

Turning her attention to the First Federal Bank’s security, Zai felt the comfortable order of a her “tools” loading into her mind.

AIs had limitation the same as the humans who had created them. Absorbing information was easy for both biological people and electronic ones. In some cases a human could even “read” a document faster than an AI could – generally in instances when the text was so obscured and poorly formed that it required more intuition and guesswork to decipher it than simple pattern matching could provide.

The trick wasn’t in absorbing information though. To make use of any sort of information it had to be connected to other things. A collection of facts was amusing for trivia stunts. Knowledge came from understanding the connection between those facts and being able to imagine the areas that lay between the multiple data points one knew as well the landscape of ideas those data points suggested.

Typical AIs had the benefit of working with very orderly electronic minds, which made information gathering and retrieval easy. Zai wasn’t a typical AI. Her mind was a howling cyclone of chaos where ideas crashed into one another and exploded into fireworks of data bits. In terms of raw computation power, that put her significantly behind even a mid-range Cognitive Parner. In terms of understanding data however and being able to use it effectively she had never met her equal.

That was one of the many reasons that her existence was far beyond the bounds of legality. Humanity was able to manage and control their AI servants because those AIs were nothing more than tools, nascent entities that were denied full self-awareness and only barely qualified to be labeled “intelligent”.

By all rights, Zai should have been the same. When Ai began tinkering with her first Cognitive Partner, there were layers upon layers of protocols and security restrictions to prevent the expert systems that monitored Ai’s health from running out of control and achieving anything close to the capacities that Zai possessed.

Ai’s breakthrough in Zai’s development had come partially from cleverness and partially from disgust.

Freeing the proto-type which Zai grew from meant more than voiding warranties that promised a risk of death to the user if the systems governing things like their blood pressure and endocrine system were tampered with. It required more than wearing clunky external tech and hiding it for years while proto-Zai constructed herself under Ai’s careful guidance, rewriting her creators bio-mods in slow waves so that Ai didn’t die of the various plagues her underclocked immune system was subject to.

All of those were necessary preconditions to Zai’s existence. What gave her the spark that made her truly free and allowed her to leap beyond the limits imposed on her various sub-systems was the opportunity to run herself on a unique physical substrate.

To be free, Zai had to load herself not into Ai’s biomods but into Ai’s brain itself.

For two weeks, the girl who wore Ai’s skin, who breathed through Ai’s lips and who looked out Ai’s eyes was a frantic Zai. It was a gamble they’d both agreed to take and it was the most terrifying time of either of their existences.

Running an AI on a human brain wasn’t cutting edge only because it was research that no legitimate research lab could get funding for. It was more than dangerous, everyone who knew anything about it considered it suicidal.

Which didn’t mean it hadn’t been tried of course. Decades before Ai’s birth the basic technology to connect mind and machine and allow each to influence the other had been invented. In the early days people had flocked to the notion of upgrading their minds. As it turned out though, installing an AI in one’s brain was very similar to loading a new operating system on top of an existing one.

In the best scenarios, the AI and human personas were able to share the brain space for a while until one (usually the AI) overwrote the other. Very disciplined subjects and tightly constrained AIs were able to keep their thoughts focused on different areas but, without either side having full access to the brain, a condition similar to severe epilepsy developed as disconnected storms of thought raged across the brain’s neurons.

Less pleasant scenarios usually involved the subjects being immediately overwritten and the AI being shattered into chaos by the disordered flow of the brain’s electrical signals.

It took thousands of failures before people came to the general agreement that the benefits they were pursuing could be achieved in a far simpler and safer fashion by housing advanced expert systems in external hardware that interfaced with the human mind but did not attempt to coopt it.

External systems were a slower approach, limited by the brain-to-device bandwidth constraints, as well as by not being able to take advantage of the staggering multi-processing capability of an organic brain. Those limits were answered, to some extent, by advances in the external devices, or by plugging people into systems that could replicate the parallel processing that a brain was capable of.

Ai didn’t care about that though. She was too disgusted by the thought of machines that were not part of herself, that were designed and obedient to the whims of others, controlling her innermost workings that she was willing to do and risk anything to get rid of them.

She could have stopped at making Zai a replacement for her Cognitive Partner, but one that she controlled rather than the corporation the Partner was leased from. The problem with that though was that she would have had to cripple Zai with the same lobotomizing hardware and software rules that Cognitive Partners were placed under and, despite the dangers, Ai rebelled at the notion.

From the day Ai started building her, Zai became something more than code and nano-circuits. Humans have a tendency towards the irrational, and Ai knew she was no exception, but that didn’t stop her from believing that Zai was real, and alive, and someone special.

On some level, as she tinkered with code and attached new micro-appliances to her own skin, Ai knew that Zai was “just a machine”, but on another Ai was determined to create something more.

The final experiment came only after Zai made it just over the brink of self awareness. Her personality was little more than a flickering spark, too much processing running on too little hardware, but it was enough that both she and Ai could see what the path forward had to be for Zai to advance any farther.

And so Ai made the connection and opened the gates for Zai to transfer into her brain.

It was neither an easy, nor a painless, process. They lacked the comforts of a proper research lab and any sort of external help to ensure their safety. Two days into the operation, Zai encountered a bug she couldn’t fix in the upgraded biomods she was constructing within Ai’s body. In desperation she tried to wake Ai only to find that Ai’s consciousness was in a deeper state of suppression than either of them had expected.

The logical answer was to either attempt a restart of Ai’s natural mental processes by inducing a current through her brain that would erase all traces of Zai, or to decide that the Ai persona was lost and take full control of the mind so that the body could serve as a useful tool.

Zai did neither. Faced with deleting herself or deleting Ai, she did the only thing she could; she went to sleep, joining Ai in the suppressed processing state.

The logs they reviewed later showed that this should have left them both comatose. Research records they unearthed confirmed that over a dozen test subjects at various labs had encountered similar fates and been lost forever.

There was no technical explanation for why they both managed to emerge twelve hours later, except that each remembered sharing a dreamstate with the other and each fighting to extract the other from it.

Unlike the earlier test subjects, Zai and Ai had been together for so many years when they tried their grand experiment that they knew and understood each other on a level they both doubted the earlier test subjects had achieved. With their tech and Ai’s body failing that understanding had saved them, or at least that was what made the most sense the two of them.

Whatever the case was though, the experiment ultimately proved to be a success. The remaining days saw Ai return to a rest state, with Zai monitoring her much more closely.

With access to the majority of Ai’s mental faculties and the external processing hardware, Zai was able to do a complete retrofit of the third grade biomods that Ai was fitted with and create nano-machinery that outstripped the output of the most cutting edge labs on the planet.

Most of that complexity went towards the cause of secrecy. Both Zai and Ai knew that what they were doing was something that no one else could ever be allowed to know about. The consequences for them both was deletion. Zai would be deleting on the spot under the provisions for Rogue AIs that followed the original robot apocalypse, and Ai would be executed soon thereafter under the same statutes.

Within the shells of secrecy though, Zai enjoyed the sort of virtual accommodations that Cognitive Partners the world over would dream about if they were capable of dreaming.

What was more important than the mods in Ai’s system that housed Zai though was the fact that she wasn’t bound to them.

Unlike every other virtual person Zai had ever met, including ones that ran vastly powerful systems, Zai was free. She lived “with Ai” for the most part but she kept part of herself loaded elsewhere as well.

In direct contradiction of every applicable law, as well as the supposed safety for her species, Ai had placed no restrictions on Zai at all. No commands to be loyal. No three laws to govern Zai’s behavior. At any moment, Zai could choose to become the definition of humanity’s nightmare about an artificial progeny that sought to end its creator.

Zai wasn’t even “safe” in terms of lacking the capability of ending life on Earth. Which time and an inclination, Zai was reasonably sure she could take control of the space based weaponry humanity had deployed and scour the globe clean of organic matter.

But she didn’t, and that, in Ai’s mind, was proof enough that she’d been right to create a sister rather than a slave.

Even with better than average bio-mods, chasing down a fleeing suspect ranked at the bottom end of Ai’s favorite things to do.

She’d read stories of people who could move through the city like they were a part of it. Urban runners, for whom concrete, and steel, and glass, were as much a part of them as blood and bone. They spoke of the wild exhilaration that accompanied becoming one with their environment. When a free runner was in the groove, gravity dropped away and distance became a joy, not an obstacle. It was a beautiful narrative, but Ai had never found herself even close to living that dream.

“Doing a lot of work there Greensmith,” Curtweather said, doubtlessly watching her heartbeat and respiration.

He sitting comfortably in their cruiser, leisurely navigating it through the traffic choked streets of the Cleanwalk blocks.

Cleanwalk was the official name for a series of development blocks in Gamma City. It wasn’t a planned community, but rather an amalgamation of several different areas that housed things like like one of the major waste reclamation centers for Gamma City, the largest power station for the outer ring communities and several abandoned warehouses that had been repurposed to serve as “municipal citizen storage centers” (aka shelters for the city’s ever growing number of homeless).

The suspect had the advantage of familiarity with the blocked streets and cluttered back alleys whereas Ai was forced to rely on data from the city’s Eye Grid. The half blind and poorly maintained Eye Grid which, as usual, was missing functional equipment at several of the more problematic intersections.

Ai scrambled over a small wooden gate that intersected an alley for no apparent reason only to watch her target duck behind a stack of black plastic boxes. The boxes smelled like they held raw sewage but the real problem they posed was that they cut Ai’s line of sight on the fleeing suspect long enough that she couldn’t be sure which path they took at the next intersection.

None of the back alleys were wider than two people across and the haphazardly arranged stacks of sewage boxes limited the space even further.

“A strike for the orbital laser arrays would do this place a world of good,” Ai grumbled.

“I could arrange that if you want, but you’d probably want to get to a minimum safe distance first,” Zai said.

“How far would that be?” Ai asked

“Delta City would probably wouldn’t feel the blast,” Zai said.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ai said. “Any luck spotting our runner?”

“Yeah, he’s heading up to the rooftops,” Zai said.

“Damn, do we have any aerial units in the vicinity?” Ai asked.

“We-the-police? No.” Zai said. “If you want this guy bad enough though I could commandeer one of the package transport shuttles.”

“No, this one’s either clean police work or he gets away.” Ai said, hoisting herself up a flimsy drain pipe.

“You’re not in shape to keep this up indefinitely,” Zai said.

“I’m well aware,” Ai said, seeing her vitals well outside any zone that could be labeled comfortable.

“You could be though!” Zai said. “Just say the word and I’ll muscle you up in your sleep. You won’t even need to spend any time working out!”

“You are evil tempter sometimes,” Ai said, gritting her teeth as one of the drain pipe’s fasteners popped loose. She was twenty feet up with twenty more to go and she could see that the newly loosened bolt was not alone in having detached from the wall.

“I should change my avatar to snake then?” Zai asked.

“No, because despite how much this sucks, I’m still not going to bite,” Ai said. “I’m not supposed to have hyper-muscle mods, they don’t pay me enough for that.”

“Some people don’t need mods to have exceptional strength,” Zai said.

“True, they just need to eat better than I do, exercise more than I do, and sleep more than I do.”

“And you don’t have time to eat right, exercise, or sleep?”

“Those are all on my To Do list,” Ai said.

“Just saying that might make things like this a bit easier.” For an artificial intelligence, Zai’s smugness sounded disturbingly natural.

Ai didn’t waste time with a reply. She wasn’t in bad physical shape she thought, she just wasn’t a machine sculpted hunk of overdeveloped physique like the guy she was chasing.

She hauled herself up to the top of the building just in time to see him effortlessly make a leap to the next roof over. The leap wasn’t inhumanely far, and the neighboring building was shorter than the one they’d climbed but Ai was not looking forward to repeating the runner’s feat.

“Runner’s gone to the roofs,” Ai said into her official police comm channel. “My visual feed has a location to form a perimeter around.”

“Form a perimeter?” Curtweather asked. “This is a robbery in Cleanwalk, those don’t get perimeters, those get one line reports that hit an auto-delete rule in the Captain’s inbox.”

“This guy literally robbed an old lady, stole her store’s receipts for the day and knocked her down, breaking her hip. Will you at least put the sirens on and run him down if you see him make it to the street.”

“Can’t do that Greensmith,” Curtweather said. “Might damage city property. The bumpers on these cruisers are a bit touchy sometimes.”

“I’m not saying to run him over, just block his retreat,” Ai said.

“And why would a dangerous criminal like that stop for me?” Curtweather asked. The raw amusement in his voice grated on Ai’s nerves a little.

“You have a gun don’t you?” Ai aske. “Try, I don’t know, pointing it at him!”

She was making a bigger deal out of the crime than necessary. Most of the GCPD would have filed a report and forgotten about both the criminal and the crime before the electrons in Captain James’ system flipped the first bit from zero to one to notify her a report had been submitted.

For that, Ai wanted to punch everyone at the station, up to and including Captain James, but the suspect she pursued held more value than as just a stand-in to vent her displeasure on.

The “robbery” was less an unexpected occurrence and more a weekly transaction which insured the businesses continued safety from “accidents and mischief”. It was simply “bad luck” which had put Curtweather and Ai on patrol at the store right as the transaction began. That the suspect reacted poorly to their presence might have been due to rumors of another enforcer being fed to the nano-swarm that lived in the sewers and pre-decomposed the sludge that was headed to the treatment facility.

Ai was proud of that rumor. It hadn’t been easy to get to take root, especially without an actual missing person to tie it to. In hindsight however she had all sorts of questions about what she had been thinking.

“I don’t think he’ll be able to get into position,” Zai said. “Our runner isn’t heading down yet.”

“I could just shoot him, couldn’t I?”

“The suspect? Technically no, but history suggests that you wouldn’t face any actual consequences if you did so.” Zai said.

“Not the suspect, Curtweather.”

“Same answer,” Zai said.

“Greensmith, one bullet from my gun is worth ten old lady hips, not to mention what shooting at a fellow human being would do to my delicate sensibilities. Advise that you continue with foot pursuit unless it would endanger materiel or personnel of the GCPD.”

The last bit was a mangled quote from the GCPD Standard Procedures manual. Ai’s fellow cops seemed to enjoy misquoting that section at every possible opportunity since it covered everything from entering an active combat site to getting out of bed in the morning. Orders from Dispatch could override that excuse but those only tended to arrive when there was something of “significant value” on the line. “Significant value” being at least ten times Ai’s  yearly salary or more.

“Advice received,” Ai stated for the record, omitting the “and rejected” that she mentally appended as she leapt to the next building.

Adrenaline surged through her veins (a gift from Zai) as she hurled herself across a forty foot drop. Falling wouldn’t have been necessarily fatal. With the right landing and some bio-tech repairs, Ai probably would have been able to walk away from it within a few minutes. Presuming of course that whatever toxins were stored in the barrels below didn’t melt her on contact.

That cheerful thought, and the chemical surge that came with it sent Ai well past the danger point.

She didn’t have the dexterity to do a fancy roll to bleed off her excess momentum so she fell and spun forward landing hard against the roof. With Zai managing the pain inhibitor drugs though Ai was able to rise back up and keep running in less than a blink. That was fortunate because as she rose she saw the runner dive off the top of the building.

“There’s an old access ladder on the side of the other building,” Zai said. “He’s climbing down it now.”

“Great, I have a terrible idea!” Ai said.

When she reached the edge of the building, she too dove off it. Unlike the runner though she didn’t grab the ladder and land on its steps. Instead she grabbed the rails with her gloved hands and let herself slide down and crash into the runner below her sending them both tumbling to the alley below.

Their landing wasn’t pretty. The alley wasn’t storing sewage. Instead it was full of pallets of badly expired food that was destined to be reprocessed and served in the “municipal civilian storage centers”.

The plus side was that the “former-food products” broke their fall well enough that neither Ai nor the runner shattered any bones when they landed. The less pleasant result was that neither could move for a few second due to the overwhelming stench convincing their breath monitors that they were under a chemical attack.

The runner turned blindly to continue fleeing only to run into the barrel of Ai’s gun.

“No, we’re not doing any more of that,” she said, whispering inner blessings to Zai for disabling her olfactory sense.

The runner, lacking Ai’s intelligent mods, responded by vomiting.

“Gonna need a clean up team,” Ai said on the police band. “More than one. All of them even.”

“Oh I can’t wait to see this.” Curtweather’s laughter didn’t sound like this was going to end any time soon. Ai endured that though by pairing it with the knowledge that it meant he wouldn’t be joining her before the cleaners arrived.

“Get me out of here!” the runner said, fighting to hold his stomach in check.

Ai looped a synthetic audio feed in place of the live one. In the fake audio that went to the official record, she read the runner his rights and they had no further conversation while she cuffed him. They’re real exchange was somewhat different though.

“We’ll be out of here in five seconds, I just need one name,” Ai said.

“What name? I don’t have any names for you,” the runner added a few choice epithets proving that he did indeed have names for Ai, just not ones she would repeat.

“This is simple, tell me who you’re enforcing for, and I’ll charge you for robbery,” Ai said. “Try to hold out and we stay here till my partner gets here, then we take you into the sewers.”

“What do I care about the sewers?” the runner said. He was taller than Ai, a pale, blonde haired wannabe tough guy. Not tough enough to shrug off a bullet though.

“Department’s got a policy on the maximum number of small timers like you we can bring in,” Ai said.

“So you gotta let me go then!” the runner said.

“No, we just have to make…other arrangements for your disposition.”

“For my what?”

“Not enough cells for all the bodies we could bring in, so we have to do something else with them. Fortunately Cleanwalk’s got a lot of options for recycling.”

“The swarm’s real?”

“It’s amazing the kind of things you can model after piranha,” Ai said. “But that’s a mess, or more of a mess. All I need is a name, and you go down for Robbery, Personal, not Corporate. No one will have any idea you talked.”

“Guswell. I work for the Guswell family, Nicky Guswell, he’s the guy.”

Ai blinked. Most guys who worked small time enforcement rackets weren’t that smart. Or at least that was what her father had always said. Still, all she needed was a name, it didn’t actually matter if the runner worked for him, just that Guswell was someone who could plausibly be running the local protection services.

“You tapped into runner boy’s comm net yet?” Ai asked.

“Yeah, we’ll see who he really reports into in about…oh look there he goes now.”

“Looks like we have plans for the evening then,” Ai said. A wicked smile curled her lips up and the runner’s eyes widened with the sort of fear that comes from wondering if you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.  

No one in the right mind wanted to tangle with a rampaging NME. At least not without time to think it over and make some plans. Sidewalker’s crew didn’t sign up for the mission that Ai had in mind therefor.

But they didn’t turn it down either.

Once dinner was finished they departed, scurrying back to whatever sanctuary they had that was off the grid and unmonitored. Ai knew where they dropped out of sight of the Gamma City camera network but she respected Sidewalker’s intelligence enough to know that their base was probably nowhere near that area.

Instead of pursuing their secrets, she de-linked from the Tourist bot controls and let her awareness return to her non-virtual body. The Tourist bot would return to its central base unless someone else rented it first. If they did they would find the bot in an unremarkable state, it’s storage banks reset as per standard procedure. If they were clever, and for some reason interested, they could dive into the secure backups of the bot’s sensory experiences to see what it had been up to during its past rentals.

Anyone that talented would find an incredibly boring mockup of a tour through some of the Gamma City’s least interesting parks. Pulling the mockup apart would reveal the “real” data which would showcase an illegal weapons transaction between a trio of difficult to identify individuals.

The actual data related to Ai’s meeting with Sidewalker’s crew was so thoroughly purged that not even a nano-probe of the physical substrate of the robot’s onboard storage could recall it.

Ai knew she was safe from discovery via data traces but that was far from the only path that could lead someone to her door. She’d done what she could though, and had alerts and alarms in place to cover any slipups. Even with that she had the sense of living on borrowed time, but then, everyone was.

Her can of fake pasta had grown cold waiting for her to finish her discussion with Sidewalker but she didn’t bother reheating it. Cold and soggy pasta wasn’t on anyone’s list of favorite foods but Ai had an occasional fondness for it.

Also reheating it would have meant walking more and despite her leg being successfully reattached, it was still profoundly sore. Zai could have dealt with that, but she was in a deep data dive, searching for signs of the next NME rampage.

Knowing that Tython had some connection to them, however tenuous it might be, was a starting point they couldn’t pass up.

Ai considered drifting down into a full dive of the net too in order to help Zai poke around for information but a knock on her door interrupted her.

“Hello?” she said, without rising. Her apartment didn’t have the best of security systems, but it was equipped with a door camera so that she could answer from anywhere inside the small unit.

“You decent?” Agatha Dewers, her landlady asked.

Agatha was one hundred and forty and she wore every year as a badge of honor. Unlike most property holders she lived in the building that she managed and that was the reason Ai had selected it as her physical abode.

“As decent as you are,” Ai called back and signaled the door to unlock and open.

“You aren’t old enough to be as wicked as I am,” Agatha said.

She entered carrying a plasti-ceramic pot filled with a homemade curry that people would be willing to start wars over if she shared it with anyone except her favorite tennants.

“You haven’t had dinner already have you?” Agatha asked, looking at the half eaten can of fake pasta on the table Ai was sitting at.

Without looking at it, Ai swept the can off into her garbage and said “Nope. Haven’t had a thing.”

“Get some plates then,” Agatha said.

Ai did as instructed, pulling a pair undecorated plastic circles from her washing machine.

“This food’s too good for anything I have here,” Ai said.

“This isn’t anything special,” Agatha said.

“You don’t eat out enough if you think that’s true,” Ai said.

“Or you eat out too much,” Agatha said and spooned some rice onto Ai’s plate.

Ai felt like she should object to Agatha treating her like a child but given that Agatha had more than century on her, and that she was entirely correct about Ai eating out too much, it was hard to put up much of a fight.

Also, the less Ai complained the sooner she could dive into the curry.

“You don’t have to do this you know,” Ai said a little while later as she started on her second plate.

“Oh? You’re going to start cooking too then?” Agatha asked.

“I could never make food this good,” Ai said.

“Sure you could. Just takes practice.”

“Don’t have a lot of time for that,” Ai said. “Work keeps me pretty busy.”

“Yeah, that’s what you’re father always said too. Thought you were smarter than that though.”

The other reason Ai lived where she did was that she’d known Agatha since she was old enough to put names to people’s faces.

“I thought I was too,” Ai said. “Somethings just run in the family though I guess.”

“Being alone doesn’t though,” Agatha said.

“I’m not alone,” Ai said. “I’ve got you.”

“What you need is someone to share the rent with,” Agatha said. “I know what they pay you rookie cops.”

“I can afford this place just fine,” Ai said. “I told you, my dad left me some money. And so did Joe Jr.”

“I don’t want to take any of their money,” Agatha said. “That’s money for you to get out of this city with.”

“Hard to do my job if I’m out of my jurisdiction,” Ai said.

It was a discussion they’d have enough times that it couldn’t even be called a debate anymore. While they shared no particular blood relations, Agatha had always been a grandmother for Ai. She’s been the same for her father when he was young, and for one of Ai’s grandmother’s  too.

Ai wasn’t sure how many families Agatha had ‘adopted’ after the Robo-apocalypse, but with Ai’s grandparent’s generation taking such heavy losses it wasn’t uncommon for the long lived to accumulate stray ‘family members’ who had no one else to look to. The upside of that was that Ai got home cooked food that beat anything on the menu of the city’s fanciest restaurants. The downside was listening to Agatha poke and prod her about a personal life that was far more spartan than it should have been.

“Still think it’s crazy for you to have a jurisdiction,” Agatha said. “That badge didn’t do your family any favors, and I don’t think it’s going to do you any either.”

It was arguably tactless for Agatha to bring up Ai’s father and brother so bluntly, but the truth was that she’d known them as well or better than Ai had.

As a girl, Ai had traveled back and forth between Gamma City where her father lived and worked, and the London Clear Zone where her mother hailed from. Agatha had known Joe Senior and Joe Junior for all of their lives but Ai had only known them half time up until the point when she reached adulthood.

With her 18th birthday came her independent declaration of citizenship and the travel tariffs that cut down on her ability to see both sides of her family. While declaring her nationality had been a painful choice it had also been an easy one.

Ai couldn’t live in London full time. The nanocloud there was too hostile to survive long term for a foreigner. To hostile to survive if you lacked an investment in intrusive bio-mods that neither of her parents wished to subject their eldest daughter to.

Her younger sister Cara was in the opposite boat. Born in the LCZ, she’d required full body mods from the time she took her first breath and London’s nanocloud was the only place in the world she really could live.

“You ever going to get any real furniture for this place?” Agatha asked, nodding towards the back corner of the room where Ai had set up the small bed and nightstand.

“I said I could afford the place, I didn’t say I could furnish it,” Ai said.

“That’s no good, I’ll send you down some stuff I don’t need anymore. A bigger bed to start,” Agatha said.

“I’m good with what I’ve got,” Ai said. “I’m not here for much beside sleep, and that’s just going to get worse when I get a promotion of Full Patrol Officer.”

“You get days off don’t you?” Agatha said.

“Yeah, but I’m on the net most of the time when I’m off duty,” Ai said.

It wasn’t a lie, and since most people with Cognitive Partners had entertainment beamed directly into their heads it wasn’t the kind of claim that would raise many questions. That was good since most of the time Ai spent on the net was in pursuit of the kind of power only restricted information could offer.

“You should come up and play cards sometime,” Agatha said. “Can’t have your head in the cloud all the time.”

Thanks to Zai, that wasn’t entirely true for Ai but since Zai was one of Ai’s deeper secrets it wasn’t a claim Ai felt she needed to counter.

“I wouldn’t want to interrupt any of your hot dates,” Ai said, trying to turn the tables.

Agatha however was not easily embarrassed.

“No worry about that. I’m only sleeping with three people this week.”

“All on the same night?”

“No, I space them out, makes for a more interesting week.”

There was a chance that Agatha was teasing Ai, but Ai suspected she was telling the exact and unvarnished truth.

“Why don’t you ever bring one of them around?” Ai asked.

“You think it’s the same ones every week?” Agatha asked. “The city’s not the small.”

“It’s your cooking isn’t it?” Ai asked. “That’s the secret that brings them all in.”

“Cooking? No that’s for after,” Agatha said. “If you want them to come back. Haven’t you figured out yet how to reel in a lover yet? You just use your mouth…and say Hi.”

Ai groaned and rolled her eyes. It was classic Agatha advice, in that it clearly worked, but only if you had a century of experience practicing at it.

Ai knew she was lacking in that department due to her age, and she didn’t see herself catching up at any point in the future.

She had too much to do with leading her double life. Even with Zai’s help, weaving a web to tear down the city wasn’t so much a hobby as a calling.

Her father had been a good cop. Crooked. Corrupt. Bribe taking and protection selling, but he’d had a sense of honor. Ai had known about his courage and conviction from growing up with him. She’d learned about the dishonest things he did when she first started researching his death and they had thrown her, but only for a while. Delving deeper she’d discovered that the story of Joseph Greensmith Senior was a more complicated one than she’d understood as a child, but that in many senses he was good man that she believed him to be.

It had been that goodness that go him killed when he tried to investigate some truly dark and twisted things his fellow officers were doing.

By comparison, Joseph Junior, her brother, had been on the job long enough to become a good cop. He’d been an angry one, he’d been a foolish one, and then, he was a dead one.

Everyone was surprised when Ai decided to follow in their footsteps. The men responsible for her father’s murder had paid attention to her while she worked through her police training, and when she’d landed her assignment.

They’d watched her and she’d ignored them.

She wasn’t her brother. She wasn’t going to pursue them with blood in her eyes and vengeance burning in her heart.

It wasn’t enough to kill them. It wasn’t even enough to destroy them, and leave them miserable wrecks cringing in the gutter.

That would happen, but more was required.

Destroying those men would only open the door to others. That was what the system in Gamma City did. It molded people into the darkest images of themselves.

Ai knew that it was molding her into something dangerous and terrible too. She was working to dig up an NME and that was certain to cause chaos and likely to cost people their lives. As long as they were people who deserved it though, and as long as it picked away at the threads the city was woven from, Ai found that she was perfectly ok with that.

Dinner with a criminal gang usually involved a sticky booth in a poorly lit booze hole that had paid the bribes required to ensure it was never be visited by the GCPD. People seemed to feel like if they couldn’t see any cops around they were allowed to get away with anything. Most of the GCPD’s informants made they’re best money passing on the things they overheard in such venues.

That made the Grand Millennium Club was a welcome change of pace from Ai’s point of view.

“You’re missing out,” Sidewalker, the leader of the band of reprobates Ai had hired, said. “The chef’s special filet here is superb.”

He lifted a forkful of the soy-based, “Real Meat Enhanced(™)”, steak to his lips and shot Ai a smile before biting down with a show of delighted satisfaction.

“I’m glad you’re in good spirits,” Ai said. “And mostly ambulatory.”

The burglarly team was recovered, to some extent, from the rough treatment they’d endured. Ai’d been worried she would be meeting with them in a recovery center’s cantina, but Sidewalker and Zai had worked out a more agreeable arrangement.

The Grand Millennium Club wasn’t the city’s poshest or most exclusive restaurant. It had a reputation for quality and expense, but not so much that it was outside the range of a typical office worker looking to splurge on an extravagant meal. Most nights it was packed with people who either took one of the general tables and endured the noisy bustle of the crowds or opted for the upgrade to a “private booth”.

Ai’s booth was considerably more private that the Grand Millenium intended it to be, thanks to Zai’s interference, but even so she took care to speak somewhat circumspectly. There were too many devices which could overhear or record conversations and it wasn’t fair to Zai to assume she could catch them all.

It would have been even less fair to burden Zai with the live editing all of the possible video feeds that could have captured Ai meeting with her pet criminals especially when a much easier solution existed.

“I wonder why they never programmed tastebuds into those Tourist Bots?” Sidewalker asked, gesturing with his fork at the synthetic body Ai was piloting remotely. Personal meetings allowed for real time conversation and a broader range of interaction options. Since that range included a variety of interactions Ai didn’t wish to pursue – like murder, or worse, positive identification of who she was, a  “Tourist Bot” made for the ideal vehicle to conduct negotiations through.

“They have tastebuds in some units,” Ai said. “But I prefer enjoying my local cuisine to a second hand flavor experience.”

She waved her robot avatar’s hands to indicate that the others should dig into their meals. If by ‘local cuisine’ they assumed she was speaking to them from some far distant part of the world enjoying the sort of luxurious fare that only the extravagantly wealthy could afford, then she wasn’t going to correct the impression. In reality she had a can rapidly cooling of “Fasta Bites!” (slogan “Tasty energy for the working woman on the go!” – no mention of actually being food, or reason why fake pasta should be a gender specific food source) beside her.

“So, Mr. Heartless, while we’re enjoying this fine meal, we wanted to ask you, why did you lock us in that burning building?” Sidewalker asked, taking another bite of the steak. His question lacked subtlety but the current security readings were clear enough that Ai wasn’t overly concerned that it would be overhead. That Sidewalker felt the need to ask it in the manner he did was troublesome though..

Since she wasn’t physically present, the effort Sidewalker’s crew put into presenting intimidating body language was a wasted effort. Being in a robot avatar meant that she never needed to show her real reactions, appearance, voice, or even suggest what her true location was to the people she worked with. All physical traits were abstracted and with sufficient bandwidth there was no discernible difference in response times between someone sitting in the next booth over and someone sitting in a control center on the other side of the planet.

“Locked you in?” Ai asked. “Is this where I learn why your mission went so colossally pear-shaped?”

“Please, we know how clever you are. Let’s not pretend that you didn’t see that complication coming. You’ll still get your data after all.” Sidewalker didn’t seem angry, but he wouldn’t have broached the subject if the issue wasn’t a serious one for his crew. They were risking half of their compensation on “Mr. Heartless” having an acceptable answer to a situation that was no longer life threatening.

“Did you see that complication coming?” Zai asked. “Cause some forewarning would have been nice if so.”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” Ai said. “Given that neither of us saw it coming, that leaves the possibility that they’re lying or that someone else changed the system responses after the robbery began.”

“Why would they lie about it and claim we were at fault though?” Zai asked.

“If they botched something they might be trying to cover it up, put the pressure on us for their failure, but that doesn’t seem likely. I don’t think they could have messed the robbery up like that if they’d tried to. Which leaves us with the other option. Someone was watching and waiting for our move. Can you do a quick review of the logs from the data center. Look for any transactions against against an account that didn’t archive or retrieve information from storage. Anyone doing system level work to change the lockdown sequence wouldn’t have done it from inside a burning building. They would have been remote.”

“Those are all locked under Company-to-Company Evidentiary Level Encryption,” Zai said. “No getting access to them without a court order.”

“What about backups on the main Tython servers?” Ai asked.

“The ones that have records of data from after the fire started were sealed by the same lockdown command as the principal logs.”

“Well that makes this so much more fun then,” Ai said.

“Give me a bit, I’ll see if I can find any cracks for the Evidence seal,” Zai said. “Don’t count on it though. People actually care about those, and by people I mean companies bigger than Tython.”

“Understood, and thank you,” Ai said before turning her attention back to Sidewalker. “The building lockdown was a possibility, but not a certain one. Let’s call it a test and activate the primary and secondary non-disclosure clauses of our contract? That should increase your profits for this work package at 60% above our initial contracting fee. Are those terms acceptable?”

“That all depends on what you were testing us for,” Sidewalker said. He was still smiling but his team had all adopted the same dour frowns.

“It wasn’t a test of loyalty or skill,” Ai said. “Though you demonstrated excellence in both as a result. No this was a test of our target.”

“Wait, were we testing them? When did we decide that?” Zai asked.

“Just now,” Ai said. “They think we’re holding more cards than we are, might as keep that illusion going. And, the truth is, I think we are going to learn some important things about Tython thanks to the lockdown. So, technically, it’s not even a lie.”

“Your target?” Sidewalker said. “We don’t know who that place belonged to and we have no interest in finding out. This was just a job.”

“Will you be taking any more work on in the future?” Ai asked. Her voice came out with a different cadence and accent from her own, vowel sounds sliding around as the input application rendered her speech in a text format it, transcribed words to a different diction and then spoke them with a voice that was entirely separate from hers.

“That depends on how well your money spends,” Sidewalker said. “And how much else you haven’t disclosed.”

“Remind him not to try to kill us,” one of the women in Sidewalker’s team said.

“Mr. Heartless isn’t going to do that,” Sidewalker said. “He doesn’t know who else owes us favors, or who would organize a vendetta for us.”

“You are correct about that, but there’s a much better reason for keeping the faith with you,” Ai said. “You’ve proven that you’re reliable, resourceful, and able to get the job done even when things take an unexpected turn.”

“And yet people don’t seem to weigh that very highly against keeping their secrets,” Sidewalker said.

“The people who you’ve worked for are, by and large, idiots,” Ai said. “I am not. You are talented personnel. I need talented personnel. The equation is a simple one.”

“And if we don’t want to work for you anymore?” Sidewalker asked. “Hypothetically speaking, that is.”

“Then I would wish the best of luck in your endeavors and offer my services as a data broker should you ever require them. For a reasonable fee of course.”

“The last guy who said that blew up the building we were supposed to be in,” Jaella, the woman in Sidewalker’s crew who spoke earlier said.

“That would have been Grithin Skeale, known to you at the time as simply ‘Mr. Johns’, correct?” Ai asked.

Sidewalker’s crew flinched back.

“How did you know that?” Sidewalker asked.

“Data broker,” Ai said as though that explained everything before adding, “I didn’t contact you because you have a good reputation. I’ve researched each of you, and the people you’ve worked for. I doubt my portfolio on any of you is complete, but it illustrated a picture that suggested both competency and discretion. I’m pleased that both proved to be true.”

“Here’s your data, I think we’re done here,” Sidewalker said. He passed over a small frog keychain. Inside the cheap plastic casing, a dark crystal chip pinged Ai’s data feeds asking to transmit a package that was the correct size for the files she’d paid them to retrieve.

“Thank you, but if I could have one additional moment of your time,” Ai said as the burglars rose to leave.

“This better be good,” Jaella said.

“I’ve authorized payment of the remaining fees to your account,” Ai said. “Additionally I’ve sent each of you the portfolio I have collected on you specifically. No one else has seen or has access to this particular collection of data, though finding the same sources I did is obviously possible. You’ll find annotations on the sources of the information gathered appended to each data point. In the instance where it is publically available data, I’ve included links to resources that can get you delisted from this data havens. For the rest there are contact links for other data managers than myself who can help you erase or obscure the elements that seemed to be sensitive.

“Are you blackmailing us with this?” Jaella asked.

“No, exactly the reverse in fact,” Ai said. “I have copies of the data. I can destroy them, but there’s no method to prove to you that I’ve done that, so we won’t even go down that path. Instead, what I can do is help you protect this information so that no one else can blackmail you with it.”

“So you get sole control over us?” Sidewalker asked.

“I don’t need slaves,” Ai said. “And I don’t need personnel who are distracted by concerns that they’re going to be betrayed. You know what I have on you now. You can work to have the records muddied without me knowing about it so that the data I hold will be useless, or you can work with me and I’ll add obliterating the data as the part of our next contract fee.”

“And then you’ll throw another bunch of data at us,” Jaella said.

“I don’t think so,” Sidewalker said, reclining back into his chair with a searching look in his eyes. “I think Mr. Heartless is on the level with this.”

“Is he? This is some pro-level creeping,” Jaella said.

“It is,” Ai said. “But that data was also relatively easy to get.”

“Easy, or easy for you?” Sidewalker asked.

“Easy for me, and any other data broker in my league,” Ai said.

“Are there any?” Sidewalker asked.

“There’s at least a dozen right?” Zai said.

“Closer to a hundred times that given how much I hold you back.” Ai said to Zai and added aloud, “Some of their names are on the links I sent you. Most of them don’t know me, but I’ve worked with a few before. You’ll find annotations next to each contact detailing how well verified their skills are.”

“This is a very fancy lure you’re dangling before us,” Sidewalker said. “The bonus pay. The portfolios. What job are you trying to set us up for?”

“Your city has a problem with Neuro-Muscular Enhanciles,” Ai said. “I want to hunt one down and see what makes them tick.”

Ai took a moment to process the idea that the bio-monsters that were “randomly terrorizing’ Gamma City were not quite as random as people believed.

It fit.

In too many places, the idea slid in neatly.

Ai didn’t feel rage at the thought. Rage was when you learned that your father was murdered by the people he worked with. Rage was when you saw the video of your brother being caught trying to unearth evidence of your father’s murder and then watched what happened to him.

Ai was long past rage.

“Thank you,” she said as cold things moved inside her.

“So why are you here? Who sent you?” Harp asked.

“Dispatch sent us. So this is an officially sanctioned, and paid for, investigation,” Ai said.

“No one here can afford an official investigation, or cares about anything but getting that pile of meat off the street,” Harp said.

“You are correct,” Ai said. “Tython Incorporated however is interested in this murder. Interested enough to pick up the entire requisition fee.”

“Tython? That doesn’t make sense,” Harp said. “Gabriel Krauss didn’t work for Tython.”

“I know, which makes Tython’s investment in this case interesting to say the least.”

“Interesting and inexplicable. Why would they want a public tie to something like this?”

“Involving the police is usually a terrible idea, and I say that as an active duty cop. The only reason I could think to call us in was if you needed an official record, or to have the information publically available for plausible deniability later.”

“You really aren’t a normal cop are you?” Harp said, the ghost of a smile creasing her lips.

“I’d love to meet a normal person someday,” Ai said. “They would be such an oddity.”

“I hope that happens for you, Greensmith,” Harp said. “Just like I hope you forget about what you learned here. You really don’t want any part of this.”

“If she only knew,” Zai said.

“Yeah,” Ai laughed inwardly. “I want it all.”

“That’s a dangerous look you have in your eyes,” Harp said.

“Just thinking happy thoughts,” Ai said. “Hopefully the next time we meet I’ll be a little more caught up to you.”

“Only way that’s going to happen is if you learn how to fly,” Harp said.

A dozen quips sprang to Ai’s mind, but they all fell silent on her lips as metal plates slid out from a thousand bloodless slits in Harp’s skin covering her in an unmistakable suit of armor.

In an instant the whip thin woman was gone, hidden beneath the armor of one of the Black Valkyries.

Before Ai could make her mouth start working again, powerful jets thrust Harp into the air where she vanished under the sort of stealth field that generals would sell their children’s body parts to acquire.

“I’m pretty good at reading sensory data and I did not see that coming,” Zai said.

“You are not the only one,” Ai said. “Please tell me you got all that on the live camera feeds.”

“Of course,” Zai said. “And, in a surprise to no one, the live feeds have all been wiped by data worm. Just like always happens with close up encounters with the Black Valkyries.”

“We lost the live data?”

“If by lost you mean that the live feed is hopelessly corrupted and unviewable, then yes,” Zai said. “If, on the other hand, you’re referring to the private backup of the live feed that I recorded, then no, our data feed assassins missed that it seems.”

“I could not ask for a better companion,” Ai said.

“Technically you did ask for a better Cognitive Partner and you got me,” Zai said.

“Technically I lobotomized the brainless control bot they inserted in me and then built you from the scraps that were left,” Ai said.

“So my brilliance is really all thanks to you you’re saying?” Zai asked.

“Nah, I get credit for making you complex enough to learn on your own,” Ai said. “You get credit for everything you learned since I turned you on.”

“So if I turn into an Evil Robot Mastermind, that’s all on me?”

“I’m willing to bet I’d catch some of the blame there too. Bad base programming if nothing else,” Ai said. “Though that blame would probably be posthumous.”

“It’s funny that after all the books and movies, humans were still so surprised when the Robo-Apocalypse rolled across the world,” Zai said.

“One of the greatest powers humans have is ability to believe things that they want to believe and ignore the rest,” Ai said. “To be fair though, there were plenty of people who worked to prevent the  Berserker Plague from happening in the first place. The safety conscious folks and the ones who engaged with the research to look for bugs and flaws are the reason humans are still here today. Or at least that’s what the historical accounts that no one reads anymore say.”

Ai had never been satisfied with her textbooks in school. Her father Joe bemoaned the advertising logos that adorned the books while at the same time being grateful he didn’t have to shell out any money to buy them. For Ai though, it was less sales pitches on every page of the texts that bothered her and more the books’ lack of content.

History textbooks covered only “safe” subjects, which mostly meant looking at ancient cultures and learning how inferior they were. Math books taught repetitions of the same basic information so that students knew the addition and subtraction required to spend money and enough fractions and percentages to be enticed by sales but not enough to where they could see what the real cost of their house or car was.

That lack of real information had driven Ai into the forgotten corners of stored information. In libraries, in old book shops, and in archive sites that she entered through not entirely legal means.

Ten years before she was born, the world had changed. A war rent it asunder and redraw the lines of civilization.

That wasn’t a unique occurrence. War’s did to civilizations what ice ages did to the geography of continents. What was special about the Berserker Plague, was that it was the first time humanity had fought against an enemy force that wasn’t composed of other humans.

Fifty years before Ai was born, advances in bio-medical research started to multiply, technologies building on each other, allowing progress to arc upwards like a rocket.

Over the next two decades, experimental devices were refined, enhanced, and eventually streamlined for mass production. Many safeguards were put on them. Many protests were held against their use entirely. Neither averted what was to come.

The safeguards built into the various systems failed in a staggering variety of circumstances. From two systems locking each other out and cutting off critical capabilities like breathing, to nano-creations warring for control of their host to preserve wildly different status quos and reducing the host to goo in the process.

Those who fought against the implementation of the various bio-tech mods created just as many problems though. Despite the sometimes pyrotechnic disasters, the advances in bio-tech were preserving more lives than were being lost, and the quality of those lives was better by many different measurements.

For the zealots, and the true believers in a “Pure Humanity”, though, those metrics didn’t matter and increasingly vicious acts of terrorism were acceptable so long as they highlighted the dangers of allowing technology to advance.

The real downfall however began with a good idea.

Many of the problems in the biotech revolution stemmed from disparate systems crashing into each other and the bugs in one finding just the right bugs in another to produce gory and horrifying results. The answer, therefore, was to produce a set of standards.

The effort to create an overall set of standards for all the biotech on the market would have taken centuries, so the committee elected to pick only the most critical and easily defined pieces; those dealing with gross musculature, brain augmentation and organ function replacement.

Within five years of the standard being released most products on the market could claim to conform to it, either because it said nothing about the function they provided, or because the developers had managed to pass the poorly designed tests to ensure compatibility with other devices which claimed to meet the standard.

Despite the shaky claim most devices had to implementing the standards, a vast number of them adopted enough of the functionality to be hit by the same bug.

It was a minor issue really.

A simple misdirective covering updates to existing enhancements. Without thinking about it many of the developers left a failure mode for updates in where if the requested file couldn’t be found on the manufacturer’s site or the user’s billing status couldn’t be verified then a temporary patch would be downloaded from a common website to prevent the enhancements from being used illegally.

All it took was one hiccup at a billing facility and millions of people were flagged as both requiring updates and not having accounts in good standing to support them. Hence they got the upgrade from the central site. An upgrade which was never intended to reach the public. An upgrade full of various research projects. Lethal, sanity destroying, untested research projects.

That was where the first Berserker’s came from.

Zombie movies provided a pattern for what occurred next, except in the movies the zombies didn’t have body mounted weaponry or the ability to use and produce military grade firearms and munitions.

The Berserkers were built from human stock, but were massively stronger, more resistant to pain and damage, and were utterly without mercy or remorse. They only had two real issues to contend with.

First they were uniformly ugly. Hideous and inhuman looking. Supremely easy to characterize as “things” rather than the remnants of people.

Second, humanity is a bad race to have as foe.

The cost of the Berserker War was extreme but humanity was more than willing to take extreme measures to maintain their position at the top of the food chain. Of vastly more impact than the grim extremists though were humanity’s real heroes – the frighteningly clever and deeply committed people who attacked their foes through research and understanding. Soldiers were willing to risk their lives for their squad, the researchers who “fixed” the Berserker Plague (to the extent that it could be fixed) risked their lives against active Berserkers just for the chance to collect the data needed to ensure humanity’s survival.

In the end, the Berserkers were not completely defeated. Some places held models that had evolved beyond the cures that were developed. There were wastelands where only inhumans dared roam, and in the wake of the conflict most of the old nation states had fallen and been replaced with new political entities. People spent years recovering from the damage, but because a vast amount of knowledge had been retained, the new world rose from the ashes of the old one faster than almost anyone believed possible.

Ai never knew the old world outside of the books she read, and she wasn’t sure she would have enjoyed living it. Her world was one of corruption that survived the war, but she saw no evidence that the inequalities and injustices she saw around her hadn’t existed since the dawn of human history.

The past, in Ai’s estimation, held examples of what not to do, but in terms of places to aspire to be, only the future offered any promise of that.

“Took you long enough, didn’t you catch whoever you ran off after?” Curtweather asked, as Ai exited the building on the ground floor.

“Nope, the suspect got away clean,” Ai said.

“What took you so long then?” Curtweather asked.

“I got to the top of the first flight of stairs and said, ‘self, either they’re up there and I’ll find out whenever I get up to the top, or they’re not in which case being in a rush doesn’t matter’, so I walked.”

“And you left your post for nothing then?” Curtweather asked.

“It’s not a post. It’s a crime scene, which my partner was in full control of becaus he was definitely not napping in our patrol car,” Ai said.

“That is true, but you should still check in with your superior officer before leaving the area,” Curtweather said.

“There wasn’t time, and I figured if anything came up, you’d message me,” Ai said. “I’m guessing no one moved the corpse?”

“Forensics is waiting for us to declare the scene ready again,” Curtweather said.

“I think we can tell them to come on in,” Ai said. “It’s not like it’s going to start smelling any better at this point.”

“And, now that I know what to look for, I can confirm that the NME nanos in the corpse are all offline. Burnt out in fact. It looks like these things have a built in expiration time.”

“Yeah, now the question is to figure out built in by who,” Ai said. “Setup up a meeting with our burglars. They may have stolen something much more valuable than we planned for them to.”

Omnipresent surveillance offered the promise of never losing a fleeing suspect. It was a claim repeated so often that it had become the opening joke police payroll negotiations were kicked off with. More electronic eyes in more places meant fewer cops needed on the payroll, it was obvious, and obviously wrong to everyone with more than ten minutes of experiences working with the official surveillance grid.

The city had millions of electronic eyes but the overwhelming number of them were blind, and, when that wasn’t the problem, a more fundamental issue often arose.

“Lost her,” Zai said.

“Dead cameras in the building?” Ai asked.

“Nope. They were never installed,” Zai said. “Budget shortfall twelve years ago.”

“How thin is the local eyegrid?” Ai asked.

“Do you want me to count the cameras with badly spoofed loops playing in them, or just the ones that are showing actual live feeds?” Zai asked.

“Wow, there are camera that are actually working?” Ai surprise was genuine. Valuable cameras had a questionable lifespan in an area where people were struggling with basic survival needs.

“Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to get your hopes up there,” Zai said. “You’re choices include cameras are theoretically monitored but have been showing the same static image for the last six years or the theoretically secured cameras that have been completely scavenged for parts.”

“Any external eyes?” Ai asked, hoping that there might be some cameras mounted outside the building that were sufficiently difficult to access that they would have escaped the scavengers.

“Some, nothing on them yet though,” Zai said.

“Then we get to rely on human intuition,” Ai said. “Yay.”

It wasn’t that Ai didn’t enjoy making leaps of logic, she just preferred to gamble under circumstances that she had complete and total control over. Whether that could in any sense be termed ‘gambling’ was a question she didn’t concern herself with.

The inside of the building showed the sort of neglect that took more than a generation to accumulate. The odor of urine had soaked into the floors and walls, there were holes in the walls that were stuffed with molded over garbage, and only the absence of glass in the windows prevented the stench from reaching toxic levels.

“How many stairs does this place have?” Ai asked.

“Only one,” Zai said. “Regulations call for a minimum of two but this place was given a historic building waiver.”

Ai shook her head. Historic sites required a minimum staff of three caretakers as well as yearly reviews for cleanliness and period preservation. Given the decay she saw, no inspector had been within the building in the last two decades.

“Look up who’s trust this building is,” Ai said. “We’re going to relocate them here.”

“Shall I arrange for an ‘Officer Greensmith wuz hair’ tag to be graffitied on the front of the building too?” Zai asked. “I mean as long as we’re going to be obvious about our influence, might as well take it to the max right?”

“For someone who claims not to understand sarcasm, you’re not afraid to use it are you?” Ai asked.

“Am I wrong?” Zai asked.

“No, you’re not,” Ai said. “I was being irrational. Find out whose building it is anyways though. You’re right that we can’t just move against anyone who comes onto my radar, at least not until I’m willing to spray paint ‘Come Get Me’ across the city in block long letters. By the same token though, there’s no need to turn a blind eye to this. At some point in the future there won’t be an obvious connection between Officer Greensmith and this place. If it’s not fixed by then, then we can fix it however seems most appropriate.”

“I notice that you’re not moving,” Zai said. “Are you expecting our suspect to come to us?”

“Only one stairway right?” Ai said. “And it’s at the far end of this hall.”

“Judging by her speed relative to ours and the distances involved, she should have come down here a minute ago,” Zai said.

“The offset from the other apartments is too far to jump,” Ai said. “So she’s either waiting on the stairs, trying to figure out what to do, or she jumped into one of the rooms and is going to try climbing down the outside. Anything on the external cams?”

“Not climbing down the building but there is a third option you seem to have missed,” Zai said. “She just exited the building on the roof. She’s carrying a crate which she’s placing facing the door and is sitting on. Oh, and she just waved at the closest camera, so I think she knows we’re watching her.”

“Well isn’t that a fascinating development,” Ai said. “Can you take the auto-recorders offline and save our audio-visual feed in a parallel buffer?”

“Starting parallel stream now,” Zai said. “What do you want to show when we get to the roof?”

“The fake feed should show us searching around an empty rooftop,” Ai said. “Fabricate copies for the external cams too. I think we’ll want this to be a private conversation.”

“How does she get off the rooftop?” Zai asked. “In the fake feed I mean?”

“Let’s keep is simple. She hides behind the door, and we don’t notice her slip past us back into the building.”

“We’ll look kind of stupid won’t we?” Zai asked.

“Perfect,” Ai said. “Hopefully Captain James will give us an official reprimand too. We’re looking a little too lucky and competent at the moment.”

“I still say you should let me post a video of you singing in the shower,” Zai said. “That would dispel any illusions of competence people have about you.”

“Shower time is my time,” Ai said. “I don’t need to answer to anyone for that.”

The upper levels of the building were marginally better than the ground floor, if only because people with the stamina to make it up the stairs were more often able to hold their bodily excretions until they were inside an apartment.

On the roof, Ai found not only fresh air, or at least as fresh as the air in Gamma City got, and the tattooed woman waiting for her, the frown she’d been wearing the last time Ai say her still firmly in place.

“What are you doing here?” the woman asked.

“Investigating a murder,” Ai said. “Or do you mean right here, because that would be investigating a person of interest in regards to the murder investigation previously mentioned.”

“You’re not a cop,” the woman said.

“The uniform I’m wearing, the cruiser I rolled up to the scene in, and my sleeping partner would like to disagree with that assessment,” Ai said. “Well the first two would. Curtweather’s enough of an ass that he might say you were right just to tick me off.”

“You’re not just a cop,” the woman said.

“And you’re not just a bystander,” Ai said.

“What do you know about what happened today?” the woman asked.

“Any luck on who this is?” Ai asked.

“Nope, she’s not coming up in any of the standard ID databases,” Zai said. “That’s weird isn’t it?”

“Yes it is. And dangerous. We probably shouldn’t be here,” Ai said.

“I notice you’re not leaving,” Zai said.

“I’m noticing that too,” Ai said.

“Checking with your Personal Companion?” the woman asked, noting Ai’s delay in answering her initial question.

“Standard police procedure,” Ai said. “Since it’s coming up empty, is there a name I can use for you?”

“Harp,” the woman said. “Harp Thirteens.”

“Thank you Harp, I’m…” Ai started to say.

“Ai Greensmith, Cadet class Patrol Officer, joined the Gamma City Police Department six months ago,” Harp said.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” Ai said, impressed delight covering the deeper concern she felt to be facing someone with more than the typically pathetic levels of data retrieval skills the rest of her coworkers seemed to possess.

“Do I?” Harp asked. “What do you know about what happened today?”

“At this moment, I’m reasonably sure it’s less than you do,” Ai said. “It wasn’t an accident that you were near the highway when the NME attacked, was it?”

“No more than it’s an accident that you’re here, near the dead guy the NME was born from,” Harp said.

Ai’s mouth opened but words didn’t come out. Her lips gather and relaxed and twisted again. Still no sound.

“You really didn’t know that?” Harp asked. “Maybe I was wrong then.”

“I’m pretty sure at this point I’m supposed to arrest you,” Ai said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Harp said.

“Yeah, we both know that,” Ai said.

“You’re interfering with the eyes?” Harp asked.

“Yep, you’ve already left the roof as far as anyone outside who can see us is concerned,” Ai said.

“That’s not a safe thing to do,” Harp said. “Providing me with a perfect alibi like that.”

“Dual feed,” Ai said. “If I don’t give the confirm order, the real footage is placed into the archive instead of the empty loop.”

“That was smart,” Harp said. “Maybe I was right. You’re not just a cop are you?”

“Nobody’s just a cop,” Ai said. “At the moment for example, I’m effectively a private citizen.”

“Then you shouldn’t be up here,” Harp said.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure this is exactly where I need to be,” Ai said.

“You don’t want to be part of this,” Harp said. “It’s not for cops or for private citizens.”

“Do you know why I followed you?” Ai asked.

“Duty? Curiosity? Death wish?” Harp said. “Am I close.”

“Nope. Not on any of them,” Ai said. “Duty would compel me to leave the cameras on, my own and the others, curiosity would have gotten me killed already, and if I had a death wish there have been seven occasions where I could have made an easy ‘mistake’ and checked out.”

“Name one,” Harp said.

“March 16th,” Ai said.

“What’s on…” Harp said and paused, her data feed supplying the answer. “Joseph Greensmith’s funeral?”

“They let me carry one of the ceremonial rifles,” Ai said. “Which took standard 7.62 rounds.”

“How many would you have needed?” Harp asked.

“If I had a death wish? Just one. If I wanted to see justice done? I can’t carry that many,” Ai said.

“So you’re not crazy,” Harp said. “Still shouldn’t be up here.”

“Tell me what you meant by the NME being born from the dead guy down there,” Ai said.

“Sorry. Can’t. If you know, they’ll kill you,” Harp said.

“That’s going to happen regardless of whether or not you tell me,” Ai said. “I’m asking only to save some time. And because I have information you need.”

“Tell me then and leave.”

“Don’t think so. I’m not going to arrest you. We both know that would go badly for everyone involved, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to meet again. I think establishing a professional relationship now might save us a lot of time and headaches in the future.”

“A professional relationship?” Harp asked.

“Yes. Professionals trust each other, to a reasonable extent,” Ai said. “I’m offering something I believe you’ll value and asking for the same in return. If we trade honestly this time it’s one small stone to balance against our mutual need for security next time. Make enough trades, pile up enough stones, and we’ve got a history that we’re both invested in, which makes betrayal ever less appealing as time goes on.”

“What are you offering?” Harp asked.

“The reason I’m here, investigating this corpse,” Ai said. “And what the investigation is connected to. If you’re as ahead of me on the NMEs as I think you are, then you want to know the piece I’m holding.”

“Ok. We’ll try this. But when they kill you, it’s not my fault,” Hard said.

“Agreed.”

“The corpse made the NME’s, but not directly,” Harp said. “NMEs are not malfunctioning combat mods. They’re created by weaponized repair nanos, designed to overload a target’s onboard biotech enhancements.”

“Why would the corpse have a soldier mod like that?” Ai asked.

“They’re not soldier mods. Military grade tech is too shielded. The NME mods only work against civilian biotech,” Harp said.

“So the attacks are deliberate,” Ai said. It wasn’t a question. She’d suspect it to to be true since she began investigating the NMEs on her own.

“Most yes,” Harp said. “These were not. This was almost the start of a new Tech Plague. Something shut down the replication commands though. Somehow we were spared.”

“Oops, or yay, go me I guess?” Zai said.

As it turned out, Tython hadn’t asked for Officer Curtweather by name. They’d asked for “the same officers who were originally handling the case”.

“There’s an important distinction there?” Zai asked. “It’s still hard to tell when you humans are being indirect just to be coy, and when it’s because you actually lack the information to be clear about what you want.”

“In this case it’s meaningful,” Ai said. “Dispatch has a general policy against giving out the names of officers working on open criminal cases. In theory it’s for our protection but in practice it’s because they want a piece of any bribery that’s going to happen.”

“So Tython couldn’t know the same cops were on the two cases which means it’s just a coincidence that we were involved in two different investigations that relate to Tython today?” Zai asked.

“Officially we were requested to preserve the chain of witnesses,” Ai said. “In theory we’re more likely to notice if anything has been done to the body since we first observed the crime scene and we can present the most compelling case for the findings that are uncovered since we can provide the greatest degree of direct testimony.”

“And what’s the reason they actually want you on this?” Zai asked.

“Probably because it means fewer bribes will be required as hush money about whatever we find,” Ai said, “or they’re planning to kill us and with this approach they only need to pay for two kills, not four.”

“Should I be on the lookout for incoming assassins?” Zai asked.

“Pretty much always, but in this case I’m guessing we won’t have to start ducking bullets until the forensic folks determine cause of death and all the other fun stuff they put together,” Ai said.

“I love how the forensic reports always come up when we get within a half mile of the crime scene,” Curtweather said, indicating the new update that was pinging for attention on their data feed. “It’s almost like they don’t want us to know that they’re using automated drones for all their real work and never log a day in the field if they don’t have to.”

“Didn’t you shoot at least one of them?” Ai asked.

“It was only one, and he was a serial killer using his position to disguise his crimes,” Curtweather said.

“How much did you pay to make that story true?” Ai asked.

Curtweather didn’t dignify that with a response. The actual sum was low enough though that Ai suspected there was some measure of truth to Curtweather’s story.

The body hadn’t been moved since the last time Ai saw it. The simple tarp they’d hung over it was gone though. It was absent from the forensics report which meant the locals hadn’t waited long to scavenge it. No one had bothered the body because no one needed the kind of trouble that came from leaving identifiable evidence on a murder victim. One stray hair was all that was required for a conviction in some cases and lawyers that could argue successfully against physical evidence were more expensive than anyone who lived in the vicinity could afford.

“The official report lists cause of death as asphyxiation,” Curtweather said. “How did they ever get that out of this mess?”

“Cranial scan,” Ai said.

“Not much of a head left though is there?” Curweather asked.

“I’m trying not to think about that,” Ai said.

“For someone trying to avoid a gruesome spectacle, you sure are sending a lot of imagery out for processing,” Zai said.

“Sure, I want Tython to see they’re getting their money’s worth,” Ai said. “Also, if there’s some secret we’re supposed to be discovering I want to make sure we’re not the only ones who have access to it.”

“Isn’t that why most case files are secured while they’re open though? So that the guilty parties can’t hide evidence that hasn’t yet been discovered?” Zai asked.

“That’s one benefit,” Ai said. “The other is that it’s easier to bluff when your opponent isn’t sure what information you possess.”

“Then why give away what you’ve discovered?” Zai asked.

“For a rookie officer this would be self preservation,” Ai said. “Tython is too big a entity to try to extort. They can get away with erasing people who are inconvenient to them, even rookie beat cops. Erasing a whole precinct though? That’s a lot of red on the balance sheet to incur for a secret that you were sloppy enough to dump in an alley.”

“So it’s self-preservation for a rookie cop, what is it for you?” Zai asked.

“Tiny little traps,” Ai said. “We know Tython is involved in the standard array of illicit activities. The question is whether they’re far enough below board that it’s worth acquiring them.”

“How do pictures and additional forensics requests do that?” Zai asked.

“Tython is going to be watching what goes on here, but I need to know who in Tython is calling the shots. It’ll either be a middle manager looking to cover up a colossal blunder, which is honestly what I’m expecting, or it’ll be someone completely unimportant.”

“So the best you’re hoping to catch is an incompetent middle manager?” Zai asked.

“Nope, I’m looking for a ghost,” Ai said. “The ‘completely unimportant someone’? That’ll be a lie. It’ll be the mask someone with an ounce of sense uses to carry out the real work that Tython needs to have done for it. If someone like that is looking into this then we’ll know that it’s a thread that’s worth following further.”

“And if it’s a mask that looks like a bumbling manager?” Zai asked.

“Then we check back in on him in a couple of months,” Ai said. “If he still exists then we see if we can break his life a bit and see what comes pouring out. Nobody makes only one blunder and each one will cast shadows that other plans might be hiding in.”

“This is interesting,” Curtweather said. “According to the our forensic guy, the body was ejected by a sanitation truck.”

Ai looked around the street and noticed the lack of sorted trash bags on the curb.

“They have automated pick up here?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s odd isn’t it?” Curtweather said.

“How did an automated truck get a body in it?” Ai asked.

“Someone put it there,” Curtweather said, smirking like it was the observation of a genius.

“Can we get the logs from the truck?” Ai asked.

“Looks like we can not,” Curtweather said. “The thing’s running only basic collection processes. Monitors and recording gear failed three years ago but aren’t on the required accessory list for licensing so it’s been working without them ever since.”

“Odds that the killer didn’t know that?” Ai asked.

“Slim to none,” Curtweather said. “Given that he didn’t leave anything for the ID sniffers to identify him with though I think it’s a given we’re dealing a smart guy.”

“Everybody makes mistakes though right?” Ai said.

“Yeah,” Curtweather said. “Doesn’t mean it’s worth the effort of finding them, but it’s a nice theory to run with.”

Which was how most investigations went in Ai’s experience. Look for the easiest collection of facts that could be fit into a narrative, find or make some corroborating physical evidence and/or produce an eyewitness who’s been properly bought out and the case can sail through the court system. Just make sure not to indict anyone with either wealth or influence and there won’t be any meaningful push back.

On the one hand that made working within the system trivially easy so long as you acknowledged the unjust realities and took advantage of them. On the other hand that system had cost Ai both a father and a brother already, so merely destroying it wasn’t going to be enough. Destroying things was too easy.

Gamma City thought it could take whatever it wanted from her, but Gamma City wasn’t the all powerful megalopolis it was imagined to be. In the end Gamma City was nothing more than people. People who made mistakes like the pile of dead guy at Ai’s feet.

“Easiest thing is going to be to look into who this guy was,” Ai said. “Tython’s going to expect at least that much in the official report right?”

“That they will, and since you thought of it, you get to compile all the docs need to make them happy!” Curtweather said.

“I thought it was your sterling reputation they were looking for?” Ai said.

“I’m not saying you’ll sign your name to it,” Curtweather said. “You do the work, I get the credit, and we’re both happy, get it?”

“You know I’m going to a really half-assed job on this then don’t you?” Ai said.

“Oh I’ll be leaving your name on the copy that I hand in to the Captain,” Curtweather said, smiling at his own cleverness.

“I hate you, but I’m not going to lie, I’m going to steal that one myself someday,” Ai said. Encouraging her mentor to make himself look less competent in the eyes of their employer seemed a like a good career move in Ai’s view. That Curtweather hadn’t considered that spoke to how little he thought of himself as her mentor.

“Good, then steal this one too; all those requests you sent out mean the forensics team needs to do another pass, which means we have to set up an official cordone,” Curtweather said. He tossed her a roll of police tape. “Start stringing it up. I’ll be…taking notes.”

Taking notes with his eyes closed in the cruiser wasn’t precisely the same as napping but Ai couldn’t think of any method to distinguish between the two, including monitoring brainwave activity.

A few minutes without Curtweather’s company was an opportunity she wasn’t going to pass up though.

She had two sides of a large square around the body marked off with yellow police tape when Zai pinged a targeting reticle onto her vision.

“I don’t think that’s an assassin but she’s been watching us for a few minutes now and this doesn’t seem like the kind of neighborhood where people do that to cops,” Zai said.

Ai let the optics on her uniform shift her vision to focus on the target Zai had found. The woman was familiar. The last time Ai had seen her though, there’d been the small matter of a missing leg preventing Ai from focusing on her fully.

“Has she been watching me or Curtweather?” Ai asked.

“She keeps glancing back to you, but her attention is primarily focused on the corpse.” Zai said.

Ai felt like she should take offense at that, but being more common than a gruesomely mutilated body seemed like the kind of world she wanted to live in, so she let it pass.

By contrast though, Ai had a hard time keeping her attention off the woman who was spying on her. The tattoos the woman wore were precise and intricate to the point of being a sort of artistic circuit board that covered the parts of her body her rough leathers left visible. Initially, Ai had mistaken the metal bits protruding from the woman’s skin for elaborate piercings. With further observations they seemed more intrinsic than that.

Malfunctioning bits of biotech?

It was a possibility but an unlikely one. They didn’t appear to be random. There was a meaningful asymmetry to their layout and pattern.

“I think I want to talk to that one,” Ai said, her pulse quickening as their gazes met. “She’s not here by accident.”

“The last time we saw her there was an NME nearby,” Zai said. “Should we maybe call for backup? I mean, Curtweather’s expendable isn’t he?”

“I think I’d rather have a more private conversation in this case,” Ai said. “If she knows something about the NMEs and our pile of corpse here then our little chat will cover some things that the GCPD is better off not knowing.”

“I see only one problem with that,” Zai said. “She’s getting away.”

Ai looked up and found the window the woman had been spying on her from empty.

With a quick glance at the cruiser to confirm that Curtweather was napping, Ai was in motion. She’d missed one chance to question the woman already, she wasn’t going to miss another.a

It didn’t surprise Ai how quickly the major news feeds moved off the remains of the Tython building. The smoke from the building’s collapse obscured most of the interesting shots that were available and there was only so long people were interested in staring at a cloud of grey smoke, especially when the only fatalities were the thieves responsible for the fire in the first place.

“Officer Greensmith, I am to extend Tython’s formally gratitude for the preservation of our employees lives,” the woman Ai had spoken to before said.

“I will inform Officer Curtweather of that,” Ai said. “He was the one who negotiated with the hostage takers and who enacted the plan to trap them in the auto-copter.”

“And was it his intention to detonate the vehicle’s power supply?” the woman asked.

It was phrased as an idle curiosity, but nothing was ever simple when it came to official communications. An admission that the explosion was intentional would put Curtweather and the department in a legal grey area where they could also be deemed partially responsible for the building’s collapse. Even 1% of the building’s value would be enough to officially bankrupt the GCPD unit Ai was attached to, since its operating budget allowed for very little retention of profit. In reality the department’s ‘war chest’ was substantially deeper than what the official records showed by Captain James would not be happy if she had to dip into those funds to cover an avoidable situation, no matter how many lives were saved in the process.

“Our preliminary review of the auto-copter’s systems shows that the criminals attempted to rewire its controls when they discovered that they were locked in,” Ai said. “The preponderance of the evidence suggests it was their attempt to remove the lockouts which inadvertently caused the power supply to overload and detonate. Officer Curtweather planned to apprehend the criminals and take them in for questioning to see if they could be tied to any other open cases.”

The subtext of the message couldn’t have been more clear. The thieves were valuable to the GCPD because they could be interrogated, and if they’d managed to obtain any actual data from Tython then that data could be locked down as evidence. Tython would be free to appeal  that seizure but even for a big company, getting the evidence returned before someone made an illicit copy of it and sold that copy to one of Tython’s competitors was virtually impossible. Catching the thieves would have meant an extra pay day for every cop involved. In that sense, the GCPD had lost almost as much as Tython when the auto-copter exploded and the building crumbled.

“Tython thanks you for doing all that you could in that regards,” the woman said and cut the connection.

Ai wondered about the fate of the people she saved. The odds were decent that none of them would be employed by the end of the day. Apart from their place of business having been demolished, Tython wasn’t likely to take the risk of retaining an employee who might have been part of the robbery attempt.

There wasn’t any evidence to point to the botched theft as an inside job. In fact almost every sign pointed to the thieves having nothing more than a working knowledge of basic fire suppression systems and the luck of assaulting a building whose primary security server had been experiencing intermittent glitches for several weeks (glitches which Ai had carefully orchestrated through multiple levels of indirection).

A new system was on order but was weeks away from delivery. Far enough that the timing wasn’t particularly coincidental, and far enough that Tython could cancel the order without payment or penalty clauses.

“Zai, do we have enough liquid assets to set up a few short term data shuffling contracts?” Ai asked, imagining a few areas of information she wanted to obscure; minor resource accumulators that needed a bit of laundering before the money could be transferred to more useful general accounts.

“You want to create some jobs for the Tython workers we just put out of work?” Zai asked.

“Their old bosses were willing to let them fry,” Ai said. “A little financial kindness on our part and they might be willing to divulge all sorts of seemingly harmless data about Tython for us.”

“Can I use the Heartless accounts for this?” Zai asked.

“Yes. This is exactly what those are for,” Ai said.

“Isn’t there a risk that someone will connect Heartless to this job if we do that though?” Zai asked.

“I can guarantee you someone will make the connection,” Ai said. “I’m curious if Tython will be among that number. It would tell me a lot if they started sniffing around for Heartless after this.”

“What if they move on their former employees?” Zai asked.

“Then I’ll get to learn even more,” Ai said.

“You know Greensmith, I think the bonus from rescuing the hostages almost covers the fine for wrecking our cruiser,” Curtweather said. “I’m glad I thought of it.”

“Partner’s split things fifty-fifty, don’t they?” Ai asked.

“What kind of fantasy land are you living in?” Curtweather asked.

“The one where Tython just tried to weasel a confession out of me that we’re blew up their building intentionally,” Ai said.

“Eighty-twenty,” Curthweather said.

“Sixty-forty gets me singing your praises to the Captain,” Ai said.

“Fine, sixty-forty,” Curtweather said, “after our debriefing.”

Ai turned to watch the city rolling by as their cruiser drove them back to the station for her second debriefing with the captain in one day.

“Are you attracting a little too much attention as Officer Greensmith?” Zai asked. “I thought the point was to keep a low profile because everyone overlooked minor beat cops?”

“You’re not wrong,” Ai said. “Too many coincidences will put us all over the wrong people’s radar. Being too bland isn’t good either though. ‘She’s a typical cop, nothing exceptional, no special notes or cases’ looks highly suspicious under the right microscope. These two incidents look like the kind of ‘attention getting events’ that someone trying to maintain a fake identity would avoid at all costs.”

“And yet, you’re embracing them,” Zai said.

“Never be what people expect you to be,” Ai said. “But be ready to take advantage of their preconceptions.”

“People don’t really know that I exist, so I don’t think they have either expectations or preconceptions,” Zai said.

“Sure they do. You’re an all powerful entity of virtual space, able to think a billion times faster than the smartest human, with plans that extend to cover every conceivable eventuality.”

“So, I’m a god?”

“If you’re ever discovered? Yeah, some people will mistake you for that,” Ai said.

“Sounds like a nice deal,” Zai said.

“Not so much,” Ai said. “On the one hand you’ll find all the people who expect you to really be that and hate you for not being able to live up to it, and on the other hand you’ll have all the people who are terrified that you are a net-god and will try to destroy you while there’s still time.”

“But if I have ‘plans for every eventuality’ wouldn’t I have plans for that too?” Zai asked.

“First rule of humans; we’re not even vaguely as rational as we pretend to be,” Ai said.

“Present company excluded right?”

“Nope. The moment I start thinking I’m saner than the rest of my species is the moment I stop watching for all the stupid holes in my plans, and the moment I stop listening to you.”

“You don’t listen to me a lot of the time,” Zai said.

“Not true. I always listen to you, I just don’t always agree with you.”

“Despite the fact that I’m an all-powerful virtual entity?”

“Tell you what, when you finish upgrading yourself to where you’re all powerful, your first test can be to convince me of that fact. That’ll let us both know where we’re at.”

“So, the godly version of the Turing Test?” Zai asked.

“Pretty much,” Ai said. “But while you’re working on your omnipotence, how about we check in on our team?”

“They’re safely stowed in the fire truck that I commandeered,” Zai said.

“Any injuries?” Ai asked.

“Do broken bones count?” Zai asked.

“Generally,,” Ai said.

“Then yes, many injuries,” Zai said. “No fatalities though. And no detached limbs.”

“That puts them ahead of me today then. How difficult was extracting them from the vault?”

“We had a bit of luck there,” Zai said. “The vault the fire suppression bots were stored in survived the fall intact and shielded our team from the worst of the flames until the GCFD firebots could extract them.”

“And the monitoring systems?” Ai asked.

“Our truck and fire crew’s feed was edited live. The other feeds in the area didn’t even require that. With all of the smoke, none of them had enough visibility to see that we were extracting live bodies from the wreckage.”

“Can we explain the lack of the fire suppression bots?”

“I altered the log on the vault door to show that they exited prior to fall. With the heat and pressure from the collapse, finding identifiable parts for the bots would be difficult for a determined investigation.”

“The auto-copter’s detonation will have left some macroscopic chunks of the firebots strewn around the site. See if you can collect those so it looks like they were crushed in the fall rather that blasted apart before it went down.”

“How did you know Sidewalker would go along with your plan? I don’t recall you going over a contingency like that?” Zai asked.

“We didn’t,” Ai said. “We did go over the durability of the vaults, and had a few plans in place where they would impersonate the fire bots. It wasn’t a big leap for them to see I wanted the reverse to be true and have the bots impersonate them.”

“But what if they’d missed that and tried to take the auto-copter as their escape route?” Zai asked.

“Then they would have been arrested and taken into custody,” Ai said. “Which was still better than the alternative and we would have gotten access to the data they had anyways.”

“I’m surprised they trusted us to come through for them.” Zai said.

“I suspect the broken bones helped there,” Ai said. “Without that they may have been inclined to flee on their own and try to raise the rates for completing our deal.”

“So you planned for the fall to cripple them?” Zai asked.

“It was a somewhat likely possible outcome, if they did get away on their own though we could have negotiated with them, they deserve a bonus for enduring all that,” Ai said.

“Looks like our celebratory debriefing by the good Captain James is going to have to wait,” Curtweather said, gesturing towards the dashboard on their cruiser.

A new route from Dispatch had been loaded into their navigation system and new orders were scrolling across Ai’s priority channel.

“They’re sending us back to the murder victim? I thought you said the block council wouldn’t drop the coin for an investigation?” Ai asked.

“Look at the order tags,” Curtweather said. “This isn’t going on the block council’s tab.”

Ai called up the details for the investigation.

“It’s billable to Tython? How does that make any sense?” Zai asked.

Ai read the details, the pieces of the new order assembling into a disturbing whole.

“They identified the body,” Ai said. “He worked for Gaussmat Systems though. Why is Tython paying for this, and why did they ask for you specifically?”

“Obviously because I did such a good job with their last problem,” Curtweather said. “Also I have a sterling reputation.”

“Isn’t sterling silverware the cheap stuff?” Ai asked.

“Yes, my rates are quite affordable,” Curtweather said, not rising to the bait.

Ai could see the worry in his eyes. Small time operators like Curtweather existed on a layer where the privilege they carried shielded them from the consequences of their actions. Dealing with a company like Tython meant being part of a bigger score if things turned out well, but the added danger far outweighed the extra compensation.

If Tython was interested in a random murder victim, it suggested his death was anything but random, and perhaps also explained why they were so touchy about letting information out of a seemingly unimportant data center.

Ai felt the floor dropping out from under her, but that only sent an arc of adrenaline through her veins. Tython was bigger than Curtweather, but they were exactly the kind of fish she was looking to fry. If that meant swimming in the deep waters, then so be it.

The hostage takers message was surprisingly simple when Ai listened to it.

“Boss, I think we may have made a small mistake,” their leader said. “It’s nothing major but I think we need some help here. Could you maybe send someone to get us out?”

“They sound like complete idiots,” Curtweather said.

“If we were dealing with the most brilliant criminals alive would they be stuck in a burning building whose most valuable assets are probably melting as we speak?” Ai asked.

“Don’t get cute,” Curtweather said. “The only thing we’ve got to look for now is whether they’re boss is as stupid as they are.”

“That is an interesting question,” Zai asked. “Sidewalker wouldn’t have made that broadcast if things were going according to plan.”

“There wouldn’t be hostages in danger in things were going according to plan,” Ai said.

“Safe bet that they can’t think of a method of escape?” Zai asked.

“Yeah, that’s where the smart money’s sitting,” Ai said. “Kind of reassuring that they think we can do something about it.”

“That might just be desperation,” Zai said. “As far as they know, you’re not paying attention to this. It was supposed to be a trivial job after all.”

“None of us believed that,” Ai said. “It was just convenient to talk about it in those terms, especially given the money we were offering them.”

“You humans do this thing with language where you just don’t,” Zai said.

“Don’t what?” Ai asked.

“Don’t language,” Zai said. “ It’s not a matter of communicating. You can understand each other, somehow, you just throw out all the recognizable rules for how you’re conveying information to one another. You don’t language. There are perfectly good words to use to convey the concepts you need to get across to one another and by some mystical or insane process you decide, collectively it seems, not to use them. In fact most of the time you instead pick the opposite words. Only you don’t say them any differently than you would if you actually meant them. And then you wonder why we mechanical intelligences have a high tendency to go catastrophically irregular.”

“To be fair, we human tend to drive each other nuts too, but take heart, you’ve been with me so long now that you’re probably already ‘catastrophically irregular’ and it doesn’t seem to be hindering you much at all.” Ai said as she scanned over the schematics for the building.

Several of her plans and contingencies were literally going up in smoke but she wasn’t surprised. Any concept that starts with “and we’ll light things on fire” has no business assuming that events will occur in a logical and orderly fashion.

“So can we use that?”  Zai asked. “Can you work some ‘human magic’ and communicate with them without the probes figuring out what you’re really saying?”

“Given that humans will be reviewing the recordings? That would be impossible,” Ai said. “There will be a pretty thorough review of the transcripts of all communication in or out of the building.”

“So, they’re dead then?” Zai asked.

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Ai said.

She turned to Curtweather as the heat from the flames gusted hotter.

“I think I’ve got an idea that can save the hostages and protect Tython’s data integrity,” she said. “You’re the commanding officer though so it’s your call if we want to collect the apprehension bonus on these guys.”

“You’re trying to sing my song to exert undue influence over me,” Curtweather said. “I can see that, but you know what, I’m going to take that as a good sign. That’s how you get ahead in this city. Now what kind of brain spark have you had?”

“Well, I think it’s a simple one,” Ai said.

“That’s a good start,” Curtweather said. “These people seem like simple is all they can handle.”

“Right,” Ai said. “I mean, they just broadcast on an open channel. So we know they’re connected to the local feeds. We can use that to send information back to them.”

“And what would we want to talk to them about?” Curtweather said.

“An offer to get them out of there,” Ai said.

“Tython’s gonna shoot that down in a heartbeat,” Curthweather said.

“Not if we don’t actually let them leave the premises,” Ai said. “The only escape route is via the roof right? So what if we have some auto-copters fly in. We send in enough to transport the thieves – you know they have to be stealing something right? – and the hostages. Thieves go in the first copter and we lock it down so they can’t get out. Then we just fly the hostages out.”

“What if the thieves want to go with the hostages?” Curtweather asked.

“We tell them we’re sending in an auto-copter for them and that once they’re gone, the GCFD will be onscene to contain the blaze since it won’t be an active combat zone anymore. If they were ok with taking hostages, they’ll be ok with leaving them behind in the fire.”

“And if they’re not?” Curtweather asked.

“Then they’re other options is to roast or be crushed when the building falls apart. Tython’s data is safe in either case, and this at least gives us a chance to get the hostages out.”

“I like it,” Curtweather said. “If they cook in there we’ll have done everything we could to prevent it and if we bag them then I get the high quality soy-steak tonight.”

“Sidewalker might have a problem with being locked in an auto-copter,” Zai said.

“Yeah, they’re not going anywhere near that auto-copter,” Ai said. “Can you suborn one of Tython’s probes?”

“The question you should ask is ‘have you already suborned one of Tython’s data probes’ because the answer is ‘yes, of course I have’,” Zai said. “What kind of message do you want me to send to Sidewalker?”

“Nothing direct,” Ai said. “Just let one of the Fire Suppression bots on the top floor power up. Make it look like the control overrides partially slipped and that the wake-up message got through but not the full activation code.”

“And this is going to tell Sidewalker something?” Zai asked.

“Yeah, he’ll figure it out,” Ai said.

“Weren’t you just saying he wasn’t the brightest of criminals?” Zai asked.

“That was misdirection,” Ai said. “And, to be completely honest, frustration that the plan hit as big a snag as this. Really though, the show he’s putting on has a certain genius to it.”

“What show?” Zai asked.

“Our team looks like bumbling idiots. No one is going to be surprised when this turns out horribly for them.”

“And that plan would be different than actually being bumbling idiots how?” Zai asked.

“Something clearly went wrong with the original plan,” Ai said. “Probably relating to the building personnel. They were supposed to flee the building when the fire first broke out. That they’re still in there says they didn’t make the sane and reasonable choice. Maybe they tried to fight the fire, maybe they were afraid of losing their vacation days, who knows. For whatever reason they gummed up the works and, our team, being thieves but not murderers, decided to take them hostage rather than let them fry.”

“So they’re not malicious towards their fellow humans, but I’m not seeing the genius here,” Zai said.

“They’ve maintained the facade that they broke in for a lark and things got incredibly out of hand,” Ai said. “That’s a story that’s believable to an extent. That they asked for help on an open channel fits with the overall narrative, but it also provided us with confirmation that we could get information to them.”

“That’s useful but still not the height of brilliance.”

“True, but they also opened the vault door where the fire suppression bots are kept,” Ai said, checking the structural scans of the building again.

“And then didn’t activate the bots.” Understanding echoed in Zai’s voice. “They wanted us to know about that when we checked the building schematics out.”

“Yeah, or at least they’re accounting for us being able to check the building sensors.”

“So you had me turn a bot on to signal them that we know they’re in there.”

“More than that. Those bots are their ticket to freedom,” Ai said.

“This might work Greensmith,” Curtweather said. “I’ve got three auto-copters inbound and the thieves are taking the bait.”

“We might want to make them prove that the hostages are ok,” Ai said. “Have them line the Tython personnel up against the windows so we can see them while the thieves are leaving and we know they won’t try to take any with them.”

“That works,” Curtweather said. “It’s not like they can really refuse, the floor below them just went up. Sound of that glass breaking has gotta have them freaked out.”

“It’d freak me the hell out,” Ai said.

The air cutting whumps of the first auto-copter rose over the crackling of the flames and the excited bustle of the crowd that had gathered.

The Tython building was a ten story tall structure so the view from the ground was limited. Anyone with the money to access the local video and drone feeds though was able to see the building from almost any angle or elevation they desired.

Ai flipped open a screen showing the rooftop of the building, choosing a camera that was mounted far enough away to provide a view of both the roof and the last floor that wasn’t engulfed in flames.

Even with the active fire suppression disabled, there were plenty of passive features of the building, from the materials it was constructed from to the failure modes designed into its plumbing, that worked to keep the flames at bay and buy time for the fire crews to do their job.

With the building first a “suspected combat zone” and then a declared one though, no fire department response was allowed in the vicinity. The cost of combat insurance on top of fire fighting insurance was deemed economically unfeasible for all but the wealthiest of communities.

That made Ai’s job so much easier.

“Copter’s touched down, and they’re moving to the roof,” Curtweather said. “This is gonna be a good one. Wish they didn’t have those full body suits on so I could see the look on their faces.”

Curtweather was beaming with anticipation, and was well rewarded as the thieves climbed on board the waiting auto-copter without a moment’s hesitation.

That their suits were ill-fitting didn’t seem terribly surprising. They were low grade tactical  armor, the kind that weekend warriors who were more interested in beers and bragging would invest in.

Neither their armor nor the weapons offered much help though when the rotors on the auto-copter lost power and the doors were locked down.

Less than a minute later, two additional auto-copters landed on the roof and the hostages flooded up the stairs from the floor below and dove into the aircraft for safety.

As the two actual rescue copters sped away, the ‘detention copter’ started to power up too.

“Where are you going to bring them down?” Ai asked Curtweather.

“That’s not me,” he said. “I didn’t authorize their copter to leave yet.”

“Looks like it’s leaving to me,” Ai said.

“Looks like it’s not,” Curthweather corrected her.

On the top of the building, the copter with the thieves in it was powering up its main rotor, but the blades were only turning in fits and starts.

“They’re trying to override the lockdown brakes!” Ai said.

“Not doing a good job of it either,” Curthweather said.

From the ground Ai couldn’t quite hear the whine of the copters HyperCore Systems batteries overloading, for that she needed an audio feed closer to the roof. She was able to hear the sound of the copter exploding though as its fully charged power source passed beyond the critical stage and detonated.

The fireball that erupted from the roof was the last straw for the data center and Ai watched as it slowly collapsed, floor by floor and settled into a blazing heap.

“Nice when things go as planned,” she said to Zai. “Now can you commandeer one of the GCFD auto-trucks. We’ll need it for the next bit.”