THE SURFACE—TAMPICO DISPUTED TERRITORY
NUGGET CASINO
Anselmo needed a smoking gun.
Rubi Whiting had told her sidekick about metaphor imaging at Sapience Assessment. A strict reading of her transcripts showed her just north of all her NDAs, but the hint she had given Crane—the coy trick with the Christmas trees—had worked. Unusual activity on her Sensorium account had been petering out for days, bit by bit, twinkle by twinkle.
The fade was subtle. Malika Amiree, in Tech, wouldn’t even agree with Anselmo that it existed. The only reason she was still supporting him was venned career frustration: she, like him, had been sidelined from the real action, the Luce case, by @GlobalSec coders.
If they could prove the Crane entity was sapient, the two of them could arrest Rubi for making the tip-off—for knowingly enabling an emergent sapient.
One problem remained: Crane had been failing ever-more-sophisticated sentience audits for decades. It was a delightfully well-programmed conversationalist, but it didn’t parse nuance.
All Anselmo had left was the tip from Allure Noonstar, about alleged ties between AIs and the implant-intolerant population.
Running with that, he had audited the shop run by the woman he met on the beach, Sparka Goldfish. She lived within a community of similar rejects, working out of the @ManicPixie spa located in the old Nugget Casino.
He had hoped to catch Rubi, preferably midway through some incriminating act, before she left the casino. But Juanita from @GlobalSec had chased her straight into the arms of the mob.
What had brought Rubi to the Nugget?
Prowling the ill-lit blackjack tables and slot machines with a case of old-world tools, Anselmo ripped plates off antique gaming devices, inventorying hardware, uploading specs and serial numbers to Malika. The building was full of connectible oddities, antiques with pocky firewalls: odds-calculating game managers, chip dispensers, canapé printers.
Why would Rubi play there? The circus stage held no answers. Nor did the roulette wheel.
Allure tooned in, her monochrome ghost dressed in a tailored suit. “Shall I throw you a rope, Agent Javier?”
“Don’t do me any favors,” he snarled.
She paced to the Sensorium pod Frankie had escaped from, throwing a meaningful glance at the scattered pieces of the girl’s gaming baton on the floor.
Anselmo bent, scooping up the pieces and finally locating its chip. Fumbling with the toolkit, he reconstructed its helix, coaxing the baton online.
“Bit of hash there…” Malika said, sharing metaphors for the raw datastream. “Movement discrepancies. The little girl’s RFID vanished into a wall.”
“A jammed room?”
“Old-school casinos were full of them. The better to spy on the marks.”
Anselmo mapped the RFID pings to a mirrored panel, exploring its edges manually until it popped a latch. Beyond it and up a staircase, a glass-walled room overlooked the stage. It bore signs of a recent, violent search: objects tossed around, boxes flung open. Near the rear, watching Anselmo, was a mannequin. His face, in profile, was familiar. Vintage #celebrity, he supposed.
At the mannequin’s feet was an opened first aid kit and a bloodied wad of smartcotton.
“Where are you?”
Malika’s voice was distant. It was coming, Anselmo realized, from speakers within the casino itself, rather than directly to his implants.
“Agent Javier, report!”
There was a sound of metal tracks—the hidden door, gliding shut. Malika’s voice cut off. Allure vanished.
All his data inputs showed red lights.
Anselmo’s flesh crawled. Was he alone? Truly?
Stay on track. Could Rubi have disclosed confidential information to Crane, here, about Sapience Assessment?
The timeline didn’t fit.
Anselmo could say she had, though, couldn’t he? Going off-record was shocking. People might believe her capable of anything.
All well and good, but where’s the evidence? He opened a door, finding a storage room full of magician’s equipment: mirrored cabinet and a stained water-tank, with a collection of rusty shackles.
He returned to the mannequin, sliding a finger under its blown orange hair, examining the neck. There were screws there, shiny and well oiled. New? They surrendered to the wrench immediately, and soon the head had come off in his hands.
Now a probe, long stainless steel, nearly an icepick. The simulacrum’s flesh was a plastic substance, strangely like a corpse, cool to the touch. Anselmo checked the mouth and throat for speakers. Nothing.
Its eyes had shutters: you could morse with the thing if you had to.
But what controlled the shutters? He found a filament in the base of the skull, no thicker than the reddish hair of the wig—perhaps deliberately designed to look like one. The wire had snapped when he had taken the head off. The other end ran down the spine.
He ripped open the suit, revealing foam, molded pectorals, nipples, pot belly with a carefully dimpled navel. The scalpel came out of the toolkit. A fast Y incision, first, sent foam flying. The wood infrastructure—real wood, Anselmo thought—proved he was cutting into a bona-fide antique.
Within the panels of its thorax, where a lung would be, he found a state-of-the-art processor.
Nothing vintage about this: it was new and devoid of maker’s marks, a breach of law in its own right. Anselmo tripped its power supply, found a greenlight, and followed the prompts into a simple simulation of a generic lounge with no connections to Sensorium.
A heavy-duty processor, then. Digital shell for a cybernetic hermit crab. Not so different from the virtual cell Pox had escaped.
Anselmo’s heart pounded. At last, a real crumb!
He surfaced and peeled the box out of its casing, using the tips of his fingers. Sliding it into a plastic evidence bag, he sealed and timestamped it before tucking it into his worldly.
When he stepped out of the secret room, Allure was waiting.
“Someone installed a server in that dummy,” he said. “Build records will be in Haystack.”
“Not if the technician didn’t have a camera,” she subbed.
Ah. Intolerants again.
“Of course, if you don’t want to persecute a bunch of rejects…”
“Anselmo!” Malika interrupted. “Where did you go?”
Anselmo held the bagged server up to a wall cam. “This is why Whiting came here. To talk to the Singularity.”
“Beyond!” Amiree’s henna markings mojied surprise and delight. “We are going to be legends, do you know that?”
“Half a legend each, if we split the credit,” he said.
“Can you have a grab-and-go fly the server to a lab?”
Anselmo had already requisitioned a car, moving into Sensorium so he could port to the @Interpol office. He began issuing requests. Arrange tech analysis. Trace the waxworks figure.
The question triggered a flare of memory. There had been talk of waxworks in London, hadn’t there? Yes, there it was, in the transcript: Frances Barnes had received a tourism tip from one of the apps.
“I need a search warrant for the Waxworks Reconstruction Shop.”
His request went into a long queue—police were actively taking gigs again, but almost everyone was tasked to crowd control.
Another connection lit up on his whiteboard: there was an implant-intolerant shop in Fort McMurray whose system logs had been hashing, apparently by accident, since around the time arsonist #trolls attacked the town.
A ping from Tampico @Interpol: “You have been offered Provisional Case Manager status.” Greenlights approved six auditors. A real team! New ribbon for his career board.
Could he demote Malika and request a more specialized tech? Rationalize that he needed someone local, maybe? Do unto her as had been done unto him?
He put out the gig request, brooming Malika without a second thought.
Allure’s toon eased into a chair, the same one Rubi had occupied there, weeks earlier when he’d taken her to review the truck footage.
His informant smiled, exploring the crease in her pressed slacks as if it were a new discovery. “Now, then. Now that you’re back on the scoreboard. What might you do for me?”