There are some definite advantages to having a significant other who happens to be a detective.  For example, only one of us is technically allowed to have a gun.  Then there are those times when your partner is pissed off and you remember that only one of you is allowed to have a gun. 

“So instead of getting the hell out of there, you…brilliant you, decided to take a closer look at the maniacal machine-man, and then you WONDER why I’m mad?”

I was not really in a position to disagree.  On the way over to Myke’s place I realized only too late that I had reopened a wound from my tangle with Chuckles and bled all over Myke’s carpet.  I needed stitches, and at that moment she had a needle in my arm.  “I don’t want to be ungrateful Myke, but could we have the overly dramatic portion of this conversation after you’re done with the sharp objects?” 

It’s bad enough when someone angry with you has a needle in your arm.  I hadn’t given any thought to an angry person working with a needle in your arm just leaving it there, and staring at you in awkward silence.  “Bad timing?”  I asked. 

“Ya think?”, she closed the wound and moved to the kitchen, and took two glasses from the cabinet.  “The only reason we’re not going to continue this argument is because you got my attention with what happened to your friend.”  She poured two glasses of red wine, returned to the couch, and handed me one.  “He was talking to you and swearing he wasn’t in control before he power-cycled, and then—?

“Then he went even more nuts,” I said.  “But it’s weird.  It wasn’t him when he came back online.  Pointer said his personality was wiped or something.”  

“Yeah, that’s why it got my attention.  I can’t say a whole lot, but there’s an open investigation.” Myke sipped her wine. “However, I’ve heard enough of your story to tell you that it has some similarities to some other incidents.”  

I was about to ask what those similarities were, but Myke cut me off at the pass “No K, can’t go there.  Not sure I was supposed to say even that much.”  I wanted to plead my case, but Myke gave me that one look that I knew was the final word in any argument.  Myke crossed her legs on the sofa, took another sip of her wine, and then cocked her head to one side.  “Hey, I have the wine.  What’s for dinner?”  I blinked.  “I beg your pardon?” 

“So you didn’t bring dinner?”

“Technically, no.  I ordered some takeout?”

“Oh, ok.  Will it be here soon?”  

“Let me check with Pointer.” 

“I translate that as “Let me get Pointer to order the dinner I forgot to order.” 

I shot her a surprised look and excused myself to go to the bathroom.  Closing the door, I tapped the silent trigger on my wrist that signaled Pointer.  “Boss!” 

“Pointer, are you aware that I tapped the silent button to get you?”

“Yup.  Which means you don’t want Myke to know you’re talking to me.”

“What part of silence were you not getting?”

Just then there was a knock on the bathroom door.  “Hi, Pointer.  Would you make sure I get beef fried rice and not shrimp?”

“Sure, Myke,” Pointer said.   I opened the door to the bathroom to see Myke’s face smiling sweetly back at me.  “Do the two of you just plot against me all the time or is this—“

“No,” Myke said.  “Every day.” Pointer said.  

“Great.”  I threw up my hands.  

—-

Dinner was a welcome respite.  I said my goodbyes to Myke and headed for the elevator.   One of the advantages of having a girlfriend who lives in the same building is that you don’t have far to stumble.  Plus, there’s always a neutral corner if a retreat is in order.  That’s probably why we’ve managed to keep it going for as long as we have because even I know I’m best taken in small doses.  I don’t know if this is a related point, but an advantage I thought I had living in an apartment building was the code they gave me when I signed the lease.  I thought that code meant that they wouldn’t let just any old case of meat in the door, but when I entered my apartment I was introduced to a huge pair of arms that latched onto my head and urged me towards the couch.  The arms pushed me down and left.  I looked up and was about to tell someone I was headed to the couch anyway when I realized that there was a second pair of arms in that room, and those were attached to the last person I ever needed to see. 

“Pockets, what the hell?” I yelled.  

“Rollins, the general idea of leaving The Dregs is to not go BACK there.” Pockets moved over to the other side of the couch.  “Especially when you get the welcoming committee you received.” 

“Because your welcoming committee was so much better up here,” I said.  “Tell your buddy his deodorant isn’t cutting it.  Why are you here?”

Pockets shot me a look that was as serious as I’ve ever seen him.  “I’m here to tell you that what you ran up against is a little deeper than you think. It’s not a glitch.” 

“Not a glitch? Damn sure looked like a glitch to me.”  

“I know,” Pockets sighed.  “This is as close to an epidemic as I’ve ever seen in the Dregs, and yet it’s only affecting a portion of the augmented population.  It’s a sizable chunk, though.  The common link appears to be MEMBRAIN.  Every one of them has it.”

“Hang on,” I said, a little confused. “Every one of them?  Every one of whom?”

“Everyone dead, Rollins.”  Pockets said.  “A cubic assload of dead augments.” 

“They all have MEMBRAIN?”  That gave me some pause for a couple of reasons.  MEMBRAIN is a port that is installed behind the right ear that connects to hardware memory inside your brain case.  It’s connected to the part of the brain that visualizes things like memories, and it self-manages.  The port is for memory extraction so they can be analyzed.  Useful in some lines of work, like mine.  You never know when you have to prove where you were, and that was the second reason it worried me: I had MEMBRAIN installed a little more than a decade ago.  It’s an older version, but I never felt like I needed to upgrade as long as it did the job.  Always seemed like way too much fuss, and while I’ve never regretted getting MEMBRAIN, I don’t want anyone messing around with my brain bucket any more than necessary.  

“So let’s start at the center and work our way out.  I have a MEMBRAIN.  Should I be worried?”

Pockets rolled his eyes.  “No, center of your universe, as long as you don’t move back to the Dregs and take candy from strangers, you should be—“

I interrupted him, “Candy from strangers?  What the hell does that mean?”  Pockets smiled, lifted his hands to my eye level, and pulled out a small vischip from an unseen pocket in his wrist.  He did come by his name honestly.  Pockets was a courier of highly sought-after items.  We work together quite often, as I find things and employ his services on occasion to get them somewhere.  Sometimes those clients—and those items—demand a certain amount of privacy.  We’re a good team.  We don’t necessarily like each other, but business is business.  “I’m just gonna leave this here,” he said.  Turning to leave, he stopped at the door.  “I’m not the type to be sentimental, Rollins.  This could be very bad.  You’ll see.  Please try not to get yourself bricked.”

I waited for Pockets to leave, and then went into my little office area.  “Pointer, put up a screen right here.”   A flat holographic screen image popped into view in front of me.  I looked at the vischip for a moment and having determined everything appeared normal, I touched the chip to the screen.  

The screen flashed to life.  It showed a large man strapped to a gurney in some sort of stark medical environment. The camera was being held by hand, and the shooter walked up to the subject and centered on their face.  A metal hand came into view from the other side of the subject’s face and yanked it to the side to reveal the MEMBRAIN port.  Another hand, slender with painted nails, inserted a device into the port and waited 15 seconds before removing it.  The metal hand restraining the face released, allowing the face to re-center to the camera.  It didn’t take long before the subject started trembling, which increased to shaking and then convulsing.  After what I figured was about a minute, the subject stopped and went limp.  The camera pulled back to a full-body view, the subject still strapped to the gurney.  After another minute, the subject jerked back into life, and in one violent movement all but shredded their arm restraints.  Sitting up on the gurney, the subject was attempting to remove the restraints from their legs before the owner of the large metal hand came back into view.  Placing a hand on the subject’s forehead, he screamed in pain before going limp again and tipping over the gurney, his head hitting the floor with the kind of sickening thud that told you that he was no longer metabolizing.  The video flicked off.  

I sat there in silence, trying to process what I had seen.  “Pointer?”

“I don’t know what to say, Rollins.”

I walked over to my fridge and pulled another Neo-Coke out.  “Yeah.” I took a long swig and thought for a second.  “I thought MEMBRAIN was for extraction only.  Can you find anything that says it’s ever been used for input?”  

“I’ve never known it to be, but I’ll go digging.” 

I looked out the window to the neon-colored panorama below.  “That’s disturbing on several levels, P.”  

“I can think of a couple, yeah,”  Pointer replied, and yet I don’t think he knew what I was thinking.  The sheer number of people that could be a victim of this could be massive, almost incalculable.  Even a fraction of that number could be devastating.  But how did it work, and more importantly, what exactly was it?  

To find that answer, I might have to go home again. 

I can’t be sure about it, but it must have been around the time that the cyborg put me through the third wall that I began to wonder if I’d made some bad life choices. 

“I think the point is not to let him do that,” the voice on the other end of my comm said sarcastically. 

“You’re just a font of fuckin’ wisdom today,” I said. “Can you find me an exit, please?” 

I picked myself up out of the pile of rubble.   It would have been easier to list the places that didn’t hurt.  Looking around, I didn’t see the cyborg anywhere.  “Pointer, I need to get out of here before—“ I was interrupted by a sudden need to duck as this swinging massive metal fist barely missed my head.  I needed to put as much space between this hunk of junk and me as possible.  “Hey man,” the cyborg yelled, “THIS AIN’T ME!”  

Could have fooled me, I thought.   Every time I have to come down here to the Dregs, I get beat up, shot up, or screwed up.  You’d think I’d learn, but a job is a job and this one was going to pay.  I was just about there before my friend Chuckles showed up.  I stopped running and turned around.  Sure enough, he wasn’t chasing me.  It seemed like he was having a problem.   “I don’t know what’s happening right now,” he paused and convulsed like he was about to throw up, “but something’s wrong.”   Then, and this was the damndest thing I’ve ever seen, he just stopped.  Still as a statue, glassy-eyed and unblinking, just….stopped.  

“Boss, I’ve got your exit lined up,” Pointer said.  

“Yeah, I…” I was slowly edging closer to this statue in front of me, fascinated.  “Boss?” Pointer was getting nervous on the other end.  “Hey, I don’t want to rush you, but you did ask for—“ I cut him off “I know, Pointer, I know.  It’s just…this cyborg just friggin’ stopped in front of me and he’s not even blinking.”  

“Boss, you need to get out of there. Now.” Pointer was insistent.  “He’s a piece of tech.  What do you do with a piece of tech that’s glitching?” 

I was right up in front of the cyborg at this point, waving my hand in front of his face.  “I toss it in the garbage, and right now I’m wondering how it’s op…er…ating?”  As I moved almost nose to nose with the Cyborg, it blinked, then blinked again, and the half of his face that was still human twisted into an evil grin.  “Reboot complete.” He said.  

“Oh, crap.”  I turned to run, but he had other ideas and tripped me up before I could get going.    I ate a face full of concrete.  He was on top of me before I could get back up.  He reared back with his large metal fist, I closed my eyes and tensed up waiting for the impact.  I heard the distinct sounds of servos shutting down, a powering off, and the full weight of this beast just fell right on top of me.  “Well,” I said.  “Did you do that?” I asked Pointer. 

“Do what?”, he replied.  “Ok, I guess that means no.”  I dragged myself out from under Chuckles and got back to my feet.  “Every time.  Every damn time.”   I looked back down at Chuckles, who just appeared to be asleep this time.  “I think he’s just taking a nap,” I told Pointer.  “Route me out of here.” 

——

A discerning person such as yourself might ask me why I keep going down to The Dregs if I keep meeting the business end of someone’s weapon of choice. My name’s Kimbal, and I’m what you would call a tracker, I find lost or stolen stuff, and nine times out of ten, that lost or stolen stuff ends up down in The Dregs, which is the badly lit underbelly of VA2, The Plex where I live.  It’s an underground pit of poverty, despair, and more human byproducts than is polite to discuss.  

The thing is, I’m from The Dregs. At least, that’s what I was told.  I have no idea whether or not I was born the old-fashioned way or grown in a vat.  I tend to think the latter because I have no idea who or where my parents are.  So, I was a kid rat from The Dregs.  I know what it takes to survive down here because I had to.  However, you can’t take The Dregs out of the kid rat because I keep ending up down here. 

This last little misadventure had to do with finding a guy.  That was him.  Mostly.  See, he’s not all there, almost literally.  His body and spare parts are a guy named Stamp.  But the part of him that was mad at me?  That wasn’t him.  Something happened to him, and I was hired by someone to figure out what.  As you might have guessed, I wasn’t able to get too close to him, but my little friend on the other side of this earpiece might’ve been able to pick something up IF HE WAS DOING HIS JOB.  

“I’m working on it boss,” Pointer said.  

“Anything yet?”  I was still picking out cinder blocks and drywall from places I didn’t know I had.  “Well, I can’t be sure,” Pointer continued, “But…”

“But what?”

“But it looks like Stamp was completely wiped.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that Stamp is gone, boss.  His personality was erased by something, and it came from his augmentations.” 

“Malware?”

“I don’t know.  I need to do some more work on this.  You might want to come in, I don’t think there’s anything more you can do tonight but get in more trouble.” 

“Copy *that*,” I said.   As I made my way out of The Dregs on foot—word to the wise, don’t come down here with transpo and expect it to be there when you’re ready to leave—I kept returning to that moment when Stamp rebooted, for lack of a better term.  It looked to me like he rebooted, and then something caused him to shut down.  I’ve been around augments before and have never seen that happen, so I had some questions.  First, what would cause that, and that’s something for Pointer to work on.  Second, if Pointer’s suspicion is correct and it’s some kind of malware, then can it be spread?  Third, and this might be more of a problem for what passes for a police force around here, did Stamp just die in front of me?  I thought about going back to check, but frankly, that would be the one time Leo would show up.  I’d rather they come asking questions instead of me giving them an easy answer right off the bat.   Leos despise The Dregs about as much as I do, so anything quick and easy will do, whether or not it’s correct.  Besides, Leo and I have a history.  It’s complicated, but suffice it to say they are not fans of my work partly because I have occasionally interfered with their, ah, ‘investigations’, but I’m pretty sure I’ve disrupted some possible revenue streams for them.  Nothing is clean in The Dregs. 

I mentioned I was a tracker and a finder of lost things.  Over the years I’ve become a little bit of a collector of vintage items, a topic that Pointer never lets me forget when I slide open the door to my loft.  Today, he was unusually quick about it. “You’re not stuck in this place all day,” he said, “but I hear that stupid little “Hi There” every time that door opens. I’m going to self-terminate, I swear.  Can you please, PLEASE, do something about it.”

I opened the door to my fridge, and red and silver job with Coca-Cola on it, and pulled a bag of sugary liquid out and popped the top.  “Send to Jerry, I need him to make another batch of this soon.”  

“Yeah, because nothing’s more important than your sugar high. Got it”. Pointer was not happy, but he rarely ever was.  I did my best to let it roll over, Pointer was my ARP, and Augmented Reality Partner.   ARPs had been around for years, but Pointer was special.  He was one of the first in a new line to receive personalities, and I don’t *think* he was supposed to be a surly little smart-ass, but he’s my surly little smart-ass.  He was never sold to the public, and I acquired him the same way I acquire most things: Persuasion, Money, and not an insignificant amount of deviousness when it’s called for.  Besides, he reminds me of a character in a book I’ve read a million times, and I like that.  “I get it, Pointer.”  I put in as much feigned annoyance in my reply as I could.  He’s fantastic when he perceives that he got under my skin.  “Myke called, she’s wondering if you could spare a brief moment of your time in between disasters to spend some uninterrupted—I’m sorry, that should read uninjured—time together?” 

“I’m surrounded by comedians today”, I sat down on the couch and took a swig of my Neo-Coke.  “So, you’ve been working on Stamp’s little glitch?”

“Yeah, and I found something that shouldn’t be there.”  That got my attention. “Oh really?  Talk to me.” 

“I’m throwing to the screen,” he said, and my main screen in the living space pulsed into life. “Ok, so in a normal augment like the kind Stamp has—“

“That’s a normal augment?” 

“Strangely, yes.  It’s not like ordering a number 2 at the counter, but chop shops have a lot of the same tech manuals they work from. Anyway, this is what the main board looks like in a normal augment.”  The main image then slid to the left, with a new image occupying the right side of the screen.  “This is what I was able to scan from Stamp when he rebooted. It wasn’t there before.”  

In the center of the main board, almost etched into the material and across several important connections was the word TSUNAMI.  “That doesn’t look good.” 

“It’s not.  It’s not healthy, either.  That was what caused the eventual shutdown, and in an augment like that, it affected life support.  I’m afraid if he didn’t get immediate help—like within 5 minutes—Stamp’s physical body didn’t make it.”  

“Damn.”  

“Here’s the thing, though,” Pointer continued, “Stamp’s personality wasn’t wiped.  It was written over thousands of times.  Every time it rewrote, it took more resources from the augment, and it maxed out the system.  That forced the reboot, followed by what you see here.”

“So Stamp’s personality was written over?”

“Yes, but not wiped.  It might still be retrievable from somewhere, like where he got the augment in the first place, or if he paid for some kind of storage.  Dregs, though, so…not likely?” 

“Right.  So, this got a lot more interesting.” I said.  I took another sip of my Neo-Coke. “I’m gonna go catch up with Myke for a minute.  Call ahead and let her know I’m coming.  And Pointer?”

“Call Jerry, I know, I know! You and your…whatever that is.  Looks awful.” 

“Don’t knock it, it helps me put up with you.  Back soon.” 

The door slid open and said “Goodbye” 

“THAT DAMN DOOR!” Pointer screamed as it slid closed behind me.