I was happily working out in my gym, when Galatea called me to the main-room. There was something I would want to see on the TV. I was quite curious, nothing I had done should make news. In the main-room, I realised just what was happening. Detective Kendall was taking my tip quite serious and had apparently gotten a few uniformed officers to join her, just in case that there were too many guys in the house.

It was not on the TV because someone was reporting on it, it was on the TV because Galatea had compiled all the surveillance cameras and drone-footage into an overview-vision and hacked into Detective Kendalls phone to give me audio. When the microwave beeped and one of her little robots brought me popcorn, I knew that my daughter truly loved me.

On the screen I watched Kendall with an officer walk up to the door, knocking, while two more officers secured the backdoor. When the backdoor swung open, the two officers got a nose full of something suspicious and announced that they were entering, which caused Kendall at the front to have the uniformed officer forcefully open the door. Not that the front-door would have stood up to her, it was just as shabby and fragile as the rest of the house, but maybe there was some sort of pecking order involved.

As they entered, I heard Kendall curse, loudly announce that police was entering the building and start to clear rooms. It did not take them long to start finding passed-out bodies, still sleeping off the excess of the night before. A few of them started to stir, only to get their hands tied behind their backs after a short frisking. They had nothing illegal on them, it seemed as if they had smoked everything there was to smoke, only a few beer-cans were still filled. So, the only thing the police had little on them, maybe trespassing.

The thugs were rather relaxed, maybe due to the drugs still in their system, even when the officers started to search. Realising that I might have to give Kendall a small push, I asked Galatea to vibrate her phone, as if she got a message and display onto her screen that she should look under the stairs. That elicited another curse, apparently she did not enjoy being made the unwilling star of New Brunsburg: VICE, even if she truly fit such a role. Maybe as the tough-as-nails, female sidekick to an older, intelectual gentleman-type. It would be an instant hit.

While I ruminated the viability of such a show, she tried to figure out how to open the secret cache under the stairs, causing me to wonder if I had made the right choice. But I was being unfair, I would not have found the opening-mechanism without technical help. I probably would not even have found the hidden cache without knowing about it and having my gadgets. It was quite well constructed, seamless and soundproof, so no hollow sound, if one was knocking against the walls, no visible clues, nothing. But it was not good enough to thwart me. And the opening mechanism, well, knowing where the hidden switch had to be and how it had to move was incredibly useful to trigger it.

Not wanting to miss out on the TV-rights I was thinking about, I gave her another hint, with the exact location. This time, she managed not to curse but once she opened the hidden door and found the cache, she did cause curse. Loudly and repeatedly. She really had to clean up her language, if she wanted to work with an impressionable young woman like me. Something I should tell her when we met the next time.

Her curses caused the semi-alert thugs to realise what she had found and start to make a fuss and alerted her colleagues at the same time. Seeing that there were quite a few weapons, some money and even more drugs stashed, Kendall called in dispatch for backup before starting an inventory with another uniformed officer as witness. Apparently, there had been trouble with valuable evidence, for example money, sadly walking off somewhere between the scene and the evidence-locker. But they were even more interested in the folder, once they noticed it. Kendall knew that there was something interesting, so she had looked quite closely.

Opening it, and seeing one of her colleagues, one who was married with children, in various compromising positions made her curse again and call internal investigation. Not that they had to go out to crime-scenes often, but apparently, she wanted to make sure nothing went wrong with the evidence. She made sure to impress on the officer with her how problematic it would be, if Detective Riggs was told about the folder, before they could investigate. The officer with her was rather young and did not seem to have the corps-mentality, yet. In addition, the threat of legal charges against him seemed to be rather chilling as well.

While the two of them wrote the inventory, the thugs realised that they were in trouble, shouting and screaming, some more intelligently as the others, but all were trying to get the officers to release them. Some by pleading, others by threatening, causing me to think that it had been lucky that they had been tied down before Kendall had made her discovery. Else, there would have been trouble, no doubt injured police officers and probably dead thugs.

The backup only took a few minutes to arrive, and arrive it did. Like the cavalry in a bad western, they rode in with flashing lights and sirens, long after the action was over. The arriving uniformed officers took care of the thugs and thugettes, loading them into transport and carting them off, while a bunch of plain-clothes detectives were ostensibly helping Detective Kendall with the cache. At least, until they realised that Kendall had already alerted Internal Affairs to come out. Apparently, they wanted to be involved with the drug- and gun-bust, but not in the fallout, if another officer was getting investigated.

Shortly after the pack arrived, another unmarked car arrived with a very humourless looking man getting out who was soon talking to Kendall. The Internal Affairs-Officer was not happy to be dragged into a crime-scene and even less happy to get handed blackmail-material on one of the detectives, plus a bank-number with the name of that detective next to it.

Once the IA-officer was gone, the pack descended again, trying to help but mostly do anything that would make them part of the bust. It was not overly large, but getting free credit was good enough for them to want a piece of the pie. Kendall was mostly wrangling them, while making sure that everything was transported from the cache to the evidence-locker.

Sadly, the fun part of the program was winding down, but it was definitely something I would watch again. But my plan was a slow one, I wanted to slowly turn up heat under the Omegas, making sure that they did not try to escape the pot, until it was boiling them.

“There is another thing you might want to watch, while you are here.” Galatea told me.

The image switched to the false colours of a low-light image, filmed by one of her drones. It showed me, playing with Clark during the last night. Watching the chase was quite interesting, I realised that I was faster when it came to twists and turns, but he was faster on a straight line.

At the same time, I realised that I had been quite lucky, for a lot of reasons. One of them was, that he had not called for backup, thinking that he could take me alone. Even a normal, unpowered police officer might have been enough, if he appeared at the wrong time. In addition, my idea of tasering him at range would have backfired. From the looks of it, he had shrugged the effect of in seconds, but maybe the pepper spray had helped motivate his muscles to move. With the pepper spray only applied to his eyes and mask, he might have been able to get me, in spite of it and physically going toe-to-toe with him was a lousy proposition.

But the footage of him, wriggling and writhing around on the ground like salted slug satisfied a vengeful, primal part of me. It was something I would have to keep an eye on, or I might do something stupid, in order to hurt him. I disliked him, greatly, but why should I destroy my life and freedom to make him suffer? No, I would happily cause him pain and humiliation if I could do so without extensive cost, but I would not invest into it.

Not when I could simply add insult to injury by doctoring the clip up a little and releasing it into the wild of the internet.

I had an idea to solve the issue of pursuers, but it would require Galatea to do something on the borderline of her comfort-zone. My idea was to place smoke-grenades on a few of her drones, allowing her to create smoked in zones in which I might be able to lose pursuers. The problem was, I was not sure where she wanted to draw the line in her pacifist stance and I unsure if I could ask her, without causing psychological harm to her, due to conflicting priorities. For a human, such things were a part of growing up, but she simply was not human. Why was there no parenting guide to raise a healthy, young Artificial Intelligence? There were plenty for human children and despite that people got it wrong so very often.