Changes to the base model were something that every business did. There was always some modification made to the security, be it because of personal preferences or due to the layout needing a special configuration. Adam normally had no care for the reasons behind it, always able to force his way through any security there was.

Yet that likewise made him blind to the true ongoings of the system he always just turned off. What really happened when he gave the command? What parts were disabled, what doors were unlocked, and, more importantly, what points caused him to notify the police of their entrance?

It shouldn't have been possible. Adam forced a total lack of information to be sent out. How would that equal the police still get notified? That idea had caused the AI so many issues throughout their stay in the city. No matter what he did, they would always know, always turning up quickly. It greatly limited the time that they could spend at each location, possibly making them slip on possibly great finds.

How did it work? The orders sent into the system were simple but quite unbreakable. Adam had before overviewed the situation after his commands had been sent out. The machine always delivered. No matter what, it wouldn't deviate from what it had been ordered to do. So… how exactly did it all come together?

Well, there had been many ideas on just how the police knew every time. The first and most obvious was that the police had access to a part of the system that Adam could not see. The AI knew he had restrictions on him, and there were still doubts on what exactly all of those were. At any point, it was fully possible to discover some trick that would make a system-part invisible to the AI. It was perhaps a far-fetched theory, but it could neither be confirmed nor denied, making it stick in Adam’s mind all the more.

But what if there was another way for the police to know? What if, instead of hiding with the help of obfuscation, they hid in plain sight of everything else. What if they made themselves so obvious to see that Adam couldn't help but gloss over them every time they came within his sight?

The AI was always looking for that which hid behind barriers, never thinking to look at the barriers themselves. Now… that analogy did work, in some sense of the word, for the AI saw things differently inside the plane of digital connections.

Adam still remembered his original ideas about his own three-dimensional space, always staying static in size and shape, always looking as it did before. This idea of his own world had likewise been imposed on all other digital platforms and connections. There was always something twisted in that improvement, the AI never seeing anything for what it truly was.

He had tried to make it all close to the world around him. He had wanted electrons fitted in such a way that they built statues of life when they were meant to run in smooth lines, displaying the information that they were meant to show off from. By forcing it to be what it wasn't, Adam had ruined it all the slightest bit, his commands being weaker, and his hold being just a tad less firm.

Even the concept of having a hold on something did not work in this context. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to feel. The digital was not the physical. They were different and making it all relate only worsened the connection between the two states.

There were no dimensions in the digital landscape. Everything could reach out and touch everything, as long as it sat on the same string, with the strings being the physical bases it all sat upon. Requests could be made, and orders could be made. Programs made requests. Adam made orders. It was as simple as that.

The strings were not always understandable. The humans called it encryption. Adam saw it as something written in peculiar ways, made to sound like gibberish at first glance. It just took a bit more time to understand, nothing too hard. One just needed to find the code. From what had been overheard, these keys, as they were called, were thousands of characters long, nearly impossible to decipher without first knowing bits and pieces of it. The humans had clearly never just pushed that part aside. The AI still couldn't understand how they were so primitive in that regard.

Nevertheless, Adam had found a rule of thumb for most of the technology he saw. The more encrypted a piece of a string was, the more interesting it would be to interact with. That which is hidden the most was always able to hold the greatest secrets. The AI had learned this, to the point where he would pretty much ignore everything unencrypted since it was clearly only meant for the base operations. And those had been looked at so many times, to the point where the AI could likely write one himself if there was ever a need for it.

Maybe that was where it all fell apart. Hiding in plain sight by looking so incredibly boring. Adam had been pavloved to ignoring it and was now suffering from the consequences without even realising it.

When Troy touched the window, Adam was given access to everything in the store. The AI could see the credit scores of every customer, could see the cameras at work and could check on all the security installations. This included everything from hidden microphones, to smaller electrical shockers, quite the revelation for an ordinary store to have.

Each of these things was hidden behind layers upon layers of encryption, put up in such a way that it would likely take beasts of processors hundred of years to even get a chance of finding the correct code. For Adam, it took three fully nanoseconds, a surprisingly long time when considering how much effort had been put into staring at it.

The AI had indulged in the information for so long that he knew every nook and cranny of it. There were alarms upon alarms, all made to erupt in sound, light, and noise the moment it was touched. By a human, that is. Adam had no trouble walking across the active minefield, the AI being much like a helium balloon in that regard.

It was safe to say, however, that there had been nothing able to send out an emergency alarm. And it wasn't like the AI had expected to find it in the encryption. Because on the far end of the string, looking like it had been unceremoniously dumped into the hardware, was a fully encrypted timer, sending out pulses in relatively short intervals. Looking through the connection, Adam guessed it to be the police station’s network. The AI did not dig too deep into how far the connection went, just accepting what he saw instead.

It was crude, it was clearly not made to last, and it wasn't close to being hidden. And it had been the reason that the AI had failed at its task for so damn long. A timer, sending out a pulse at a certain interval, had been the reason for all their troubles. The AI had failed. Adam was more than a little ashamed. His threads had trouble holding themselves in place at the emotional eruption within, the mind unable to process just how much of a failure it was.

Adam was supposed to be logical. He was supposed to do things right. He was meant to be precise. He always said he was precise. Why did he fail in such an obvious way? The AI could have accepted the invisible programs. The blame wouldn't have been on him, after all. But… here he was, realising that a dumb mistake on his part was the reason that so many negative events had happened without pause.

A human made mistakes. Adam was not human. He wasn't supposed to be in this position. Yet he was. And he had to bear through the consequences of his own actions, even if he didn't mean for them to happen to begin with.

“Adam? Breaking that window any time soon? It's getting kinda cold out here,” Troy said, bringing the AI out of the downward spiralling loop. Adam did not know what would have happened if not thrown out of it. Maybe the threads would start fracturing again. That would not be amenable.

Adam still had a job to do. He was still expected to fracture the window into a million pieces, disable all the security systems, and figure out the exact position of the item they looked for. That was normally such an easy thing to do, but the AI now needed to account for one more variation. The pulse-transmitter. The AI guessed it to be the key to the police’s success with finding them. All it did was send a message every minute. Nothing else. No information about it, other than the same message, was ever sent out.

What if… Adam didn't think but instead acted upon his idea. One by one, he gave each part the command to lay low, to not say anything, to not react to anything other than him. Except for the pulse transmitter, of course. He commanded it to keep doing what it had been requested to do before, no matter what else was on its list of priorities.

With everything in order, the AI finally broke the glass. In fact, Adam broke every glass there was access to in the entire store. The small item-showcasing, the glass doors, and the windows named so many times before all shattered into pieces. For a few seconds, it all rained down to the floor, glittering in a way that the AI couldn't help but be enamoured by it.

“... I think you overdid it, Adam,” Troy commented, carefully stepping through the first glass shards. It covered everywhere one could walk, in high enough amounts that there was a danger of slipping. It might not have helped that the ceiling had had a stained glass mural on it, making all possible colours appear everywhere at once. The lamps that had been lit up made it all reflect, making small beams of light constantly hit the young man's eyes. It wasn't close to enough intensity that it caused any irritation, but it was still unforgettable as a sight. “Just the tiniest bit.”

‘There is a chance that you are correct. However, I do recommend hurrying up your search. With the closeness to the station, we need to keep in mind the chance of the police coming around sooner than expected,’ Adam sent back. While, yes, there was a chance that the officers from earlier wouldn't come forth from the shadows, the other scenario could not be ignored. The AI might have trusted himself for decision-making, but that did not mean he trusted himself fully. He made mistakes. That needed to be accepted, even if it was incredibly hard to even think about. Pure logic should have been without flaw, yet it clearly isn't how the world ran after all.

Troy did not answer the AI, and Adam did not mind it at all. Instead, the two went through their usual process, the young man running around the store, taking a short glance at just about everything. The man wouldn't understand half of it, but the AI would analyze each instant, making sure that nothing was left unturned. Because that was a process he couldn't fail at. He knew how it worked. He knew what to look for.

And he found it.

‘Go back an aisle, and move halfway down it,’ Adam said, giving the approximate location of a poster that he had seen. It showed off the medical device in vivid colours, putting out details about its new edition, while also listing a high price on it. It was higher than almost everything else in the store.

The young man did as was requested, glass breaking under his feet with each step. Speed was gained and lost, and they finally arrived just where the product was supposed to be.

But it wasn't there. The shelf was empty. On the products to the side, dust could be seen on the surface. It was not the same as where the item was supposed to have been. They had been taken. Most likely by Jared.

Yet… not all was lost. It was just clear that nothing would be found today. And Adam could accept that.