‘Eliah?’

She didn’t look up.

‘Eliah, please, you have to tell us what happened.’

She started rocking back and forth.

Lilly threw a helpless glance over his shoulder. Orion sighed and stood, stretching his back. ‘I need more coffee for this.’

Lilly’s glance turned into a scowl and he turned his attention to Eliah.

She was sitting in his armchair, back at the flat. The cup of tea in her hands had long gone cold. Since she’d flung herself at him in the workshop and told him that her brother was gone, she hadn’t spoken another word.

It wasn’t exactly unusual for her to go silent for long stretches of time, but they needed to know what had happened. Right now. Soon as possible.

Lilly only knew that some people had come and taken Yoshua away. He had tried to comfort Eliah while Orion and Poison talked to the remaining patrons of the Stove. Naturally, nobody had seen a thing, and the street outside had been empty by the time they had gotten there. No traces. Due to the Stove’s secondary purpose, and the location chosen correspondingly, there were no traffic cameras pointed directly at the building. There was no footage of Yoshua exiting his bar.

Instead of waiting for someone to come back and make more trouble, Lilly had taken Eliah’s shoulders and they had retreated home for now.

‘Maybe the cameras in a wider area around the Stove picked up something,’ Poison suggested. ‘Can you check those?’

He shook his head. He would not move from Eliah’s side, not even for a second. She needed him right now, even if she didn’t show it like ordinary people did. Her hands may lie loosely around the cup in her lap, but she’d tensed when he’d gone to fetch her some water earlier. Her fingers had gripped the ceramic tightly, muscles only relaxing when he’d settled back down next to her. He wouldn’t leave again. He could always check the cameras later, the data wasn’t going anywhere.

Poison huffed in exasperation and disappeared into his room. Lilly tensed but refused to leave Eliah to throw her out. Poison returned a few seconds later with his laptop. She set it on the coffee table, within his reach, and glowered.

Lilly sighed and pulled the laptop closer, getting to work on the traffic records. He glanced over at Eliah every few seconds, but she didn’t move, and her hands stayed relaxed.

Once Lilly bypassed the relevant security routines, a surprise awaited him. The traffic records were gone. Not just deleted, either. In a scattered, loose circle around the Stove, the cameras had suffered “malfunctions” and been switched off for “maintenance”. The system had not just been tampered with, it had been manipulated expertly, by someone with official access. Or with more skill than Lilly thought possible.

Lilly cursed. ‘Somebody deleted the records, and they did a good job of it. Probably shut off the cameras in real time. Something or someone big is behind this, with lots of people in lots of places.’ he looked over at Eliah. She closed her eyes briefly, took a deep breath, and started talking.

‘When we were little, Yoshua was abducted. From the street, while we were playing. No trace. Our parents freaked. The police couldn’t find him. He showed up two weeks later, same spot they’d picked him up. He told me everything, just me. They did tests. Made him solve puzzles. Scared him on purpose. Stuck electrodes to his head all the time. They talked about the Gods, too. Maybe looking for something.’

Lilly gaped. He had never before heard her say that much at any one time, or even half as much, or a third. And what in the hells had happened to her brother?

‘Gods,’ Poison said. ‘Like actual, real gods.’

Eliah shrugged.

Something about the words seemed familiar, about the phrasing.

‘You don’t mean the, well, Gods, right? Capital G? The AI thing?’

Eliah nodded.

Lilly whistled.

‘What?’, Poison demanded. ‘What’s the AI thing?’

‘AI thing?’ Orion returned from his trip to the coffee machine.

‘Stop repeating it.’ Lilly ran a hand through his hair. ‘It’s something that happened, I don’t know, about fifty years ago? A team of researchers looked into the connection between brain activity patterns and behaviour. Tried to simulate personalities and induce specific characteristics. They succeeded, actually managed more than they had gone for. In the end, they built five distinct personality simulations and found a way to kind of … download them into a person’s brain.’

‘Well that doesn’t sound creepy at all,’ Poison commented.

‘Yeah. The problem is, something went wrong, some kind of anomaly in one of the simulations. They couldn’t shut it down safely. So they pulled all the plugs instead, probably afraid of the robot uprising or something. Most of the research was lost, as well as the simulations, and the project fell apart. Thirty years later, someone found old records and tried to patch them up to get access to the simulations again. They were recovered, but they were different from before. The simulations still had distinct memories from the start of the project and their creators, but they also had new ones. They had developed, and instead of being shut off for three decades, they’d spent that time together. They knew each other, and could differentiate their personal memory from things the other simulations had told them. Problem is, nobody programmed that. The memory routines were supposed to be much more rudimentary and less complete. Somehow, the simulations changed while they were out of commission, they developed.’

‘Emergent AI?’, Orion asked. ‘That shouldn’t happen.’

‘Especially not without a system to run on, but it did. There’s some rumours that somebody found the code and worked on the simulations for that thirty year interim. But then they should have shown up when the old research was accessed. And the simulations completely disappeared after that, nobody knows why or how. It seems like they didn’t want to hang around to be studied, so they broke the connection.’

Orion’s eyebrows rose further. ‘On their own. Of course. What about back-ups?’

‘Malfunctions all along. The source code was incomplete to begin with. It rebuilt itself with the simulations and then completely broke down with the loss of connection. Nobody knows how to recreate personalities like that, or even how they managed to run wild. The researchers from the first trials are all dead or missing.’

‘Sounds like a really bad sci-fi-slash-horror movie,’ Poison commented drily. ‘What’s that got to do with any gods?’

‘It’s what they call the simulations now. You know, man-made, intangible, not in contact with humanity. Ring a bell? Plus they seem to have hacked physics.’

‘Excuse me?’

Lilly shrugged and grinned. ‘Legend goes they can manipulate matter with their thoughts.’

Orion waved his hands around. ‘Ooh, spooky!’

Poison scoffed. ‘Yeah, sure, a computer program developed telekinesis, sounds about right. How do you believe this crap?’

Lilly frowned. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘It sounds like an urban legend. What, if I go to an abandoned server farm at midnight and recite the square root of pi, the Gods will appear to grant me three wishes?’

‘AI research has done amazing things in the last century,’ Orion interjected.

Poison scoffed. ‘You’re trying to tell me someone managed something that you seem to think is literally impossible. Then every bit of research was lost, all the evidence gone. Everyone is okay with that. Nobody thinks it might have been made up. Oh well, we were at the edge of a great breakthrough but it didn’t work so we’ll never try again.’

‘They have tried,’ Lilly said quietly. ‘Grad students in computer science get it in their heads all the time. Why not try the impossible? It has been done before, should be doable. But that’s the weird part, nobody in fifty years has come even close. There have been some advances. Temporary mood-altering drugs. Mostly hormonal manipulation. Nowhere near the real thing, though.’

‘So what does Yoshua have to do with all of this?’, Orion got them back on track.

Lilly sobered at the reminder and his gaze returned to Eliah. ‘According to the stories, and we don’t have anything else to go on, the Gods need bodies to inhabit. It takes more than a random person, the hosts are special, somehow, and pretty rare. Maybe whoever took Yoshua as a kid tried him out as a host, found out he was special, and now they want to try again? Maybe something about Yoshua wasn’t ready yet? Maybe transferring a God into a human body didn’t work back then but now the research is more advanced?’

‘You do realize this is crazy, right?’, Poison asked. ‘And talking of research, doesn’t all of this seem a little bit familiar to you, considering today’s topics of conversation?’ She pointedly raised an eyebrow.

Familiar? Well, brain scans, behavioural patterns, research, … Oh.

‘My work with Michael,’ Lilly groaned. ‘Of course. You think there’s a connection.’

‘To the secret government-funded study? Because Yoshua disappears right after we find somewhat of a lead about Michael? Might.’

‘I knew what he was doing was important, and dangerous, but I didn’t think it would go this far,’ Lilly murmured, more to himself than to the others.

‘Great,’ Orion stood. ‘Let’s try and find the mad scientists before they blow up the planet, shall we?’

Sarah sighed and let her forehead sink down to rest on the desk surface. She sat at her desk, trying to work things out. A lot of things. A lot of working out.

The person opposite her moved. Probably looking over to check on her because of the thud of her head hitting wood. Well, there was probably some kind of wood somewhere in the desk, beneath the cheap varnish that made it quite easy to remove coffee stains.

She heard the soft snort of a sympathetic smile, and the other officer went back to their own work. It was not exactly a rare event for someone in here to despair over their tasks. Especially if they were a cross-agency liaison and tasked with finding a man who kept on managing to stay ahead of everyone.

What kind of contacts did Michael Runner have in the city? What did he sell to get the necessary funds? He wasn’t supposed to have large financial reserves. No family inheritance, no wealth.

She didn’t even really know who he was, aside from the sparse file the Agency had provided her.

Sure, she had been briefed on the case. Runner had done Agency-funded research, very secret, very classified. Far too high up the priority ladder for her to get the details on that research. But Runner had made a big discovery, and then he’d skipped town, taking his insights with him. The Agency was looking to reclaim him, and the knowledge he had taken.

Apparently, word had gotten out that government-protected secrets – and possibly worse – had leaked. National intelligence services had decided that since all kinds of underground movements and syndicates were getting involved, this was now an entirely national matter, and therefore their playing field.

The Agency, naturally, disagreed.

More people got involved, ever more. Whenever a trace of Runner popped up somewhere, the local law enforcement figured that they should get a hand in. After all, the cross-county hunt was partially happening on their turf. The Agency had reacted by sending liaisons to the respective departments. Officially, they were there to help the investigation along and provide additional intelligence. In reality, the institutions didn’t cooperate with each other like that. They might get much more done if they did.

Sarah currently stood before the problem that the police had no clue what exactly they were looking for. She suspected neither did the national services. To them, Runner could be a fugitive, terrorist, foreign spy, informant, or a hundred other things. A lot of speculations were made during coffee breaks around here.

And while it wasn’t openly mentioned, but Sarah was pretty sure there was a betting pool on the subject.

The only thing the different factions were all sure about was that if the Agency wanted Michael Runner, they wanted him first. Regardless of who exactly was being hunted.

And the Agency, in turn, wanted to keep all the cake to themselves. Sarah found herself in the uncomfortable position of not being able to talk to anyone or brainstorm ideas or work with anyone else at all.

None of her temporary colleagues knew anything substantial anyway, but she found it easier to bounce ideas off someone. If they were impartial or ignorant of the facts, even better.

She would have to do without help. Okay. Review the file.

Runner moved frequently.

Runner kept to himself.

Runner worked with underground “independent” medics and such.

The last bit would provide him with the funds to survive and keep below the radar. There, she’d already found the answer to one of her questions!

Now to finding the man. There was a decent demand for run-down flats paid in cash by people calling themselves John Smith, and such demand created an equal amount of supply. Even with all the resources Sarah could ever wish for, she wouldn’t have been able to check them all. At least not in any useful amount of time.

There was only one hint that made the Agency reasonably sure Runner was in this particular area; he had boarded a plane somewhere in the north of the country and, upon arrival not so far north, booked passage on a train headed further south. Someone fitting his description had been sighted around the city, and someone was certainly greasing business for the medics. Again, someone fitting Runner’s description had been named as the reason in one or two interrogations.

As far as hunches went, this was a fairly sure operation.

The remaining question was, how was one to find a fugitive neuroscientist doing psych evaluations for gang members and not spending most of his cash?

Monitoring the medics had failed on numerous unrelated occasions. The local police had tried to flush them out and drive more criminals towards the closely watched ERs. Secret entrances, covers, and much more precautions had made the task impossible, but Sarah had tried her own avenue of attack anyway. Without avail.

She had tried other approaches. None of the informants sent to follow Runner home had returned even remotely successful. Runner was very careful, and hard to tail, and moved frequently. Qualities that had let him stay out of reach for a whole three weeks.

Impressive for someone with multiple intelligence services breathing down his neck and with no prior experience. As far as she knew, at least, he wasn’t an agent. He was a scientist. Not that that fit with anything in her assignment.

Sarah lifted her head from the desk and stood, stretching. This was getting her nowhere.

Her agency wanted her to find Runner, but refused to give her more information. On his training, records, past life, what kind of work he had done for the government, why he ran, why they wanted him back so badly… She knew almost nothing. And she was expected to be okay with that. Did the agency even want her to succeed? Probably. There was no need to keep her as an official cover for something.

Where to start, then? She could start digging into his current life, if she couldn’t find out anything about his past. Runner had been seen on a few occasions. Where, doing what? Maybe she could find out something about his preferences.

Fetching two mugs of coffee from the kitchen, she headed over to Daniel’s office. He opened the door at her knock and accepted one of the mugs gratefully, inviting her inside.

‘What can I do you for?’

Sarah frowned at him, scrutinizing the bags under his eyes. ‘When was the last time you slept?’

He snorted and shook his head.

‘Too long ago, then. Forget it, none of my business. I need access to some files, and I don’t have clearance for police records. Was wondering if you could help me out.’

Daniel grunted a confirmation and sat, activating his holographic keyboard, and started typing.

‘Come ‘round so you can see the monitor.’

Sarah rounded the desk in time to see the filing system’s login screen confirm Daniel’s security clearance.

‘What’re you looking for?’

She considered. Best to start with Runner’s current employment.

‘Anything you can get me on independent medic facilities. When they move shop. Whatever you got. Locations would be nice, no matter how old.’

Daniel shrugged and went to work. He browsed through the data for a few minutes, refined the search, then pulled up several overview files. When he opened the first one, the screen displayed a loading icon, rotating around itself, then went blank.

‘What the …?’

Daniel tried to type, tapped the mouse, switched off the screen, switched it back on, tried the keyboard short-cuts again.

> DAN

The words appeared at once, white ASCII characters on black. Daniel paused, surprised.

> WE KNOW ABOUT YOU

What the hell?

‘Daniel, what’s going on?’

He didn’t answer, just swallowed heavily.

‘Is this about -’ It fit. ‘Is this about that thing Silas mentioned? Your personal detail, the info that was stolen by Hounds?’

Something was up. Something important was going on right before her. Gods, how she hated to be out of the loop when the matter concerned her. And this might concern her very much.

Daniel didn’t meet her gaze. Slowly, hesitantly, he began to type out a reply. The screen didn’t display his writing, so Sarah tried to follow the keystrokes. She caught the last few: you mean?

The answer appeared a few seconds later.

> GIVE US YOSHUA STONE

‘Wait,’ Sarah interjected, ‘the guy who runs the Stove? I was there for lunch. He’s up and serving, as usual. Tending bar, handing out food.’

Daniel nodded.

‘We didn’t do anything to him. No large operations planned. It’s not even in our interest. Neutrality agreement and all. The Agency agrees with the police in that regard.’

Another nod. Daniel was nice, but he was tight-lipped on an average day, and worse now. But he typed out about what she had said.

The next reply was slower to arrive. Sarah fidgeted. Finally, the white-on-black characters changed.

> THEN YOU BETTER FIND HIM

Daniel gritted his teeth, his fingers flying across the keys. Sarah couldn’t follow the movement to decipher the words, but then the screen changed in answer. The picture of an askew, stylized capital letter “H”.

‘Hounds,’ she breathed. That confirmed her suspicions.

Daniel picked up his phone and dialled a number. When someone picked up on the other end, he spoke quietly, tersely.

‘I know it’s your day off, but they made their move.’

He listened, scribbling on a notepad with his free hand.

‘Uh-huh. Yeah. Thank you.’

He ended the call and leant back, pressing the balls of his hands to his eyes.

‘Daniel?’, Sarah tried softly. She felt an uncharacteristic desire to do something, to help. She didn’t usually get involved in other people’s bullshit if it didn’t benefit her job. ‘What’s going on? What can I do?’

‘Hounds just made the threat I’ve been waiting for,’ Daniel answered quietly. ‘They probably waited for an opportunity like this, for something they really, really want to make optimal use of their leverage. And something came up. Yoshua Stone. I’m sorry, I don’t think I’ll be able to help you with Runner’s case.’

‘I thought Hounds “don’t do threats”?’

She’d seen the statement made in a lot of reports. It was remarked in almost all records of interaction between the group of thieves and law enforcement.

Daniel shook his head, finally dropping his hands from his face. His eyes were rimmed red and he looked exhausted, even worse than before. As if the last few minutes had cost him a few hours’ worth of energy. What was on that flash drive that could throw him off course this badly? What was he hiding?

‘That’s Orion. He says that a lot. Never expressly includes his friends, though.’

Sarah sighed. ‘Shit. What do we do now?’

‘We wait. Ryan’s on his way. You just go back to your work, you have a presumed terrorist-slash-informant-slash-drug-manufacturer to catch.’ His tone carried a strained bit of humour that he seemed to muster purely for her benefit.

Sarah didn’t know why, but she shook her head. ‘I’m staying here. If there’s a threat, I’m not going to leave you alone. Let me help.’

She even put a consoling hand on his shoulder. She really did want to help him, she realized. And if she could sate some of her curiosity along the way, all the better.

Daniel was a tough man, built like a soldier, with an obvious amount of unpleasant shit in his past.

Beneath her fingers, Sarah could feel him trembling, just slightly.

It had been a long, long day. Daniel fumbled with his keys, trying to unlock the door to his apartment. He wanted to get some tea, and then go straight to bed. He glanced down at the hand holding his keys and noticed he was trembling.

Daniel scoffed and tightened his fingers around the metal, feeling the teeth bite into his skin. It grounded him, at least somewhat. Tea, and then bed. He unlocked the door.

A fully grown combination of headaches and trouble lounged on the edge of his dining room table. He looked up as if surprised to find Daniel arriving at his own gods-damned apartment and smirked.

‘Evening, Nine.’

‘No,’ Daniel growled.

The headache sighed dramatically. ‘Fine, fine. It’s Daniel right now? I’ll try to remember.’

‘What’s wrong this time, Jordan?’

A shrug and another smirk. ‘Can’t I come to visit any more? Does there have to be a reason? You look like shit, by the way.’

Daniel stared at him flatly. Jordan sighed and slid off the table. ‘All right, there might have been a small skirmish because an informant mysteriously disappeared.’

This was not the way Daniel had imagined his night. He wanted peace and quiet, not exchanging verbal blows with Jordan.

‘Did you get blood anywhere?’

Jordan raised an eyebrow in mock indignation. ‘I would never.’

Daniel scoffed. ‘I still remember two months ago. I had to burn my bed sheets.’

‘Okay, so I might have, two or three times, accidentally-’

‘Go get your ass in the bathroom. I’ll catch up in a second.’

Jordan smirked but shut his mouth and sauntered off down the hallway. Daniel noticed a small imbalance in his step, not quite a limp. Not a leg wound. Torso, probably the side, though without bloodstains visible on his clothing.

Daniel stood for a second, deliberating. Tea was not going to work for him right now. It wouldn’t calm him down.

Instead, he pulled a bottle of scotch from a cabinet and poured two glasses before heading towards the bathroom.

He had been right about the side wound. Jordan waited for him, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with his shirt off.

The wound was ugly, and not what Daniel would have expected. Dark bruises met a jagged line of blood across the length of Jordan’s ribs. It was not a cut made by a sharp object. Instead, it almost looked as if the skin had …

‘Torn,’ Jordan supplied. ‘Got hit a few times too often.’

‘I can see that. With what?’

‘Steel pipe.’

Daniel raised an eyebrow.

‘Might have been a crowbar. I wasn’t paying attention to the particulars.’

That much was as per usual. Daniel examined the cut and the bruises, carefully pressing against the younger man’s ribs. Jordan’s jaw clenched but he didn’t make a sound, and his rib cage didn’t give.

Nothing appeared to be broken, so Daniel checked the abdomen for tension. All in order. He cleaned the torn skin and put in stitches where they were necessary. Mostly, the jagged lines would heal well on their own, much better than a clean cut.

‘I’m not a CT scan, but I think you don’t have any organ damage,’ he commented as he finished up.

‘I know what organ damage feels like,’ Jordan retorted.

Daniel snorted. ‘Like when you injured your spleen and thought it was bad sushi.’

‘I was eight.’

‘Just saying.’

Jordan scoffed and rose, flexing to test the pull on his side. ‘Seems to be in order. Mind if I rest up here a bit?’

Daniel picked up his glass of scotch and nudged the second one over. Jordan took a sip and sighed appreciatively. He tried to hide it, but his eyes were sunken and his features were tense. Either that had been one hell of a skirmish, or something else was going on.

‘You don’t happen to know anything about Yoshua Stone disappearing?’, Daniel probed. Couldn’t hurt to try.

Jordan considered the name for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Not that I’ve heard of. I certainly haven’t been put in charge of any retrievals.’

Daniel grunted.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Got some problems. Someone knows about me, and they want Stone. Seems he disappeared.’

Jordan pursed his lips. ‘Well, shit. I’ll keep an ear out, but that sounds bad. You need help dealing with it?’

In other words, can I kill anyone for you. Daniel failed to suppress a grin. ‘Help, from you? I think I’ll be okay.’

He almost immediately regretted the words. Yes, he and Jordan had gone their separate ways a long time ago, and yes, Daniel disapproved of the other man’s line of work. But saying it like that was crossing a line they had silently agreed on drawing in their conversations.

Jordan waved him off, apparently unbothered. ‘I know you didn’t meant that, so I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it. But it’s time I get going.’

He finished his scotch. ‘Thanks for the patch-up, Nine.’

Daniel scowled, but Jordan was already on his way out, a quick grin on his face. Daniel probably deserved that.

Seconds later, the apartment door fell shut and he was alone with bloody gauze and scotch.