I can’t say that I wasn’t pleased with Alena’s report. I mean, seriously, I did not need it, but the few months of Enki operating had tripled my fortune.

That alone was ok. Don’t get me wrong, having too much money is by far preferable to having not enough. But I had more than enough money for over three years by now.

No, more important was that this money was official and well-known. It conveyed status. Status that would keep problems away.

Vasilienkov would never have even dreamed of betraying me if I had the status I had now. Heck, Frankel would have bowed and let me go if that had been the case.

Not that I would have been on board the Drunken Owl in the first place, but status meant protection. It meant the option to go to Mercedes-Benz and order a brand-new T-240 with all the extras without the need to prove that one could afford one.

It meant that no measly little C-tier corp flunky would even dare to stand in my way. And right now, it was just a matter of getting that status known.

Yes, technically, Phillip Rawleigh had a higher status, here in NYC. After all, he was the grandson of the owner of Ralcon, but it was a small thing.

Ralcon was, at last at this time, still bigger than Vandermeer. But not by much, after the artificial problems for Vandermeer had been removed and they took over most of the market that Falconer had served.

It was already foreseeable that Vandermeer would outrank Ralcon in a couple of years.

But my status with Enki was something else. Yes, it was lower, no question there. Ralcon and Vandermeer were two of the eight triple-A corporations in existence, while Enki was ‘only’ one of the 17 double-A.

But more important for me was the fact that it was not inherited. Enki was my creation. Well, mine, Ben’s, and Michael’s. This status was something that I had earned.

And to be honest, if Enki had the strategic and political depth for it, we would be a triple-A. Easily.

Again, the simple fact that we controlled the Q-links made us one of the top dogs. The new grav coils were just the icing on the cake.

But we lacked the well-stocked research department, the multifaceted offensive military capability, and the bought and paid-for politicians in high positions.

The R&D was relatively easy. If we decided to trust the candidates. Not only that they would not convey our secrets to anybody else, but that they actually could do the work they were hired to do.

The military… honestly I was not convinced that we needed to be able to act offensively, but it was one of the factors that set the big eight apart from the rest. Heck, Kawamoto had no less than five battle groups headed by a battleship each.

Talk about projecting power.

The political power was just a matter of time though. The problem here was simply that we were too new. Not enough time to worm our way into the needed positions. We had yet to buy any politicians, much less enough to count.

Honestly, even our status as a double-A was… tenuous. I was convinced that solely the fact that we had enough profit for a triple-A put us there. We were just way too profitable for a single-A.

To sum it up, we were an anomaly that did not fit into any of the neat little drawers that formed the system-wide social structure. And as long as we did not remedy that, we would be vulnerable.

That brought me back to the one thing that I had burning under my fingernails. Blumenthal. I could not explain why I developed such an instant and intense dislike for that man, but it had happened.

And I wanted to figure him out. Find out what he was planning. Where he was coming from, and where he was going.

Maybe it was some form of subconscious need for revenge against all the operatives that I had met in Nowhere, but I can’t tell you if that is true.

The fact was, I wanted, no, I needed to put him under the microscope.

The good thing was that in this instance, unlike virtually every other occasion when I had to foray into matrix combat, I had the luxury of time.

I could do it the right way.

To prove that, I first created a dummy account for multiple fixers. As a customer, not a contractor. Including Isaak Francis Blumenthal.

It was not unusual that a customer remained anonym to the fixer. There was a downright flood of Mr. and Ms. Smiths, Millers, Does, Johnsons, and so on. All of them ‘very concerned private individuals'. With ‘absolutely no connection’ to any organization, government, or corporation.

Those individuals would only rarely meet even the fixers in person. Then I bought some mostly random information.

The information itself was completely irrelevant. It was the formatting, the metadata, and the way the data was handled that was important for me.

Well, the information was mostly irrelevant. I took the opportunity to buy what each fixer knew about their competition.

That, naturally, told me quite a bit more about the various fixers operating in the Bronx. Most of it I filed as interesting but not important.

The accounts about Blumenthal… they were a bit sparse. I could tell that none of his ‘colleagues’ took him in the slightest seriously. What I could read between the lines was that they thought he was some rich idiot playing criminal to spice up his life.

Much more interesting were the accounts I got back from Blumenthal about the other fixers.

They immediately put any doubt about him being an operative to rest. I’ve rarely seen such detailed and thorough reports on a fixer.

Unfortunately, the reports were scrubbed of any metadata that I might use. Sure, the final text was written in Word. But whatever Blumenthal had done, he did not even use copy & paste. It allowed me, or more precisely, Warden, to analyze his personality. Sadly, not sufficiently enough to create a password profile for him.

And before you ask, yes, I tried the usual phishing attacks. Just out of routine, mind you, and as I had expected, he did not fall for it.

That left me with the next step. I hired an honest to god private detective. The snag here was that the private eye refused to negotiate through the matrix.

Said he did not trust it to be secure enough. I am sure he just wanted to meet the client in person. Not that I did indulge him in that.

I, briefly, considered hiring a proxy who would pose as the face of the operation. But then I had an even better idea.

It was fortuitous that Enki had just begun selling the Incarnate telepresence bot. It was even easier to have one of them delivered to a mostly unused back alley in the Bronx by an automated freight drone.

From there, an anonymously hired cab brought the bot to the dive bar the detective had specified.

The funny thing is, with some bog standard clothes, and the holo-projector running, it mostly looked like an absolutely average person hidden behind a holographic mask.

Those masks were not all that rare, even here in the more ritzy Bronx.

I was quite happy that I never included a sense of smell, or nearly any other sense if I am honest, in the design of the Incarnate, as when I saw the interior of the bar for the first time.

It was the typical unsavory, almost certainly smelly, underlit provider of cheap alcohol, mostly in the form of barely palatable beer, and despite the time of the early afternoon, it was already well visited.

The so-called ‘music’ was an incoherent jumble of notes, vaguely resembling what a drunk might think of a melody, without even a hint of heart or soul, also known as ‘easy listening’. It began grating on my nerves the moment I stepped into the bar.

It was nonetheless easy to find the detective, as he, for some inexplicable reason, had decided to go full bore into the clichés about private detectives.

He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth, the fedora on his head, and a dirty trenchcoat that had probably started out tan. His greasy black hair was way too long for his rather portly face, and his scruffy stubble bore witness that he had not run into a shaver for at least a few days.

All in all, exactly how one would imagine a detective to be… in a holopic. I could only hope that he was a bit more discrete when he was on the job. Not that I expected much anyway. He was just another shot in the dark for me anyway.

With that said, I moved the Incarnate to his table, noting the bottle of whiskey, quickly identified as so low tier that it took a shovel to find it, and a single glass on the table.

When ‘I’ sat down, he looked up for the first time and then scowled.

“I would prefer you lose the mask.”

I answered with the completely robotic synthetic voice of the bot:

“That won’t do you any good, but as you wish.” And deactivated the holoprojector, revealing the android head underneath.

He recoiled and snarled:

“What the fuck is that?”

“That is one of those new Enki Incarnate bots. A marvelous invention. Spares us the need of hiring a proxy.”

“A bot? I thought I would negotiate with a human!”

“You are negotiating with a human. The human is just not physically at the same location as you.”

He growled briefly.

“Get real, I can clearly see that this is a bot, you confirmed it is a bot.”

“It is a telepresence bot. Specialized to be remotely piloted. Except that there is no biological matter opposite of you, the mind is human.”

It took him a moment to digest that and then frowned even harder.

“Did I not tell your people that I do not trust the matrix? And then you remotely control a bot? Have you no sense of security?”

“The connection is direct via a Q-link. The matrix is not involved. And while your insistence on security is laudable, we think you are a bit paranoid. But whatever, this connection is secure.”

He slapped his hand on the table.

“But that still does not tell me who I am dealing with!”

“You assume that even without the Incarnate, you would have learned that, Mr. Sharpes. That is not the case. If Enki had not brought the Incarnate to market, you would be sitting in front of a hireling who would have no idea who we are either, who would get fed what he was to say over a com. This removes an unnecessary step in between and removes another opening in security.”

Harrison Sharpes, licensed and bonded private detective, was visibly unhappy about that, but unfortunately for him, that was all he would get, and he knew that.

“Fine. What do I call you?”

“Smith.”

He rolled his eyes but remained somewhat cordial.

“Figures. Now, is it Mr. or Ms. Smith?”

“Just Smith. That is enough.”

He murmured, “Paranoid much, hu?” very softly, but the Incarnate had good enough audio sensors to pick it up. Not that I called him out about it.

“Alright, Smith, what can I do for you?”

“We require whatever information you can find about six individuals. Their names are Marvin Abbot, Isaak Blumenthal, Kellan Davenport, Gabriel Holmes, Janiya Parson, and Tanja Silver.”

Yes, I was only interested in one of them, but I expected that this ‘research’ would reach the ears of the people investigated, so I decided to muddy the waters somewhat.

His eyes widened, and he recoiled a bit, evidently confused.

“Fuck, I know three of those names. They are all fixers? What the fuck are you playing at? You think I will dig up dirt about fixers? Think again.”

“You are correct that all six of them are fixers. But we are not hiring you to dig up dirt about them but compile freely available information. We require nothing that is not public knowledge, and if we decided to invest the time, we would not need somebody to compile that information.

Fortunately for you, we want that information quickly, so we decided to hire you to collect the available information. Not what can be found out through the matrix. We already have that. We need to know what is known on the street.”

He frowned again.

“Just the publicly available information? Why?”

“That is unimportant for you. Are you willing and capable of doing the job or do we have to look for somebody else?”

After a brief moment, he sighed and nodded.

“Yeah, I can do it. My rates are $800 per day, plus expenses.”

“As long as you can justify the expenses. We won’t bankroll a weekend getaway in Atlantic City.”

“I will have to wine and dine some sources, and outright pay some of them.”

“That is no problem. How do you want to get paid?”

“Cash.”

“That is doable but surprising.”

He knitted his brows in confusion again.

“Why surprising?”

“Dollar notes are easily traceable. The government and big corporations can follow them easier than a well-scrubbed electronic transfer.”

He scowled, again.

“For real? How?”

“Every bank note, not just from the US, but virtually all over the world, has an RFID chip embedded with a unique signature. Every single time you walk past one of the hidden scanners, any database connected to it can tell exactly which notes you carry. Combine that with facial recognition, and governments and corporations can exactly trace all and each of your steps.”

For a moment he stared at the Incarnate and then cursed. After a minute or so, he calmed himself back down.

“So there is no way to keep that information out of the hands of the corps?”

So it was not the governments he was concerned about. Not really surprising, as the governments generally were owned by the corporations.

“There are a couple of ways. The easiest way would be deep credits. They are filtered through the dark web, the Abyss to be precise. If you know somebody proficient enough with computers you could have them obscure any digital transaction. Another way would be precious metals, bullion, or old coins.

If your transactions get large enough, you can go to ITB, but it is unlikely that you will reach that point."

His eyes widened again.

“For real? Shit, I’ll have to look into that, don’t I?”

Yup, that confirmed something I had suspected already. My next sentence was the conclusion.

“Unfortunately, we are developing serious doubts about your qualification to fulfill this commission.”

Again, he scowled hard.

“What, why? ‘Cause I didn’t know about the RFID chips in cash? Or that deep credits are safe?”

“Partly, yes. But mostly because you create the distinct impression that the words discretion and inconspicuousness are not part of your vocabulary. While the job itself is not illegal and we won’t care if it becomes known, we do not want to advertise it.”

It took him a moment to parse through my sentences, and then his eyes widened.

“Oh… oh, fuck. Listen, mate, this…” he gestured all over his getup, “is all for show. This is the Bronx. Not Brooklyn, not Queens, not Staten Island. If somebody wants to hire a private dick here, they expect somebody directly out of film noir.

They expect the greasy overweight man in the dirty trenchcoat, with a fedora on the head. They expect the payment to be hush-hush.

I give them the show, play the part, and give the impression that I am actually paranoid about the payment.

And then I am the diversion, while my partners do the real work.

Seriously, if you don’t care about that crap, you can simply pay into our account. Makes it easier for us as well.”

I said nothing for, what for me felt like an eternity. Mostly because I had gone into higher compression, and addressed Warden:

I held myself back and inwardly rolled my eyes. Sure, it was unimportant, but it would have been nice to know those little factoids beforehand.

Then I surfaced, and in the real world, just a couple of seconds had gone by, and my answer was still natural:

“We see. It seems that we failed to sufficiently research your organization. Our apology for that. As it is, we will give you a chance. Do your best to not disappoint us.”

He scoffed.

“Let me guess, it would be detrimental to my health?”

“No, we don’t work that way. It will, however, be detrimental to the review we will leave about your firm.”

He stopped short and then laughed briefly.

“Yeah, that is fair.”

“Do you require an advance on the money?”

He visibly thought about it for a moment, before he nodded.

“Yeah. I don’t know how expensive it will be.”

“Are $10k for expenses and seven days of pay acceptable?”

“Wait, just like that?”

“Money is of less importance to us than any information you might find.”

Instead of saying something, he fiddled with his credled, and then extended his arm, so that my Incarnate could read the account information.

The transfer of the money, anonymously, naturally, was done almost instantly.

Not that he noticed that.

“Uh, won’t you read the account information?”

“This is a bot. We have already done so and transferred the money. Do you require a written list of the persons we ask you to investigate?”

“Uhm, no, not necessary. We… well, we record these meetings routinely.”

It goes without question that the Incarnate’s ‘face’ showed absolutely no emotions, considering that it was a simple plate of carbon with a speaker grille and a pair of optical sensors. Nonetheless, Sharpes held up his hands in a warding motion.

“Don’t get angry. Again, our usual clientele is rarely so considerate to provide a written list or even repeat themselves. They expect that we listen carefully and get it right the first time.”

“We were not going to say anything. The only information this recording will provide is that you talked to an Incarnate, with an artificial voice. While Incarnates are still somewhat rare, there are already several dozen of them in New York City alone.

Q-links are cheap, and anybody can get them, diadems to remote control the Incarnate are cheap and plentiful. The only name we provided, except the ones we offered to provide a written list of, is obviously false.

But it would be better if you either tell your other clients beforehand or not at all.”

He sighed heavily.

“You are right, but many of those big egos will explode anyway. But whatever… say, this Incarnate seems pretty useful. What does it cost?”

“Considering your rates, we fear it is at least at this time outside of your budget. This model costs 42 grand.”

He nearly exploded in a coughing fit and took a moment to catch himself.

“Fuck! Who do they think they can fleece that amount of money for a simple bot?”

“We assume you have no experience with what you call simple bots. Or you would know that a human-sized android with a halfway natural moving profile and enough manual dexterity to function as a proxy starts at around $35,000. And that is without the stereoscopic full spectrum optical sensors and the hologram projector.

As it is, a bot of the same quality as an Incarnate would have set you back around $80k just a few months ago. If you were able to find one in the first place.”

His eyes widened in surprise.

“No shit? Damn, why are they so expensive? I thought you could get a nice android for around 10k.”

“A used one with a standard bot moving profile. The way that bots usually have jerky motions. They also lack the manual dexterity for much that a human hand can do.”

“So… not so expensive? But seriously, who do they think they are making those things for?”

“Not people like you. To be fair, they do not make them for people like us either.” Yes, I was lying through my vocoder here, but I was for sure not telling him that.

“The Incarnate is designed for corporations. To facilitate a meeting without the need to travel from L5, the Moon, or the Outer System. For those people, even the four hours they spend on travel to or from the Moon a single time is worth more than an Incarnate.”

“Too true. Those rich fucks care more about their personal comfort and time than anything else.”

“Is there anything else to discuss or do you understand the job?”

“Yeah, I understand it. We will get it done, no worry.”

“Then we wish you a nice day.”

I stood the Incarnate up and began moving it towards the door.

With that, I disconnected from the bot, and let Warden maneuver it back home. Yes, it was just an Incarnate, and it did only cost me $1200 in materials but waste not, want not.

I then began with the next step of my plan. Again, most likely in futility, but it did cost me nothing to try the low-hanging fruits.

I found Blumenthal’s gallery computer in the matrix. As usual, it was up and running. In this time and age, only people very concerned about computer security shut their computers down as a standard measure.

Also, as usual, it ran on Envision. Envision 42 to be exact. With Office 40. I spare you the boring nothing burger that this entailed.

Yes, I got the financial data of the gallery, but that was all. He had not even a last-generation firewall or antivirus, for goodness sake. Not that he needed it for this machine. It was just the front after all.

Because I had nothing better to do than probe his fixer system, despite not expecting to get very far with it, I did exactly that.

I would love to tell you a tale of the daring and dangerous infiltration that I managed, capture you with a description of how I overcame all those sophisticated security systems and fought tooth-and-nail against some horrendously brutal hunter-killer program… alas, it was not to be.

Yes, this system was considerably more secure than the one of the gallery, but that is like saying that a molehill is considerably higher than a hole in the ground.

The gallery system had no security whatsoever, while the fixer system had something posing as a security system. Oh, fine, it was an actual security system… in 2240 when it was created.

When I encountered it, 10 years later, it was no longer the tough cookie that it had been, for the first few months of its existence.

And even then it was not quite the top of the line. Needless to say, it took me longer to identify it, with nearly 12 seconds, than to beat it.

Now, if I had any doubt that Blumenthal’s profession as a fixer was equally a front as that as an art dealer, those would have gone the way of the dodo.

I got his whole system copied, which took around 1.2 hours.

It took Warden and me nearly three hours to have it thoroughly analyzed.

It took so long because we, well I, could not believe that this was it. That there was no hidden cache, no secret data, nothing.

It was, in one word, banal. Even the database that I had stolen from Vasilienkov was more up-to-date than that. I found entries for several people who I learned quickly were deceased. Don’t get me wrong, they were not entries for people that were dead, but active.

One thing the analysis made clear was that this database had not been updated for a bit more than three years.

Essentially since he had arrived in NYC.

So far, this little excursion had been a bust, not that I had expected anything else. What I did expect though was that his third system would yield some information that I was interested in.

There was just one tiny problem. I had to find it first. It should have been no problem, as I had, theoretically, just to follow any matrix links into the building. Unfortunately, things couldn’t be that easy.

Oh sure, there were still a few links in, but those were the standard TV connection, a basic com, and a couple of the ubiquitous connections that one gets with any utility company.

No computer, not even a smart TV. Yes, there were ways to hide a connection. But those ways were… well not obvious, but with the right tools easy enough to spot.

And there was nothing of the sort here. If he had just started out, or it had been a few years since Enki released the Q-links, I would suspect that he used one. But he had set up shop around 3½ years ago.

There was no way that he had implemented a Q-link then. That left just one option. He had another location where he had the computer system and anything else he wanted to hide.

Now it was on Mr. Sharpes. For now at least. I had some ideas on how to work around the issue. I just needed time, and maybe some help.