Katria continued to play with him over the years.
Snazz returned with an analysis of the data. Katria skimmed it and highlighted a few points she found interesting:
• Spanker ghetto (from Cloud statistics)
• The two demons were living together (DNA traces found on the scene)
• Voice of demon was likely female and in distress (voice analysis done by the angel)
Despite the fact that satellites and sniffers would arrive soon, there were thousands of potential suspects in the search radius, so Katria knew she needed to narrow down her suspect list. Of course, she would start with the most obvious, a direct match. That would be what the satellites would look for first, but it was difficult to get a positive ID from overhead. If that did not work, then they would look for female runners in the radial zone in which the demon could theoretically be. The demon already had over a minute head start and, according to her profile, was a very swift runner. This would make for a rather large search area.
I have another sat online, Rhemus reported. How about those sniffers?
The first one will be here in ’bout twenty secs, Katria replied. Your sats catch any candidates?
A couple of running girls, but nothing definite. Body type on all of ’em seem a little off.
Probably just spankers, Katria responded. But we should check them anyway. Our girl might have customized.
The term “customized” referred to the common practice of demons changing their appearance using various illegal means, such as gene therapy or old-fashioned plastic surgery.
It took less than a minute for the first sniffer that arrived to check the candidates, which all came back negative. Katria scowled and blinked a message to Rhemus. Have sats feed my sniffers all the women in the area, starting with the ones farthest out in the search zone. She might not be running; she might be smarter than that.
Rhemus pinged confirmation.
As the first sniffer widened its search to include all women, the next sniffer arrived, to which she assigned the task of picking up the girl’s trail from her estimated last location.
You can either run or you can hide, Katria thought. If you run, we’ll see you run and get you faster. If you hide, we’ll sniff you out and find you later.
But there was a third option, one employed by the more clever demons she had hunted. The demon could be trying to blend in. Perhaps this one thinks she can simply walk away, Katria mused.
Only minutes later Katria started having doubts, discovering that all the women came back negative.
Damn, maybe our demon isn’t a woman. Maybe it’s a man who used a voice disrupter. Katria felt her stomach wrench as the thought came to her. No, the DNA in the apartment could not lie. The demon is female. But maybe she’s disguised, using an illusionary veil or something.
Yeah, I already thought of that, Rhemus chimed in. Katria was startled, as she had not realized she was broadcasting her thoughts through the blink. The sats aren’t just watching for chicks. I’m tagging anyone hauling ass out of the area.
What if she’s disguised and just walks out? Katria countered.
Yeah, that would suck, Rhemus replied. We need to sniff everyone who leaves. Do you have the bots for that?
Katria inspected the foot traffic patterns. Most people were leaving the area using designated paths, but some went off trail.
Looks like I’ve got enough to handle it, Katria sent. You just have the sats mark ’em, and the sniffers will check ’em.
There was a brief pause and then Katria continued. Anyway, my bet is the bitch isn’t on the surface. She’s probably holed up in one of those mounds-that’s what rats do.
Rats have tunnels, Rhemus sent. You see on the map?
Rhemus displayed the subterranean map of the ghetto. This particular map was not public for some reason, but law enforcement spankers like Rhemus and Katria had access. Wherever there were nanosites, software could map surfaces. All SkinWare maps were accessible to law enforcement with a permit, an electronic permit that took Rhemus only a few seconds to request and obtain.
Katria said, I’m seeing three subterranean tunnels out of the ghetto. Since we don’t have sats to help out under there, I’m going to have to assign a bot to guard each tunnel. Damn!
Yeah, it’s going to cost you some resources, but securing the perimeter is priority one. Rhemus stated the obvious.
Just then, Katria got a ping that the scent trail had been found. Finally, some good news, she thought.
Now that the trail was picked up and the exits secured, Katria knew the noose was tightening. In less than a minute, she learned that the demon had indeed gone into one of the mounds. That explained why the satellites had not found her. No problem, she thought. The underground exits are covered.
Still, Katria was not comfortable just sitting back and watching events unfold. Because it was still early in the morning, there was not a lot of traffic on the surface, and so only three bots were busy up top. Three more bots were covering the underground exits, which left two more with nothing to do. All this hardware was costing her points by the second, and there was no benefit in sending the idle ones home since she had already paid for the minimum rental and still had over fifteen minutes left on them. She needed to find the demon sooner rather than later if she was going to come out ahead in this game.
Katria asked herself, How do I find the demon quickly if she’s hiding?
A demon inside a mound could not be observed as easily as one outside. Privacy rules prohibited nanosites- the invisibly small chips used by SkinWare-to be equipped with observation instruments such as cameras; rather, they were designed to simply announce themselves, to be observed, but not to observe back. Outside one’s home was public domain, so satellites could be used on evildoers, but indoor areas were a different matter.
Katria had obtained a search permit for the mounds and therefore could have her extra sniffers check everyone systematically, but that was woefully inefficient, even for machines as fast as these. The tunnels and chambers of the apartment mounds of Anywhere were extensive, to say the least. Worse yet, many of the chambers and tunnels were sealed by doors, hatches, or more exotic impediments, slowing down the sniffers considerably. When a flying Frisbee-shaped sniffer encountered such a portal, usually the most expedient way past was to slice a small slit in the surrounding dro-vine and slip through. If this was not feasible (for example, in classic buildings that did not use dro-vine), the sniffer would extend a set of mechanical arms and picks out from its smooth, shiny hull, but sniffers were not adept at manipulating knobs, handles, and locks designed for human use.
All these factors added up to the fact that the simpleminded tactic of systematically sniffing every resident in Anywhere would be disastrously slow and therefore expensive. Katria decided she needed to filter candidates somehow.
She knew the apartment mound complex was primarily populated with gamers. Certainly the demon was not a gamer since Katria had never heard of such a thing. That single fact separated their demon from just about everyone else in the area.
Rhemus had already obtained a permit to tap into SkinWare, so Katria decided to run a query on all the active games in Anywhere, looking for anyone who was a ghost to all games-that is, a person not logged into any game. Certainly our demon will fall into this category, thought Katria.
Her familiar connected to the games MyLife, Grokstania, Samurai on Top, Lust Bunnies, NeverWorld, Golden Age, Treasure Island, Mission Flipp’n Ridiculous, and Covert Ops V. Only 23.6 % of the population were hits, but that was still 668 people! However, when she narrowed it down to the region to which the sniffer had tracked the demon, it was less than two hundred. Katria immediately dispatched her two idle sniffers to check them.
CHAPTER 14
