“Thank you so much, Lobo,” she said, her voice strained with fatigue. “You’ve no idea how much it means to us.”
“I think I do,” Lobo replied. “Come — I’ll show you where you can sleep.”
They followed him up the staircase, taking care to not trip in one of the many dips and breaks that ran up the steps. He went down the carpeted hallway for a short distance before turning left and opening a half-ajar door.
“Now don’t get too excited,” he said as he led Beth into the gloomy room. “We don’t have enough space to really give you a room of your own, but this part of the house is always the most empty. The folk in here are so strung out they probably won’t wake up for another day or so. You’ll just have to find an empty spot on the floor to post up.”
He reached into a closet just by the doorway and pulled out a cloth bundle, tossing it to Beth. She caught it and realized, after a few seconds, that it was a ratty sleeping bag.
“It’s the best we have,” Lobo said. “I’m sorry.”
Beth tried to smile politely. “Thank you,” she said.
Lobo nodded, then disappeared through the entrance.
The detective took her smelly bedding over to the far corner of the room, by one of the side facing windows. She had to watch her step as she made her way through the labyrinth between sleeping, drug-dosed forms snoring on the floor. She sighed a little once she got to her corner. She unrolled the sleeping bag and laid on top of it, rather than in it.
Beth’s thoughts turned miserable as she took in the whole situation. One of the top detectives in her precinct, forced to take shelter in a house full of junkies. She felt cold and lost, like a child who let go of her parents’ hands while walking through a crowd. She was scared and wanted to cry out for someone to help her. To just take her in under their wing, coddle her, and tell her everything was going to be okay.
But everything isn’t going to be okay, is it? she wondered.
“That’s up to us,” Simon said.
In the midst of drowning in sad thoughts, Beth managed to find some peace and drift off to sleep.
History
Simon and Beth spent every waking moment at the Fog house researching the enemy they were up against. Some of the junkies would wake up, leave, come back, and do more drugs, but the detective did her best to ignore them. Her nose wrinkled every time she smelled a little sweet wisp of meth or a puff of sour Fog, but she’d just cover her mouth and continue delving into the mountain of information she had at her disposal.
The I.I. was still using his private network access to reach out into the wealth of data stored on the world wide web with complete anonymity. He’d find useful articles, news clips, or records and pass them along to Beth, who remained disconnected from the Net the whole time. It was almost like Simon was laundering the information for her, the way a criminal organization might launder money.
Lobo would come in and check on them every now and then, but Beth and Simon were too immersed in their research to say much to him. He’d bring food occasionally, usually some single-ingredient sandwich or a poorly heated bowl of soup. Beth was gracious each time he fed her, even if the meal turned her stomach a little.
They were trying to trace the story of Blake Tarov to its origin. Using a combination of news articles and viral videos, they were able to paint a picture of the militia leader’s rise to power. Nothing mentioned the fact that he was actually an artificial intelligence in disguise, of course — at least not in the public records. Simon had all the evidence they needed of that, but there were some pieces missing. Who created the Tarov A.I.? Why? These were all questions that they could almost answer. Maybe something out there on the public domain held the key. Something that had been overlooked.
Blake Tarov the installed intelligence, as the story goes, first made his public appearance in a viral video taken nearly a decade ago. The clip showed the now master general of the Liberators in a bodyshell fighting off a handful of human supremacists — or sapes, as some folk had taken to calling them. The sapes were trying to attack a storage bank full of I.I.s somewhere in Dallas, but Tarov saw the incident and intervened.
The bodyshell he used looked like a crude representation of the digital man Beth had encountered online. It had his broad shoulders, his hulking stature, and even his big, muscled face — though represented through stony gray plastic. The bodyshell seemed under an intense amount of strain as the video’s cameraman tried to keep him in the frame. The I.I. was taking cover behind a van while the human terrorists fired at him with automatic rifles. Once he sensed a break in the fire, Tarov squared his shoulders and started to push the van sideways towards the attackers. The cameraman followed, desperate to stay in cover and not get shot himself.
Sparks flew from the van’s wheels as they scraped along the pavement. He pushed with such steady strength that the axles bent and the hubcaps were dragged on the street while he pushed the vehicle against the grain, so to speak. The sapes were almost so taken aback by the I.I.’s actions that they forgot to return fire. They only got a few shots into the van before Tarov coiled up and shoved the van as hard as he could. The force sent the machine rolling towards the sapes like a crocodile in a death spiral, closing the twenty-yard gap and slamming into the terrorists.
The cameraman had been so blown away by what he’d
