“Artificial intelligence,” Mendelsohn said. “That’s what QuantiFIE was working on. Artificial intelligence that could add to and subtract from this algorithm when necessary in order to improve itself during problem solving.”
I blinked. “So...QuantiFIE had a learning AI and this Grendel stole it.”
“A copy of it, anyway,” Wittman said.
“And the Grendel also stole two high-powered servers.” My mind churned for a second. “You think the Grendel might be planning to...?”
“Some assembly required?” Mendelsohn got to the end of my assumption before I was required to fill it out myself. “It could be. Though the purpose is very unclear at present. The algorithm plus a couple high-capacity computers?” He shook his head. “There has to be more to it than that. The algorithm isn’t complete, and just plugging the servers in and putting the algorithm on them and letting them run? Well, it’d produce nothing.”
“Great, I love it when a terrible criminal has a plan that I can’t see coming together.” I stood, lifting my silver case.
Mendelsohn joined me in standing a moment later. Wittman eyed me—and my case—with something approaching nerves. “What are you planning to do?” he asked.
“I want to see the place where the servers were stolen,” I said. “Think you can arrange that?”
Mendelsohn shot a glance at Wittman, who gave a nod after only a short pause. “I think we can,” Mendelsohn said.
“Great, let’s get to it,” I said, and hefted the silver case as we headed for the door. “See ya later, Cam.”
“Good hunting,” Wittman said, though when I turned, I thought I caught just a hint of something out of him that I hadn’t seen before.
Anger.
15.
“You sent the new address to my associate, right?” I asked as we stepped out of the car in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mendelsohn said.
“Great,” I said, wondering if having Friday show up here was going to be a good thing or a bad one.
Tenderloin was an interesting neighborhood, at least visually. Older buildings were mingled in with some refaced ones, giving the place a feel that this area had been around for a while and was turning over, some serious gentrifying in progress. This stretch seemed to be one that had really been worked over by the construction in the area, and while I saw a few tents with homeless people sitting in them just across the road, they seemed a little out of place in this part of the neighborhood.
“Watch your step,” Mendelsohn said, and he sounded a little tense.
I frowned, dragging the silver case out of the car while trying not to ding the paint job. “For what?” I glanced at the homeless across the street. “Those guys?”
“No,” Mendelsohn said, and pointed at the ground.
I looked down. “Oh.”
There were a half dozen discarded syringes just lying in the gutter about ten inches from my foot. I looked down the street and saw more of them. A lot more.
“Okay, that’s a new one for me,” I said, and turned as Mendelsohn circled the limo over to my side. He kept his eyes on his feet until he was on the sidewalk, and then he paused, looking at the side of the building ahead.
I turned to see what had caught his attention, and my jaw dropped.
A homeless man was squatting against the side of a brick building, pants around his ankles. The veins were bulging out in his neck, and he was clearly straining to get his poop out.
“I’m sorry,” Mendelsohn said, once again blushing.
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to avert my eyes. “This is a thing that happens all the time. Usually indoors, in a toilet facility. I’m a little surprised to see it happening right here in the open because I thought I was in San Francisco, not Afghanistan, but hey. We live, we learn.”
“San Francisco has a few problems,” Mendelsohn said. “But they’re working on it. Trying new things. Hoping for a solution.”
I just nodded along, trying to synchronize my position on the street with where I suspected the camera was that recorded the robbery. I looked around, caught sight of a similar-looking facade on a building across the street, then turned until I found the camera in question. It was about twenty feet up on the side of the nearest building, mounted to the wall but disguised in a piece of signage.
“Found it?” Mendelsohn asked, catching me with a smile. He already knew what I was up to. “The van was parked here.” He’d positioned himself on the curb next to a VW van that would have looked more in place in the San Francisco of the 1970s than modern day.
“Thanks,” I said, and looked for signs of broken glass, a telltale mark of the place where the burglary had occurred. I frowned when I didn’t find it.
“There are street cleaners that come through here daily,” Mendelsohn said, once again guessing at my gutter-peering. “They’re here for the syringes but they tend to sweep up the broken glass, too.”
I gave him my best cock-eyed look. “Hell of a place, San Francisco.”
“Like I said, they’re working on it. Auto burglaries are down year over year, so...”
“Progress,” I said, positioning myself close to where I thought the break-in had happened. With all the glass swept away, and the news of daily syringe sweep-ups, I doubt there’d be a hell of a lot of physical evidence to see. Even if that VW van hadn’t been parked smack dab in the middle of where the break-in had occurred.
“In your wildest dreams, what might you like to find at this location?” Mendelsohn asked. There was a deep quality to his tone, a richness to his voice that suggested he’d have been a hell of a radio man.
“The Grendel all belted up in the heaviest restraints known to man,” I said, stepping off the curb behind the van. “Failing that, some sort of evidence or witness that gives me a clue I can work with to move toward that goal.”
“An eminently worthy aim,” Mendelsohn pronounced. “Do you do any canvassing in situations like this?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “You ever do any police work?”
He waved me off as he shook his head. “No, all I know about police work I’ve learned from books and television.” He pointed to the tent across the street. “Care to try your luck talking to the locals?”
“I might just give that a try, yeah,” I said, thinking it over. I’d turned up a clue or two in the past talking to local homeless populations. If they were willing to talk, they tended to have seen more than your average passerby, mostly because they spent more time on the street and were thus more attuned to odd goings-on than your average millennial phone-dweller, who you could barely get to look up from their screen by setting off a grenade in front of them.
“I imagine that could be an interesting conversation,” Mendelsohn said. He sounded genuinely enthused.
I eyed his shoes. “Maybe take a few steps back, watch this from a distance? Not sure how street people will react to a managing director.”
“Let’s find out,” Mendelsohn said, and we both crossed the street, heading toward the tent on the sidewalk.
The guy sitting outside the tent watched me with lackadaisical interest. His eyes were slightly out of focus, and I had a suspicion he was on something, probably the sort of something that resulted in syringes being dropped all over the sidewalks and streets. Track marks on his arms confirmed it for me, but it was nice to know that I could deduce the cause of a thousand-yard stare even across the road.
“Hey,” I said as I closed in. “How’s it going?”
His eyes slid off me, past me, and settled on Mendelsohn behind me. “Hey, Mr. Aaron. How you doing today?”
“I’m doing all right, Jonah,” Mendelsohn said. “How are you feeling? You need a ride to a shelter?”
“I’m okay for now.” Jonah spoke with a slow drawl, his words dribbling out as he felt like letting them. “The shower truck came by this morning,” he said, with something like pride.
“That’s good,” Mendelsohn said.
“Have you seen Uruk or Benji around today?”
I blinked. Uruk? Sounded like one of Reed’s geeky, Lord of the Rings characters.
Mendelsohn seemed to catch my musing. “Uruk was an ancient city of Sumeria.”
“And this Uruk fellow is from there, surely,” I said, oh so dryly.
“Anything is possible,” Mendelsohn said.
“I saw Uruk earlier,” Jonah said. “Benji...he hasn’t been around for a while.” He stared off, eyes taking on a dreamlike quality. Now he was looking miles past us, though he was still talking to us like we were off in the wild blue yonder with him.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mendelsohn said, closing in on Jonah. Jonah didn’t really react to his presence, but I saw Mendelsohn slip him a hundred, pushing it into Jonah’s palm tightly. “Get yourself something to eat, friend.”
“Will do, Mr. Aaron,” Jonah said, slowly blinking his eyes and then letting out a contented sigh.
“We should talk to Uruk,” Mendelsohn said.
“I’m not going to Mesopotamia today,” I said. Mendelsohn gave me a blank look, and I was forced to concede. “Fine, it was a lame joke. Where would you suggest we look?”
“About a block from here there’s a mission,” Mendelsohn said, pointing north. “Sometimes the locals gravitate there.”
“Before we do, though,” I said, “why are we looking for this Uruk?”
“He was on the video you watched,” Mendelsohn said. “He was the one in the yellow t-shirt.”
That raised my eyebrow again. Mendelsohn not only knew some of the homeless in the area, but was friendly with them to the point that they were on a casual, first-name basis. I started to wonder if he was, in fact, one of those oh so rare nice guys of myth and legend.
Before I had a chance to really follow that thought to its conclusion, my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I shifted the weight of my silvery case and went fishing in my pocket for it, eventually coming up with it to find that the caller ID said it was Shaw calling me. “Whassup?”
“I’m your boss,” Shaw said, sounding a little put out. “You could at least say, ‘Whassup, boss-man.’ Show some respect.”
“Whassup, boss-man?” I asked, pausing to press my cell phone to my cheek with one shoulder while shifting the silver case to my other hand. It wasn’t that heavy, but it was really awkward and digging into my fingers. Whoever had designed this thing hadn’t bothered studying ergonomics.
“I got a report from the Midtown office that you checked a little something special out of the armory,” Shaw said. “All I have to say about that is...please don’t make my life hell in any way with it.”
“No promises,” I said. “It’s not really the sort of thing that lends itself to making your life easier. Mine, probably. But yours? Nah.”
“Please,” Shaw said. “Just...please. Second, we have another strike by the Grendel.”
“Tell me it was in a mead hall in Norway.”
“Close. A robotics lab in Chicago. Last night.”
I full-on frowned. “What the hell? It drove through the night to Chicago and hit another target? What is this thing after?”
“Not sure,” Shaw said, “but I’m guessing it flew, in its human form. Also, I think you’ll find this interesting. The lab they hit is a recent acquisition of Inquest.”
“The search engine?” I asked, still fully frowning. Inquest had taken the crown from Google a year or two ago, which was no mean feat given that ‘Google’ was synonymous for internet searching at this point. Still, they’d done it, to much trumpeting and a thousand think pieces predicting the death of more tech giants in the steady, convulsive orgy that was technological disruption. I didn’t quite buy that; Inquest hadn’t actually killed the competition yet. After all, they’d just won the traffic war for a year now.
“Correct,” Shaw said. “I guess they’re a cash-rich business, so they’re buying a bunch of stuff.”
“As one does, when one is cash-rich,” I said. “Personally, I’m going to start buying fur coats when you guys finally acknowledge my true worth and pay me as such.”
Shaw laughed, but it was so fake. “You’re a government employee, Nealon. Your worth is whatever the pay scale says it is, and good luck getting a dime more. Anyway, get this—the co-CEOs of Inquest are apparently aware of your case and want a meeting.”
I kept frowning and looked to Mendelsohn. “Where’s Inquest’s HQ?”
“Mountain View,” he said, pointing south. “Back in Silicon Valley.”
“Did they ask for a certain time slot?” I asked Shaw. “Or should I just stop in whenever?”
“Sooner would be better,” Shaw said. “You know how these rich folks get when they don’t have something they want done on their schedule. These people definitely are donors, Nealon. I know you don’t give a fig who you piss off, but I would strongly advise you to step carefully on this one. That comes straight from Chalke.”
“Then I will definitely treat it as such,” I said.
There was a pause. “That means you’re going to make a mess of this just for the hell of it, doesn’t it?”
“I swear I never start these things,” I said. “But like the Stone Cold Stunner, I’m a hell of a finisher.”
“You really are like Steve Austin. I never put that together until now.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m chasing one weak-tea lead and then I’ll head right over to Inquest. Anything else for me, or should I get back to work?”
“Seriously, Nealon, that case you’re carrying—”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll limit the collateral damage.” I hung up, because there was nothing else he was going to say in that vein that I needed or wanted to hear.
“Something up?” Mendelsohn asked. “With Inquest?”
“Grendel hit one of their subsidiaries, a robotics lab in Chicago,” I said. “Any thoughts on why he’d be doing that?”
Mendelsohn seemed to give it some thought, pursing his lips, brow furrowed, but finally he came out with, “It’s an interesting data point. Not sure I could spin it into any conclusions, though.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go see if we can find this Uruk, then maybe we can get down to the business of seeing what Inquest lost and Grendel found.” I shook my head. This case was getting weirder all the time.
The sound of distant buzzing grew louder as I stood there, on the sidewalk, surrounded by discarded needles and a tent, as the buzzing turned into a small roar, like an outboard motor. For a second I wondered if we were close to the bay, but then I saw it turn the corner.
A moped.
With Friday on it.
He was hulked out, twice the width of a normal man, muscles on top of his muscles. He looked comically stupid riding on that little thing, like he’d tip over easily if he wasn’t possessed of meta balance.
With everyone on the street watching, he cruised up to me and brought the moped to a stop, deploying his kickstand. He was, of course, wearing his signature black mask, like a luchador, a gimp, a bank robber, or maybe some combo of the three. He had a kid’s backpack draped across his too-big shoulders, and once he’d parked, he revved the moped as he grinned at me.
I cringed at the loudness of the motor. I was pretty sure he had no muffler on that, and part of me wondered how he’d lost it. Then I noticed that his weight was bending the frame, the moped dipping awfully close to the ground. Question answered.
Mendelsohn just stared at him, then shot a look at me. “Is this a friend of yours?”
“Not a friend,” Friday said in that overly dramatic voice, deep and yet husky at the same time. “We’re family.”
I swallowed my pained pride at his appearance, and said, ruefully, “Aaron Mendelsohn, this is Guy Friday.” I took a deep breath, cringing inwardly at Friday’s stupid grin. “He’s my uncle.”
16.
When we got to the mission, Mendelsohn went in to inquire about Uruk. I stayed outside, mostly because everyone in the place was giving me
the eye, probably thinking I was here to bust them for something. Which I totally wasn’t. Either way, between me drawing the attention of the residents like I was 5-0 and Friday swollen to the approximate size of a Cadillac Escalade, I decided to wait outside.
Friday, for whatever reason, decided to wait with me.
Yay.
“So...how are things?” he asked, about as awkwardly as you might expect given it was Friday. We were leaning up against the stained brick wall outside, and a guy about twenty feet away was staring at me defiantly, preparing a heroin needle for injection, practically daring me to do something about it. The smell of garbage and human waste filled my metahuman senses, though there were no obvious signs of either from where I stood.
“Well, I died yesterday,” I said. “So there’s that.”
“I die sometimes, too,” Friday said, nodding sagely. “And am reborn, every morning. Like a phoenix rising from flames. Except I rise from a bed.”
“No, I mean actually died yesterday,” I said, arms folded. “The villain we’re after? It’s a Grendel-type metahuman. It killed me.” I caught Friday peering down at me out of his mask, eyes wide with alarm. “What? I got better,” I said with a shrug.
“Oh, right, you said something like that already—waitaminute.” He straightened, his breathing picked up, and suddenly he sounded a little like the moped revving. “This thing killed you?” He slapped a giant fist into the palm of his other hand. “I am now honor-bound to avenge you by murdering this...‘Gremlin.’”
“Grendel,” I said. “But hey, fine, murder it. Awesome by me. Don’t expect an easy fight, though. The thing has invulnerable skin, bone claws—”
“So it’s like Wolverine?”
I shook my head because the fact I’d drawn that comparison made me uneasy to believe I thought anything like Friday. “It’s a lot bigger than a normal human.” I looked up at his commanding bulk. “It’s probably a little smaller than you are right now. But with yellow skin.”
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