The puppy had been right outside the bath. A steady stream of tourists entering the ancient site ensured good begging for the tiny hound. Dax had found the mutt in that spot the last three times it got away. Cheeto was his girlfriend's dog. He was following her on a Jane Austen, Victorian fantasy vacation, and now he appeared to be the designated animal wrangler.

Dashing into the Bath toward the loud commotion Dax took a right and headed to the Pump House, where he and Cheryl had tea the previous day. A yelp, followed by barking and some aggressive growling revealed Cheeto to be sheltering under a large circular table that was currently hosting high tea. One elderly woman sporting a hat that could have hidden a whole pheasant seemed delighted and was clearly offering part of a biscuit to the underside of the table while cooing lightly. The rest of the table held a dowdy universal expression of affront.

It was probably the biscuit rather than the cooing that brought Cheeto to her side of the table. Dax's apology was immediately cut short, "Nonsense! This little fellow is the brightest spot of this insipid tea." The affront at the table turned up a few notches, but all of the stares were directed straight at Dax. Never adept in social situations, the present tableau left him at a complete loss. Fortunately, a well-suited individual from the sidelines inserted a calling card into his hand as he simultaneously extracted Cheeto and guided him away from the table, with a nod of ‘Mum' to the elderly lady.

---

Eric stared at the shabby carpet tile peeling away from the ground. It was a constant bump demarcating the furthest edge his office chair could range. An unnecessary annoyance, but he never moved past it. Just as he'd never move past this assignment, a constant reminder of past sins enveloping his days. The file was pitifully small, and the year spent in this basement hadn't expanded it more than a few kilobytes.

The missing girl had been fourteen when she disappeared. She'd be sixteen now.

Off and on for the last year, Eric had explored school records within this depressing basement. Such documents were highly restricted. Even as a guild investigator he could get years of labor for disclosing any of the stupid, trivial details from the recorded daily lives of these children. He couldn't bring to bear more advanced sifting routines. He had raw access when physically present, and the threat of punishment to prevent bringing anything out or for that matter anything useful in. There was no question the answer was in the records, making his continuing failure more depressing than the dank room.

The girl was the daughter of senator Blake. Eric wasn't the original primary on the case back when it was a media sensation. He lucked out on getting it as his own semi-permanent open file because he discovered the first clues showing the missing girl was actually a run away rather than a kidnapping. The original crime scene, video of the abduction, and the contact from the kidnappers had all been staged. Not by a rival or a syndicate, but by the girl. It was a masterful artifice on the part of a fourteen-year-old Alex Blake, and it was a wildly unpopular truth to deliver to his commander, much less the senator. The media, of course, loved it.

Putting the headset on, Eric was immersed in the student coffee house as it appeared three years ago. The décor was shabby, and the students looked to shop solely at thrift shops. However, none of these students were starving. The school was not just private, it was selective. The authentic flannel shirt draping Daniel, the fourteen-year-old boy at the counter was undoubtedly a designer concoction that was actually made by hand and never committed to a template. The truly awful shirt on Alex, the girl buying coffee was handmade by her mother the senator. Making and mending clothes had become a common hobby of the wealthy. Displaying true talent was oddly considered gauche that year. Today that wasn't as true which marked that 2 year period with an odd halo of nostalgia.

Eric had rerun this scene for the last few days looking for anything hidden in the seemingly innocuous transaction. The boy was now known to be an aiborg, but it wasn't clear when that happened. There was no doubt he hadn't started that way. He hadn't even implanted anything exotic, beyond some off-market memory extensions common to hundreds of thousands of people, but somehow he went from enhanced preteen to shell for a very nasty AI. The kid seemed normal here, and he appeared normal all the way until the confrontation more than a year later that left the two from the faculty and the boy dead.

"Alex! Mach?" ‘Yep. Anything happening?' The grinder interrupted for a full ten seconds, as the beans were ground. Pulling the portafilter away, Daniel leveled the grounds, grabbed the flat packer and leaned in slightly. Pulling the packer out he tapped the side twice, dropped it lightly on top and spun it to create a perfectly flat top to the grounds.

"Have you heard Dogtooth is playing the Mediterranean kitchen?" The portafilter was slammed into place and reaching for the manual lever, "They are playing under a false name, something like ClownMonkey." The espresso was pulled straight into a ceramic cup.

Eric paused before young Alex could respond. The espresso shot hung partly in the air mid pull. Eric had long ago verified a giant act like Dogtooth had actually played at the unlikely hole in the wall. They played under the name BozoApe, which the first time through he considered close enough. Now, however, he was taking another look.

ClownMonkey rather than BozoApe? Was this some method for signaling or passing info? If so how? Eric kicked off differential searches on clown bozo, ape monkey, clown ape, and bozo monkey. Watching the first results trickle in, he grimaced and stopped it. A better lead was needed to crack this damn case. There was some connection, but he had watched all twenty-seven instances these two had met on campus. All the meetings were just as brief, and just as seemingly innocuous. This was the last time they met before she disappeared.

The stream of espresso frozen in front of him suddenly triggered his own need for a break. Pulling the headset off, Eric clambered out of the basement toward the very same coffee shop.

The teenage girl at the counter had pigtails, one pink, the other orange. "Can I get a macchiato?" Pulling out a ceramic cup she turned toward a different machine, stuck the cup under and hit a button. "That's six eighty."

As he paid, "Hey why not use this machine right here?" Pointing at the chrome covered manual espresso machine he had seen used over and over.

"That? I'm not even sure it works. It's really old, like an antique." "Ah. So when did it break?" "Hmm, not sure. It hasn't worked as long as I've been here. At least five years." "Mind if I take a look at it?" "It's already broken, go for it."

Eric pulled out his phone and started scanning the machine. It took a second to get a wireframe, and it was extrapolating the bottom, so he awkwardly tilted it up to get a read on that angle. A quick search showed it was a manual espresso machine. He could get an exact copy on Craigslist for a weeks pay, but it wouldn't be a working model. Damn.

There was no help for it. The scan would take 4 days to clear protocol controls before it would be allowed into the basement to compare with the video. Eric knew it wouldn't match. The machine he had seen was working. How many people knew how to keep something like that in good repair?

Alex looked up from the screen and squinted at the flames. The smell of burning wood satisfied some unarticulated need. Moving closer, letting the radiating heat burn tension away from shoulders tight with crouching and sporadic bursts of typing, a stray thought brought back the task at hand.

"Where did you say your parents were from?" ‘Milwaukee, though they moved away after I was I born. I don't remember it, and only visited it a few times.' "Oh yeah, sorry. Did you have any siblings?" ‘Nope, only child.'

Time is a factor, and this was dragging on way too long. That only child thing could be an easy out, avoiding the whole branch of questions about brothers or sisters. Possible weakness? Is it better to go for a gut check or a fact check? The clients hate gut checks, but this profile is practically made to evade the pure fact route.

"How long was your longest romantic relationship?" ‘I was engaged to Kylie, but we broke it off after the long distance thing didn't work. I guess we were together for 6 years. The last two weren't really together since we were in different time zones.'

Bingo. If this is an AI from any of the known background DBs rich enough for the last forty minutes of conversation, an eft run will determine it in 15 minutes with a 99.85 success rate Loading the eft chat Bot, Alex turned back to the fire and hoped for a negative. The last forty minutes had convinced her this was a real guy. It would be a shame to initiate a terminate if that wasn't true.

Alex had terminated hundreds of undeclared AIs, but only three had ever fooled her longer than 20 minutes. She had a false positive error rate below 0.5%, which given how expensive terminate protocols were, was a stat that made her well sought after for this gig. A terminate protocol that trashed part of a real persons' identity, before failing to find any actual AI, was a damn expensive mess to clean up.

The fire had consumed most of the logs. Opening the stove door, a warm rush of air blew embers around the firebox, and Alex pulled back her arm from the increased heat. Grabbing a log, she shoved it in amidst a swirl of ash and a few glowing embers. The door shut again, the wood remained stubbornly flame-free for a few seconds. When it caught, a halo of flames swirled around the window.

A knock on the door startled Alex away from the image. What the hell? Reflexively she glanced at the time left on the eft chat. No definitive result. Only three minutes remaining. Unfolding from her position at the fire, Alex heard a more insistent knock. There was nothing she expected delivered. Who else would be knocking at the doorway out here without at least a text message first? Wary, she grabbed a stun stick and edged to the door. Standing to the side, she yelled through, "Who is it?"

No answer and the handle started turning! With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Alex stabbed the stun stick at the door handle. A loud snap and a gurgling sound on the other side prefaced someone slumping against the door. It was locked … Right? I know I had to have locked it. Grabbing another stun stick, she opened the door enough to let a tall twenty-something flop into the entry. A nervous glance outside, found herself cursing her own foolishness. What good is a stun stick if this guy had backup further away? Dragging the limp body inside was harder than she imagined. Working a keyboard doesn't do much for building muscle.

Panting with the effort, she slumped against the wall and realized there was a car parked outside. At this point, probably best to use it and relocate. Getting her head on straight first, she shot a picture of mystery boy. Yeah, he was older, but he had that look that still screamed boy, and got all the pretty girls swooning. Bet he's a real douchebag. She then grabbed his fingerprints as well. Too bad that gurgling sound he made probably wasn't enough to determine a voice print. Looking at the fireplace, she gave a somewhat ineffectual kick to his ribs, in retaliation for needing to leave such an awesome pad.

Damn … I think I may have hurt my foot more than him. He must have augs or boosts. Glad he didn't have anything anti-stun. Sometimes old school is the best. No one uses one shot stuns anymore.

Grabbing her carryall, Alex stuffed in her computer, food from the fridge, and a bottle of whiskey to drink on the way. In passing, she saw the chatbot was still going seventeen minutes past a definitive answer. No time for that now though, it can wait until she was away from this county.

Carry all on her back, Alex pulled up an adapter to reprogram the car. No point in letting whoever sent this track her. She'd have a virtual decoy drive elsewhere. The car was a really cool looking antique replica, with an absurdly tiny interior. It even had a steering wheel, which was really cool in a totally impractical way. Hard to imagine sitting behind that thing while driving just for the sake of authenticity, maybe it folds back into the bonnet?

The doors were open. Unfortunately, Alex couldn't see an adapter anywhere. The damn thing was taking authenticity to an absurd extreme. Was it one of those custom jobs with only wireless programming and an insanely long one-time pad? The inside was studded with instruments and knobs and levers. Some hidden away out of easy reach. And how the hell would anyone get work done in this thing?

She found a lever that released the front bonnet a small amount. It seemed to be an entirely mechanical release. Five minutes of frustration followed by incomprehension, staring at a combustion engine in the bonnet... It was hot, smelling of the mechanical things of a bygone era.

Then from behind: "It's not a replica. It's real sunbeam tiger."