Basement

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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?