There was so much damage done to the whole place. More than enough to make Cassandra reconsider their chances of getting the thieves. While they had been on the defensive since the moment they had first been interacted with, running at the first sign of an officer being there, the woman was beginning to get increasingly worried about what they could truly do when backed into a corner.
When she had gotten the apparent upper hand on one of the thieves, getting them down on the floor, they had been able to incapacitate her for close to a minute of her life, Cassandra being unable to do little more than flab around feebly on the floor. It would have taken little more than a pocket knife to have killed her at that point, yet they clearly hadn't thought of it back then.
Likewise was there a clear potential to do much evil with the help of digital manipulation. From the last ambush, it was clear that their control over machinery was not contained to locked doors and building alarms, the thieves able to control an automation with nothing but a touch to the face.
They could have made the automation do anything. They could have made it go against Cassandra, to disable the safety features in place and make it rip her to pieces. They could have made it into a slave, changing its ideas about rank into them being like a god to them. Jules could have been deleted, an empty vessel filling the construct’s place forever. The amount of damage was unimaginable.
Yet they hadn't done anything close to what they could. Why? Was there still some semblance of a heart in their chests? Did they not feel the greed in their minds yet? Cassandra knew just how despicable criminals could be, so she couldn't mentally figure out why they hadn't exploited the weakness so apparent in the city’s defences. It would take one terminal to the water systems before the whole area was left in ruin. A single hand on the electrical systems would be able to destroy billions of lamps, computers, and whatever other electrical appliances that were currently installed in the homes of millions. It would take much less than a simple overload to kill everything.
How the other officers hadn't realised just how much of a danger it all was had dumbfounded the woman. These people she worked with were supposed to be some of the oldest veterans in the branch, yet even they hadn't yet seen the situation for what it was worth. They were fighting with cowardly gods, able to destroy them all the moment they finally decided to take a swap at it.
Did they think there were limits to what the thieves could do? Could Jared and Grunwald not truly imagine simple thieves with such massive amounts of power? Cassandra could understand that not truly believing anything of the kind during her first time against them. They had been going after a single type of alarm, one not connected to the online servers at all. Cheap garbage, in other words.
It wasn't out of this world that weakness would be found in such a thing. Cassandra was sure that a skilled team could find a few holes in a matter of a single week. When they began to branch out to other parts of the city, going after stores without the same kind of alarms, having security systems worth more than just a million, the woman grew much more cautious. When they were able to hack Jules, a construct renowned for its inability to be touched by any hackers worldwide, Cassandra began to feel fear. When they destroyed billions worth by compromising every system on a whole street, that fear was put into words.
“I don't know if we can win against these people,” Cassandra stated, looking through the items in the backrooms. They had long since left the initial medical store, having gone slowly down the street and methodically checking everything for any stolen objects. Only a few had been found, some being more than a little random. Others were the insides of candy bars, however, so the reasoning behind those was a little more obvious. Even criminals needed calories.
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you call them people,” Jules said from the next shelf over. Cassandra wasn't the only one during her job, after all, the two splitting the task in half. With the help of external systems, they were both able to check through the items at the same speed, most of their part being simply to look at the shelves themselves and let the internal catalogue do the heavy lifting. Everything was digitized, after all, every piece put out having been noted, with the locations written down to the centimetre. Even a simple push to the side, barely more than a small shove, could be seen in the eyes of documentation. Truly an act of micromanagement. “Anything that’s got you to change your mind about these soulless beings?”
Casandra glared through the shelf, looking towards where she guessed the automation she could be. Not that she could look at the piece of junk, the low wall stopping them from having contact visually. Yet… the woman could clearly hear that tone that the construct was putting on. It was making fun of her.
“Every criminal is a person, even if they don’t deserve to be called as such,” Cassandra answered, giving her views of such thieves quite clearly. Every person who could get behind the system needed to work towards changing it instead of simply throwing it out of the window and resorting to mindless violence and thievery. The proper decor was the only way to success, in the end, inner turmoil doing nothing but creating chaos that wouldn't be worth a damn.
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“Yet you call the criminals who did all of this,” Jules began, taking a few louder steps around its own side of the shelf. “People. Just… where do you draw the line here? According to my syste4ms, criminals are those who break the law, yet your method of titling is clearly more than a little different from my own.”
“Criminals commit petty crimes. They steal for their own greed, kill so that they can loot the corpses, and take whatever they fancy. Murder, robbery, extrusion all have the goals of making one richer in some sense,” Cassandra said, briefly stopping at a point to check out what her inner systems were classified as an error. A small round box was seated in a spot supposed to be empty, and the system meant to catalogue items was having a hissy-fit about just what it was supposed to be. It was actually taking more resources than what it was supposed to be allowed to do. What a mess. “What’s done today did nothing close to that. The people behind this did not threaten us with anything. They only destroyed what was around them, with no grander purpose to it. If their goal was to enter each store to steal, there would have only been a need to destroy one window for each.”
“Yet they decided to have a personal vendetta for anything related to glass,” Jules commented, crunching some of the shards under its feet for extra feet. Or maybe the construct just needed to step forward some more. With how much of the stuff littered the ground everywhere, it really was hard to know for sure.
Not all the stores were decorated with translucent material, luckily stopping all the stores from being fully covered in the decorations, yet the wind had clearly done its best to spread what there was as well as it could. In a few of the corners, there were especially more than a few handfuls ready to pick up. Not that the woman would do so, feeling that her fingers were much prettier without being littered with small wounds.
“I don’t think they cared about it specifically. It could be closer to it being the easiest thing to make a mess of,” Cassandra stated, overlooking the store. The one they stood in had been one of the stores left out of the mess the most, yet it was still littered with so much waste that it would be easiest to burn the whole thing down than even think about cleaning it. “A broken TV wouldn't cost as much as this.”
“Not that they could even find one of those at every store,” Juels said with a small laugh. Cassandra tried to reason with herself that the laugh was due to the absurdity of the claim and not because of there being a very dumb hidden joke within. How exactly did it even know of those? Even she had only seen those century-old shows at a whim, yet the construct was having a grand old time quoting them. “Oh! I found one!”
Hm? That was surprising. The two hadn't found anything actually stolen in the last two stores. The first three had shown a good amount of promise, the thieves apparently in love with general stores with how much had been taken off the shelves. Even now, she was unsure of how long a time had been spent on the street, with the number of items that had been thrown off the shelves. Destroying all the windows could have been done in the span of a few minutes, yet taking things off where they sat had to be done manually. It had to have been a solid twenty minutes, at the minimum.
“What is it?” Cassandra asked. If any store had to have been without anything found, the woman had expected it to be the one they stood in at that very moment. Just what could ever be found in a store meant for training activities? It wasn't even that heavily specialized, only selling superficial things for a variety of sports and general activities that required gear. And the place they stood on now just made it make any less sense.
“Wetsuits!” Jules said, throwing an example over the shelf, Cassandra almost not catching due to the absurdity of it all. Not a single time in her career had anybody prepared the woman for constructs going around and throwing wetsuits at her. Truly the biggest failure of her education.
Holding it for herself, Cassandra was able to confirm that, yes, she had a wetsuit in her hand. Quite a big one at that. It would require either a very big or fat man to ever have a chance of making it as tight as it required.
“How many were taken?” Cassandra asked, staring at the suit in front of her. “And what sizes are we talking about?”
If it was more than one, the woman could guess they were being used for all the thieves in the group. And if they all needed one each, then it would make sense to estimate how many there were based on how many had been taken from the store. Though, only the gods knew just why anybody had thought they would need them, to begin with. It wasn't quite the season for anything related to scuba-diving.
“Four,” the automation answered, making the woman instantly think that her assumption was correct. “Two small ones, one medium one, and one extra-large.”
The size differences just confirmed it. They were going to use it for something. If the sizes had been identical, Cassandra could have taken it as a single person planning to use them all for themself, yet there clearly were other plans in the works. But… whatever was it for? They were only meant to be used in water, their abilities to keep people warm not that efficient in the open air. Thick clothing was much easier for such things.
“Note it down and move on. If they took that from here, they might just have taken more,” Cassandra stated. The construct did instantly refute her command, going on for a few minutes about how good it was for already having done it without being asked. The woman just turned it out at the end.
There was much the two went through, the store suddenly becoming that much bigger when the idea about there being some smaller items taken as well. Every piece was combed through, every pile pulled apart so every item within could be checked through. The two spent more time inside that single store than what they had spent inside every other store put together. Truly, it was work well spent.
And it did yield some form of results. Much further into the store, in another section that handled diving of any kind, the officers found yet another piece of swim-gear that wasn't supposed to have even been looked at by the thieves. Yet it had been taken anyway.
“Four full bottles, everything else included within,” Cassandra noted. The thieves had brought out four scuba tanks. From what she knew, such things weighed more than any human should have been comfortable with, and the thieves had taken four of them. If it was only one person, it would have taken several rounds to get. It truly had been easy pickings for them. The woman wasn't sure what to think about it. “I honestly can’t understand them.”
“Could be contract work,” Jules suggested. “Not the first time somebody hires thieves to get items for a lower price.”
Cassandra supposed that was an answer. The prices of such things were extremely high nowadays, and thieves were known to auction items that were found as an extra source of revenue. Yet… it just didn't fit the profile already established. Cassandra couldn't get herself to believe it.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Cassandra said, not able to really find any other way to explain it. Having noted down what was taken in the store, they left it to search for the next. There was much more to look through, after all, and there was little chance that it would be quick.