Wander tugged me away from the cops as they finished up. The top of his head looked a little like a sports dome on a foggy day. Little beads of sweat formed there to run down his forehead, and behind his ears. All twitchy around the face, a sign that his version of thinking was trying to engage, I guessed.

Ritchie was in slow burn mode. "What the hell are you doing? Thought you were on research detail, and I find you down here, flopping around on the floor. Nice coat. New?"

"Eh, yeah, just picked it up today. I was trying to find you. Checked the office, all that, so Blackie and me, we thought to check for you at the hospital. One thing and another, we ended up here, got clobbered, you know the rest."

Wander swiveled to look over at some building across the street. His lips thinned to a line, then he snapped, "Okay. You found me. What did you find out?"

I went over the reports I had collated. Ritchie stopped me twice to repeat some of it, especially the Tin-hat journal research. He seemed perturbed about Blackie's mention of the lack of fish smell on my attacker's shoes. I reviewed my memory files to see if there was anything else, but I'm pretty good at details, obviously.

"Mic, I need you to make me a short list of buildings. Places recently rented, that might make for good private lab sites in town. If you spot a Mitchel Davis on a lease somewhere, that'd be a bonus."

"Sure, okay, Ritchie. What's with the interest in the professors hobbies?"

"Just, the guy who roughed you up, Davis, mentioned the project at the hospital had to do with aunties singular cork, or something."

"Eh, that's the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, boss."

"Yeah, the brain. Something to do with putting two and two together upstairs. Becky's Dad wrote a lot about precognition in those hobby journals. Seems similar."

I took a few millisecond cycles to review the articles again. "Well", I temporized, "postulating new information based on trends and past data; is science, not crystal ball gazing. In a way, maybe."

Ritchie went quiet, eyes glazed over, possibly having a seizure or something, then thrust a hand into his torn trench-coat.

"And take this." Ritchie fumbled the cube that had started all this, out of his coat pocket. "Don't loose it, or flash it around." He got quiet for a second, then, "it's time to gab at our client again. I'll do that. Stay off the streets. I'll call you tomorrow, don't try to hunt me down. If there's trouble, call Frank."

A bunch of Frank's notes were already showing up in the police precinct database, an easy hack, so, as I made my way back uptown, I reviewed these. I kept finding myself attracted to other stuff though. Especially on-line gambling sites. I never paid much attention to these sites before, but for some reason, I found myself reserving some bandwidth to browse them, even placed a couple bets on one or two. I couldn't decide why, I automatically calculate the odds on such games, uniformly bad odds, and usually just move on. Maybe it was just the thrust of recent events, but a certain...excitement...seemed to get aroused in me at the thought of beating those odds. Where had that come from?

The ship-to-dock bills of delivery were re-laded for transport to a concern called Carl Ozymandus Researches, Limited. A firm name that traced back to nothing in particular. A real estate transaction did attach to the name though. Dated several months back, and executed miles from here. Nothing under Mitchell Davis. The bills were for tissue knitters. Common enough, for clinics and hospitals where tissue repair was used daily to close wounds, or regenerate the lost flesh of accident victims. They weren't a controlled device. Anyone with a deep pocket could buy one, I suppose. Thing is, they needed charging with undifferentiated stem cells and an associated bio-scaffolding media to work their magic. Those kinds of supplies were controlled substances, available only to licensed hospitals and such. The amount of associated hard and software needed was extensive too. DNA databases, organic template sequencers, that kind of stuff. Unless Davis was hooked up with some kind of uber-wealthy philanthropist bent on opening a free trauma center, or military field hospital, I couldn't see a reason for purchasing, or pilfering them. Maybe he didn't like his ears, and intended to knit up a few dozen new ones. Could be, just a straight up heist, and Davis had been hi-jacking the machine shipment. Could be Ozymandus Ltd was a legit storage site, and the pick-up some favor to the hospital.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

One way to find out. Diaper pants had sent Old Yeller on an errand, so I was free to ride a city bus. The thought of this seemed to evoke a sneer somewhere within me. No reason for that, usually I'm all up for new experiences. Anyway, I had the address for Ozymandus, Ltd.

The metallic gray bus boated up with the grace of a porker with digestion problems. I was previously unaware that hydrogen vehicles, even antiques like this one was, could fume and sputter, but somehow, the miracle was managed. The door opened revealing a tennis racket like affair that blocked your way until you inserted coinage, or a credit marker into a prominent red box next to it. I patched in, to talk with the A.I. bus controller while I took care of the charges. It was a bit dim. Lots of factory seconds ended up in jobs like this. The chip was chatty and typically enthusiastic.

"Hey, wow, an A.I! Don't get many A.I. passengers. Well, none really. You work for the city? You know, I'm almost always on time, almost. It wasn't my fault yesterday. That old lady with the packages, getting her head slammed in the door like that, I couldn't stop the pneumatic closer, see, and then the salad oil fell out of her bag and spilled all over the place. After the old guy slipped and fell, all the other passengers just sort of domino-ed over. The wheelchair guy rolled back and hit the emergency door latch. When I started up, they just all sort of slid out the back, see? I..."

"Er, I don't work for the city."

"Oh."

"You run this route all the time?"

"Hey, just because I'm installed in a bus, doesn't mean that's what I'm all about. I freelance as a writer; you know, human interest stories, like that."

Okay, a machine that wrote human interest stories. "Sell much?"

"It's a process."

"About your route. You stay to this one most times?"

"Mostly. This is my last run, I end up at Berkshire. Then it's back to the shop. So, what do you do?"

"M.I.C.A.I.N, here. I'm in investigations. Need to go a little farther than Berkshire; the job's at Corporation Drive. Two blocks further."

"Wow, a private eye? Say, maybe I can help you out. Two blocks, I can overshoot my stop. Good turnaround at Corporation Avenue. Man, what's it like?"

"Danger, excitement, dames, and bucks," I crowed. "It's a good gig."

"Cool. Wish I could get in on that, but I'm kinda bolted in. Wish I could help more."

"You know, your bus kinda stinks. Maybe next time you get serviced, you might want to have the combustion sequencers replaced."

"Don't have sequencers. I monitor the burn myself, got my own secret sauce, see. Very efficient, kind of thing. Gonna patent it.

"Eh, sure."

It got me to thinking. I might need a diversion, for what I had in mind. We discussed it, then I moved on into the bus. The chat had taken all of twenty micro-cycles, so nobody got held up or anything.

The bus had lots of colorful folk aboard, some seated, some swaying from handrails mounted along the center aisle. I dithered over sitting or standing. The ones seated generally had fewer teeth than those standing, I noted, or were female. All seemed inured to the buses stench. Anyway, standing seemed appropriate to my case. Something squirmed in the back of my mind, as if I were re-evaluating the way I looked at things. Amused, maybe. It was an odd cycle of reprocessing, a recursive glitch. Leftovers from the diddling I received at the docks, probably. I would have to check on that later.

Eventually the final stop came, and the remaining riders filed off. Instead of turning back, the bus smoked on towards Corporation Drive, like we had discussed. I moved to the front and got myself ready for what was to come.