Dark City - Deputy Police Chief’s Apartment

I watch a small old man sleep. Hard to believe he’s Blank. His mustache is pretty dope. There is that.

I slipped past my psycho early, to be at the Deputy’s apartment before Blank went into her sleep pod. Already turned the room. No firearms. Very disappointing.

There’s a bug-bot languidly chewing on the Deputy’s phone. I watch it. Tell me your secrets little bug. It stops chewing and laboriously barfs out another bug-bot. They both start eating the phone. Dang. That just raises more questions.

“Gak!!” My new friend wakes gracelessly.

There’s an adjustment period, which I largely ignore. Life is suffering. I get it. Have some peanut butter crunch.

One issue I can resolve is his vision problems. At least I try to. He’s worse at eye drops than I am. I end up helping. If you consider a headlock and eyelid peeling helping. It’s been a while since I manhandled someone. Guess I’m feeling better.

“My body feels funny. Not good.”

“We’ll get you some ants. That’ll make sense later. Let’s fucking go.”

Glad there’s no psychos about. Motherfucker’s timid. We conquer his fears of my truck and get to rambling. Police Station, here we come.

“The plan is simple. You get us access to police information. We discover why the psychos aren’t getting arrested. Hopefully, it’s a simple issue. A glitch. Maybe we fix it. The psychos get fucked. We do drugs.”

“And find Harkon, right?”

“Absolutely. Let’s find Harkon.” I laugh gleefully.

Our trip takes us through a busier part of town. We pass two other trucks and see a pedestrian decked out in dangling streamers. It’s not much for a city built to house millions, but it’s still the most people I’ve seen awake. There’s also a couple stores or restaurants with lights on. Town is hopping. I try to parse if there’s more drones flying about, but it’s hard to say. There’s still thousands.

We roll up to the cop shop. It’s a modern-gothic fortress of glass, steel, and stone. Impressively oppressive. I approve on an aesthetic level. Will home minions here. Let’s meet the locals.

We send Volt out to scout. She’s back in her floating chibi form. We’ve been hitting shops, here and there. Looking for attack drones - or firearms - and settling for a faster courier drone. We also patched Volt into the expert systems of their clerks and delivery drones.

I’m trying to build Volt a better visual identification algorithm, and linking extra cameras from other drones should build it faster. I hope. It’s possible we’ve already overtrained her vision and this is actually making it worse. Probably not tho. It’s hard to measure. Could be a while until we see a quantifiable difference one way or the other. Unless she really fucks up.

So yeah, Volt is scouting, but it’s mostly diagnostic. Let’s see how she does. I keep my eyes peeled and throw on a trash bag for extra security.

The Deputy edges closer to the menacing building. “Are you sure I work here? I don’t remember any of this.”

“Interesting. What do you remember?”

“Being a movie star.” The little old man shuffles forward nervously. “Being beautiful. People loving me.”

“Huh. Well, you’re also the Deputy Chief of Police for Dark City. Just put in a few minutes of work and you can get back to being fabulous.”

We’re at the main doors. The Deputy exhales. Nods. “Right. Let’s do this.”

I’m expecting biometric security - or at least a lock - but nope, the doors just open. We enter into an opulent lobby reminiscent of my secret apartment. There’s a reception area with a d-bot clerk. Its cheap plastic smile clashes creepily with the grand surroundings.

We edge past its expectant vacantness and skulk through the public areas of the station. We pass a few computer terminals, but opt to try the Deputy’s before we start messing with other people’s stuff. The building gets lazily commercial as we go deeper. Stone and glass fading to drywall and PET carpet. We find offices, then his office, and finally a little secret door that hides a small safe. It has a keypad.

The Deputy shrugs. “I have no idea.”

“Do you have any passcodes in Bright City?” He nods. “Try those.”

The second code pops open the safe. There’s a laptop and a slip of paper inside. The paper has a username and password written on it. Wonderful.

We turn the office. Find a power cord for the laptop and a mouse. No firearms. They’re here somewhere. We fire up the laptop. The username and password are good. We’re in.

“What now?”

“We need to figure out why the police aren’t catching the psychos.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Great.” says the Deputy. “How do we do that?”

“I dunno. Don’t have a plan for that. Didn’t think we’d get this far.”

“Right.” He thinks. “Check my email?”

I shrug. “Sure. Maybe it’s in a memo.”

He has twelve thousand unread emails. Homogeneously d-bot generated comparative statistics. Most of it is incomprehensible. We don’t have a frame of reference. They spent 500 Mega-Bucks on drone maintenance last week. Is that high or low? We have no idea.

Eventually, we find some crime reports. They arrested 0.03% of people with outstanding warrants last week.

“That seems low. Maybe they’re not catching our psychos because they suck.”

The Deputy frowns. “I guess it depends on how many outstanding warrants there are.” He pulls up a list of outstanding warrants. “Wait! How did I do that? Shit, maybe I am a cop.”

The list is revelatory. 1 million outstanding warrants.

“That’s egregious.” I say. “There can’t be more than a million people in the city. Are we all criminals?”

“Dunno, but it makes the 0.03% arrest rate look better.” says the Deputy. “They detained 300 people this week.”

“Fuck. What does being ‘detained’ entail?”

“Umm… it doesn’t say. Do we need to know that?” The warrant list updates. Adds the Deputy for accessing police records while suspended for truancy. “Well shit.”

It’s kinda funny. It’d be more funny if I wasn’t on the list too. “I’d like to know if they’re getting a stern talking to or being rendered down to salty goo. Either’s possible with a fully automated justice system.”

The Deputy holds his cheeks. “Send Harkon my regrets. I would like to go back to Bright City now.”

“Chin up. Once we know how they make arrests, we can game it so it happens to people other than us.” I tap the laptop. “We can probably do both from this. We just have to stay undiscovered until we figure it out.”

A large dude wanders into the office with a vacuum cleaner. Sculpted muscles, aggressive hair products, bling. He bumbles the vacuum through the door, notices us, freaks out, flees.

“Not a problem.” I say. “Just a very stylish janitor. More afraid of us than we are of him.”

Was he afraid? Asks Volt. That’s not good.

The Deputy is hyperventilating. “I want to go home now.”

“Uhh… That’s actually not a bad idea.” I grab the laptop. Probably should have left the minute we found it.

We scamper deeper into the building, angling for a back door. We find it just as I hear the thrum of a heavy drone approaching. I slam the door behind us. Too slow, suckers.

A large disk-shaped drone flies through a slot above the door. Dang it.

“You are under arrest. Do not resist.”

It’s a frisbee shaped quadrotor, 3 feet across and a few inches thick. It has a yellow shell with thick black rubber styling. It reminds me of the Bright City security drones. The ones that are shit at fighting other drones, but work well for mowing down squishy humans.

Fuck.

The cop drone hovers about twenty feet off the ground and fifty feet ahead of us. It does not appear to see me, focused on the Deputy. I’m tempted to chuck the laptop at it, but I’d definitely whiff.

“Volt, you distract it.” I hiss softly as I shake out a second garbage bag. “Dep, get in the bag.”

“No!” He’s panicking. “It told us not to resist!”

Shouting is enough to set off the cop-drone. It fires a pair of thin wires at the Deputy, but Volt is already flying in with a hologram of the Deputy shining bright on her side. She dives in close enough to bork the cops targeting algorithm and takes the shot instead. The wires spark with electricity as they get wound up in Volts rotors. She drops, pulling the cop off balance. It detaches its taser probes and rights itself, but too late. I got the trash bag over the Deputy’s ineffectually thrashing body.

The drone clearly can’t see us, but I can’t convince the Deputy of that. He flails about in panicky circles, only calming down after he wipes out hard. I eventually shepherd him into the truck and we head out.

It’s a glum ride home. The Deputy’s scared and bitter about being dragged into this. Which is a bit rich considering it’s literally his fucking job. I’m disappointed at how crappy the cop-drone was. We beat it with a holodrone and two trashbags. No wonder psychos are running amok. It would only be useful against the most haplessly confused. I look at the Deputy. The human cops haven’t impressed me either.

We get Dep to his apartment.

“I don’t want to do this anymore. You have the laptop. Leave me alone.”

“But we never got your ants?”

“I don’t know what that means.” He closes the door.

Fuck.

Volt drives us through the city, looking for a place to crash. I rifle through the laptop, trying to plan our next move.

“All the police have been suspended, At least they’re not getting paid. The only people still on payroll are the mayor and some maintenance staff.”

I don’t think that janitor liked us.

“He did not.”

Where does this leave us? Are we still trying to reprogram the cop-drones?

“I don’t think there’s any point. We could just tape a sharp spoon to a courier. Probably be more dangerous.”

Then, we wake up more cops? Wake up the Mayor?

“I dunno. That hasn’t worked so well.”

Bah! We’re getting objectively better at waking people up. The last guy didn’t even try to kill us.

“Yes, but was he useful?”

We got the laptop. Learned stuff. Maybe our next guy will have a gun and a can-do attitude?

“That’d be nice, but I think the cops lost their guns when they got suspended.”

Well, we got a packet of socio-psychological profiles for everyone in the city. Maybe we can wake a random helpful guy with a gun and a can-do attitude.

“Maybe. Or - if we can match bedrooms with personality types - maybe we can find where the psychos are sleeping.”

Oh. Are we switching from allies to ambush?

“Yes.”