Drewcker lay back and stared dead at the ceiling. If it weren’t for the bandage wrapped around his head, and his open eyes, he may have passed for a corpse. Amber watched him through his hospital room’s window, before braving up enough to enter.
His head tilted towards her upon hearing the door creak open, and the man’s eyes became weak. Amber used all her strength to keep her composure, but her will shattered as she walked over to her father, lying broken before her. Her lips crumpled, and water pushed against her eyelids as she squeezed his hand.
“Dad…” She struggled to speak.
“Hey there, Goldie,” he said to his daughter.
Amber gently rubbed her thumb back and forth across his fingers.
“Sorry I missed breakfast,” he joked.
Amber chuckled, then looked down and shut her eyes tight.
“Hey,” he said to her, “we’ll get through it. Gotta recover… but these people did good work. We should be real grateful… things could have been different.”
She let her eyes open, then mustered a smile at him.
“Hey that sure helps.” He smiled back as he said, “That helps a whole lot.”
She swallowed, then opened her mouth.
“What happened?”
Soteria waited for her sister to leave the apartment before closing herself in her bedroom. The lights were down, and her monitor glared at her as she leaned forward in her chair, her hand unable to release its grip around her mouse.
The security feed was pulled up and ready to be played again. She hadn’t started the footage yet. The file displayed itself as the still frame of a silent evening at the complex, captured at the very back of a walkway with the parking lot and stairs at the center, and rows of apartment doors on the left and right side. She pressed play.
As the audio in her headphones played and the grains in the video began to move, Soteria detected the haunted walk of two unidentified men approaching her home from the lot, their dark figures just being touched by the light of the streetlamps.
Soteria focused her attention on the details of their appearance as they became clearer the closer they came. Both were bald and bearded men. One was patchy. One was full. They both were carrying switchsticks beside them.
They made it to her front door, and a force weighed on Soteria’s breath.
“Kaz, have you ever seen a door like this? It’s like a whole computer!”
Her face stiffened.
The men appeared to be in their early thirties or late twenties. They were not wrinkled, but tired. Bags were under their eyes, and their eyebrows seemed crooked. Their bodies were young, but their faces were already soulless to Soteria.
The two had a clear intent to break open the door, but before the full beard knocked his way in, something shifted in them both, as if they were questioning their intent. They stopped themselves and then turned around while still in front of the camera. Soteria could only make out the face of the man with the patchy beard. He was confused. They walked away from her door, and the camera captured them stopping and waiting in the center frame on the sidewalk by the parking lot. They just stared to the right of the frame. Then they left.
The footage ended there.
Soteria’s hand unstuck itself from the mouse and flung to her wristwatch. The cell app was open in seconds, and Soteria began dialing the numbers 9-1―
She hovered her finger above that last digit.
In her room’s blackness, all that occupied her vision was the image of a late-night security feed and a half-dialed emergency number in her hand.
Her finger inched closer to pressing the button… but she pulled it away and rested her wrist.
She leaned forward, grabbed the mouse, and rewound the tape to when the men’s faces were closest in frame, then cropped a square image of the man’s face farthest from the camera. Plugging the image into her browser revealed a social media account @kaakaaass22! on Turbopic. Soteria clicked the link to the account, but all it showed was a private profile, accompanied by a blank profile photo, and no name other than the username.
Back to the recording, she took a snip of the second man’s face and plugged it into the browser. Another social media profile was uncovered, and like the other like the other it was private. @beckitt_ball, however, displayed a public name beneath the @: Becky Loinchester.
She leaned back into her chair and tapped her finger on the side of her mouse as her eyes darted back and forth.
She reopened the security tab and played it. It was at the point where the men turned around and walked toward the parking lot. Her eyes squinted at the pixels. She rewound it several seconds back and narrowed her eyes to the right of the screen as the men walked away.
She saw nothing.
Soteria rewound the footage, but this time increased the volume on her headphones to its maximum.
The ambient frequencies scraped her eardrums as she listened to the men talk at her door and walk away the same as before. She could hear nothing that she had not heard already.
She removed her headphones and fell back, her knuckle pressed into her chin.
A new strategy was playing in Soteria’s head as she left her room and her apartment. Her door shut, and she paced to the edge of the parking lot, aligning herself with the men from the footage, looking back to ensure she was in the center of the door’s camera behind her.
She scanned to the right of the parking lot, accounting for flashy cars, apartments, anything that could have caught their eyes… or anything they may have heard. Her gaze was drawn downward to the edge of the building in front of her, where she saw the gravel path between buildings C and D.
She stepped over to the gap, and although the path seemed unassuming, she persisted. The rough ground cracked beneath her footsteps as she moved down, noting any irregularities she could detect.
After passing two windows on both sides, she reached the one belonging to her sister. Soteria stopped there. She rested her arms on the window and looked inside.
Nothing seemed wrong. The floor was clean, the lights were off.
It was enough for her to put her arms back at her side, and keep walking, but she soon stopped. An itch scratched at her mind. She returned to the window, eyeing the lock at its base. Her fingers held the metal surrounding the glass, and she pulled up.
The window opened.
Soteria’s mouth fell, and she took a quick breath. Her body was still, and her fingertips remained pressed on the glass.
With a weak grip, she closed the window shut.
A collection of wet fingerprints was left, but it soon faded.
“Hello and welcome to Cyberyte! If you need help, please contact one of our robotic assistants!” A bot greeted Azura with a smiley face and a wave as she entered the store. Its design was sleek, like Cyberyte itself. The machines looked almost like a person wearing a skin-tight black suit―if their bodies were made from hard plastics and metals, and their heads had glowing screens where their faces would be. They were just human enough.
The inside of Cyberyte was like a snowy mountain, with white walls that could blind a person if they were not ready. Neon LEDs outlined the path to every aisle brimming with the likes of limb enhancers, computers, drones, monitors, and listening devices. If it blinked and had wires, the odds were, they had it.
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The holoscreen on Azura’s palm showed the store’s website, with a specific gadget, the biter, displaying a location in aisle D28. The model they were selling seemed to be the same one that belonged to her sister, the same model she mistakenly broke the prior night.
The tiny thing only cost 40 dollars, which admittedly did mean that she would be skipping out on buying lunch that day… but given the knot that had been twisting in her stomach since morning, she felt she could live with it.
While her palm faced her, her glove displayed a new notification from Ren in response to her earlier request.
Sorry just saw this! Sure! Feel free to come by whenever :)
With a contorted face staring down at her hand, she sent back a thumbs up, then turned off the screen and went ahead to her aisle.
Among other electronics, D28 was home to the biter, as promised. She swiped the cardboard container off the shelf’s hang tab and carried the box away to the nearest checkout.
A few aisles down were a series of scanners with lines of people wrapped in illuminated fabric standing in them, chatting and laughing as they made their purchases. Like Azura, each of them seemed to have at least one chunk of circuitry stuck to their body, whether it be their illuminative boots or their light-up hair extensions. People liked to glow.
There were three lines to choose from, two stretched about three people back, each seeming to just be walking out with an item or two, and one line, on the far left, was occupied by just a single elderly man and child, unloading their full shopping cart one slow item at a time. Hunched over, the man grunted as he lifted every box onto the scanner, while the child stood and watched, seeming completely astounded at the mountainous task of taking objects from one location and moving them to another.
Azura scanned the lines.
She overheard one of their conversations. “So the thing is like, I like totally can get where you are coming from but like the 20xk is on the spot, OKAY? It is ON-THE-SPOT!”
They giggled together. Azura looked back at the man, then got in line behind him.
While she waited for him to finish, she tried to muddy her focus and stare off at the wall, but she could not help but bring herself back as her eyes flickered down at the three-year-old. He stared directly at her. She turned her eyes away for a moment but soon looked back to see he was still blankly eyeing her with his mouth agape. She awkwardly darted her eyes away.
“Hey nice glove!” A voice spoke from behind.
Azura turned around and saw a young woman standing behind her in line. Her brown hair was cut short and choppy and just reached the top of her ear lobe so Azura could get a good look at her pulsing pink earrings.
“Hm?” Azura said, halfway unsure that she was the one the woman was talking to.
“Is that the second series? Those are some hot circuits!”
Azura breathed. “Thanks, yeah. It’s a second series.”
It didn’t take Azura long to realize how rude she sounded.
“Uh,” She shut her eyes. “I’m sorry, uh,” Azura collected herself. “I love your earrings! I don’t think I’ve seen them in that color.”
The woman giggled. “Thaaank youuu! Yeah I got them from Aestech a few weeks ago actually. Oh. My god. Their earrings are so underrated I’m telling you. And they are super fair price too, like this pair, I got two, this pair was only like 70 bucks, and they are SOO hot!”
“Yeah they’re cute!” Azura tried to think of something to say. “Where’d you get them?”
The woman still smiled, but she waited a confused moment to respond, “…From Aestech.”
Azura’s cheeks turned fiery. “…Yeah! Right, I’ll have to go there.”
The old man finished checking out and cleared out of the way of the scanner.
“Thanks for talking!” Azura blurted as she turned around and scrunched her face in embarrassment.
The man pushed the shopping cart to the exits with the child following close behind, who, without shame, asked him, “Grandpa why is her voice robot-y?”
Azura could tell who he was looking at, and she did not look back to confirm it. She scanned the biter and swiped her credit card, then made her way out of the store.
On the way out a bot said to her, “Thank you for shopping at Cyberyte, come again soon!”
Cyberyte was on the second level of a larger 150-foot-tall building in Masontown. It was on the smaller side for Hoffwell, but especially small for Masontown, the district home to towers that regularly surpassed 300 or 400 feet and pierced through the sky with their spires. It was the city’s beating heart, home to its most profitable businesses, most luxurious homes, and most bustling streets occupied by the most gorgeous and sleek cars. To be present in Masontown was to be reminded that a person is just the smallest piece of data moving around through an incomprehensively large system, a system that creates the infrastructure and the technology that she and others relied on to survive.
Beyond the thick glass wall that was the premise’s exit, was a series of pristine black stairs that led into the outdoor entrance plaza at the building’s base.
Outside, people waited for their gedaways by the road with umbrellas in hand to fend off the violent downpour that coated the plaza in rain. It would have served her to have looked at the weather app.
She checked her glove, and her gedaway would be arriving in seconds.
While she stood warmly inside watching water spill down the overhang, she squeezed her mouth tight and bounced her knees in frustration. As she saw her Getaway slide in front of the plaza, she clicked her vocaled out of its magnet and held it tight in her pocket, then walked through the sliding doors and into the cold and slippery dread that awaited her.
With swiftness in mind, Azura kept her eyes on her gedaway and brushed past the people carefully stepping up the stairs. The distance between her and her ride shortened. She intended to keep her pace, but in just a moment she felt the raw, weightless, and panicked feeling of her foot losing its traction on the glistening surface.
She slipped…
…and fell hard on her ass with a taunting SPLASH!
“Oh my god are you okay?”
“Are you alright?”
The people stopped and looked down at her, sitting wet and dripping on the edge of the stairs.
Thank you I’m fine, she mouthed, but of course, no one could hear what she was saying.
She gripped the sharp square railing, pulled herself up, and hobbled through the packed plaza and to the car, tearing the door open and dropping herself on the leather seats. The interface at the center of the car’s dashboard asked to confirm her identity, and once her ID had been scanned, the car proceeded on its route. Azura ensured the wipers were disabled, allowing the rain to cover the windshields.
She was data in a system.
Even through his boot, Officer Garret could feel the shift in surface texture as he stepped from smooth tile onto a sticky mess of soda that coated the floor in a puddle. With each step, he had to fight the ground to lift his foot again so he could continue onto the tile which, even ignoring the brown sludge that he just trekked through, needed a thorough mopping.
“Do you clean this place often?” he asked, without turning his head.
Standing by the cleared-out cash register behind him, Amber answered, “Well… I don’t really clean much. We have a janitor who comes in.”
Staring at the dust and grime covering the floor, Officer Garret circled back towards the counter. “Might want to hire a new janitor.”
At the same time, his partner came forward from the other end of the store.
“Okay did you guys find anything new? Is there something we can use?” Amber spoke to both criminal investigators. Her hand glowed as she rhythmically squeezed a translucent golden orb.
Officer Garret faced her with his hands in his pockets and took an extended inhale like he was trying to vacuum the crumbs out of his mustache.
“Well…” he began, “those stickers you found are pretty interesting. Not very useful. But interesting. What was readily apparent in the store from my sweep seems to confirm what you said about a scuffle, and… yeah, y’know, the money being gone. Would have preferred if we could have gotten your father’s testimony too, but… we got what we got.”
Amber nodded. “Okay.”
“Yeah. But besides that, we don’t have… really anything that we can go off of here.”
Amber’s expression quickly dropped from cautious optimism to glaring disappointment. She released her grip on the orb, and its manifestation faded away into a cloud of sparkling dust.
“What about you?” she asked the other investigator, who shook his head back and forth in response.
Her chin dropped.
“Okay… well there’s still the cameras,” she suggested, “The cameras probably got the whole thing.”
Garret tilted his head. “You haven’t looked at the cameras already?”
“I called you the second I saw the register... I waited out here so I didn’t miss you.”
“Huh.” He clicked his tongue. “Yeah. If you want we can give those a look.”
“Yes. Please. They’re just in the back.”
“Alright… but I should tell you, if they don’t show what you’re saying… our hands are tied here.” Garret gestured for his partner to follow him, as Amber led the two to the employee’s room.
Amber sat down, and the investigators hovered over her while she pulled up the footage on the desktop in the corner of the room.
She started the footage at around twelve, and for a moment saw the image of her bored father watching movies on his handheld from several camera angles, but in mere seconds all footage went completely out.
Amber’s breathing hastened. She rewound the footage five seconds, but it soon returned to black.
“Ooo” Garret chimed, “yeah that’s not great.”
“I―uh… oh my god. Uh they never do this!”
“Yeah…”
“I’ll just…” she sped up the footage for a few seconds until the video returned, about five minutes after it went out.
They saw the picture of her father on the ground and two bald men who soon, after one had to pick himself up off the floor, fled the scene, leaving behind an injured man.
“There!” She rewound and paused. She pointed at the face of one of the assailants. “Those are the men!”
Amber flipped around to face the officers and saw their faces bored, and unimpressed.
“Yeah… I’m very sorry but that still isn’t enough for us to work off of.”
Amber blinked. “Wh―wha?”
“Well again there seems to have been an altercation, but there's nothing on the video that proves these men were the ones who injured your father―”
“Or took the money,” his partner added, “your father said there was a third individual involved, it’s possible it was them who took it―”
“Without that video we aren’t able to say.”
Amber tried and failed to speak, letting out stammers before stringing together an actual sentence. “They’re RIGHT there! It was them!”
“For all we know the robbery took place hours after, when the building was empty.”
“The cameras are motion-activated, they would have caught that!”
“And they were supposed to be activated at the time of your father’s injury too, weren’t they? The system here is faulty and the fact is we just can’t confirm what you’re saying without conducting further investigation… which at this point would probably cost you way more money than you lost here. Your business is insured, this kind of incident really just isn’t worth looking into.”
Lights flickered on and off in her head as she tried to grasp onto any solution, and then asked, “What about an allseer? Could we get one in here to confirm the events?”
“Well we do have a couple allseers on the force, but they’re a bit occupied with… respectfully more urgent cases. And even if they weren’t, again, that would be an additional fee.”
Defeated, Amber crumpled back into the chair. The time she had lost seemed too to be an additional fee.
“You know, you really should clean this room up.”