Dammit. Where is he?
I swear we’ve mapped out every possible place in New Orleans where he could be secretly holding even half as many people as he’s kidnapped. Zilch. None of the private investigators have turned up anything, and I’m pretty sure that we have every single one in the city on our payroll by now along with hundreds of others that we’ve imported from the region.
According to Lin’s research, he and his CPP accomplice have bounced between every major dating app as they’ve acquired their test subjects. He never used his own picture, but Lin’s algorithm identified a dozen profiles that she’s sure belonged to them. I flick through the batch of missing persons reports, at least three dozen of which were on the apps until they matched with one of them and disappeared. Lin has her own set of fake accounts on all of the sites now, trolling and hoping we catch Jeff’s interest, but by the time she got those set up, Jeff stopped adding new test subjects. He must have enough for his current round of tests.
But where does he put them? It’s got to be somewhere inside the city, but nothing has gotten us even the smallest of clues. We’re watching all the cams on all the streets in and out way too closely for him to be getting anyone out. Short of breaking our quarantine and heading in to actually check the city with our bots, I don’t know what else we can do. And even if we did decide to go head to head with the Feds, it would be stupid to do it since Jeff has figured out effective ways to detect one of our clouds in action like he did at the Wallace Hospital. That would make it too easy for him to slip away or set off whatever traps he’s set up for us. Might as well let the CTTF do whatever they’ve got planned rather than do that.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
I’m still wondering how he even gets around the city without us seeing him on any of the cams we have. We’ve got that place wired like a surveillance state, but we still get nothing. Every day Lin and I check and double check our thousands of feeds that we’ve purchased or hacked. I spot check video streaming on dozens of screens at a time, verifying the algorithms that Lin wrote to monitor the rest of them. Every day, nothing.
At least today the dev team got us our update with the acoustical signaling mods. Finally a fix for the jammer problem that will let us run bots without RF transmissions. It felt like that project took them forever, but I guess they had a lot on their plates with all the defenses from the laundry list of world-ending threats we dumped on them.
I should be patient with them, they’re working on it as hard and fast as they can. But it’s hard, feeling helpless like this. Knowing that Jeff is doing whatever crazy mad science project he thinks he needs to do to make his human hive a reality. I should have stopped him when I could have, back in St. Louis. I could have done it. Maybe.
“Hey, love.”
Lin’s voice pulls me back to reality. I get lost in my own head sometimes. It’s happening more lately as my memory continues to deteriorate. Even following all of Louise’s guidelines my functional human memory is down to just a few hours before I have to reread everything. I open my physical eyes and see the love of my life there, coming towards my desk.
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“About me, I hope. Though I suppose I’ll never know. Come on. We told your grandparents this morning that we’d meet them for lunch.”
“Oh, yes. I guess we did.” I don’t remember it, but it’s on my schedule. “Let’s go then.”
She takes my arm as we walk out. I swear she’s gotten more affectionate since she stopped being able to read my thoughts whenever she wants to.