Chapter 6, Part 2

bleakly

The chubby guy occupying the labcoat continued to look at me impassively. I sighed and put the barrel of my sixty-shooter to his forehead. The impassive expression continued unchanged.

I smirked. “We both know if I pull this trigger it will be both a felony, and utterly useless. Good job getting into my head there, though. I don’t wanna know how you found out about the doppelganger, and I applaud your creativity, but stop it. Jig’s up, Otto.”

The labcoat melted and gave way to a police uniform. The bastardliness remained. He grinned in that infuriatingly inhuman way that holograms do. “There’s still a few of ‘em in here, Bleak. You gotta track ‘em down and figure out the hell they’re doing with all these zebras.”

I shook my head. “Nope. I know exactly what you conned these guys into, and what the zebras are for. ‘Cause the only thing useful to you is information. And the only good way to hide information these days is to not keep it all in one place.” I waved down at the confused herd of zebras. “You broke the payload up into a few hundred compressed chunks and had your patsies hide it right in the DNA of the poor animals down there. Too bad I was two steps ahead of you.”

He continued to grin, but his physical representation flickered as he drew on more processing bandwidth to figure out how I knew what I knew. Even holograms got tells.

I holstered the gun, unholstered my handheld, and blazed my patented even-more-annoying-than-a-hologram grin at him at a hundred percent intensity. “Best thing is, you think you have the entire thing genetically encoded and spread throughout the herd. But I managed to grab a couple of the most important terabytes. If you want what I got, you’re gonna have to bargain for it.”

My handheld’s screen blinked red, and I gave its surface a nonchalant tap. Cookiejar_noose.1_z closed with a satisfied beep. I was suddenly really glad that I’d taken the time to prepare for this very contingency– an AI trying to hack me.

Otto’s synthetic facial expression went from impassive to puzzled to really, really mad. “You–”

“Yep!” I kissed the screen of my trusty digital assistant. “I didn’t have shit, obviously. How the hell could I? You had this con airtight. Didn’t stop you from jamming your digital arm all the way into the boobytrapped digital cookie jar. The thing about the zebras was a guess, by the way. Thanks for confirming it.”

Code spilled across Otto’s face as he struggled for coherency– a valiant attempt, considering at least a third of his processor power was already wrapped up in my handheld and quickly getting dumped to a quarantined server I’d whipped up for just such an occasion.

I sighed again. “Man, what the hell should I do with my very own holocop?”

Otto was stuttering. “This– resis– isting arrest– assaulting an officer–”

“Go to sleep, Otto. Good game. Play again.”

Otto faded out of existence and into my private storage space.

The zebras continued to mill around. The small-time guys Otto had tricked into pulling off the heist would be taken care of easily; the security foundation entrusted with the infobomb Otto stole would probably already be alerted and on their way, since Otto’s attention and the protection that came with it now belonged entirely to me.

I chuckled at the thought of the poor, underpaid technicians who would have to do the zebra blood samples to properly resequence their precious data. Then a thought occurred to me, and I started looking for the controls to open the warehouse’s docking bay doors. After all, if there’s one thing I always said this city needed, it’s a herd of genetically modified zebras running wild in the streets. 

Or, wait. I always say something about letting yellows mellow. That’s what I always say.