Lakma collapsed into an unoccupied desk chair, letting it spin with the momentum he crashed into it with.

  “This guy knows too many damn people! It feels like all we’ve been doing is asking the same questions and getting the same answers.” He groaned.

  It was now early morning, the duo had spent multiple hours performing house calls and searches, to completely no avail. A common thread Lakma had noticed with all of Everharts associates was their complete co-operation, but implicit distaste of PEAs. He knew some people didn’t like the organisation for a reason he couldn’t be bothered to learn, outside of the fact they had probably broken the law themselves at points, but he hadn’t expected them to be unproblematically compliant, and to still find nothing.

  “Do you have a better idea?” Tae responded calmly, already beginning to write up her report.

  They had returned to the PEA HQ, and had chosen the shared Tertiary office to ‘debrief’ in. The room was completely empty in the early hours, sparing the two from being packed in uncomfortably tight with the other Tertiary Detectives. It would still be dark for a good while yet, and Tertiaries were only required to come into the offices in the light of day. Lakma’s office was perfectly suitable for their needs, but it was somehow messier than an office in the service of over a dozen people. Tae often made an effort to point that out at every opportunity. The Tertiary office by comparison, was incredibly tidy, despite it’s inherently cramped nature, every workstation had their monitors, documents and stationary meticulously measured to occupy the space as efficiently as possible, likely because a stack of misplaced files could easily become a stack of missing files if it were knocked onto their workstation.

  Lakma thought for a second, debating on whether or not he wanted to be chewed out by his boss, at least then he’d finally know who he actually worked for. “I have an idea, if you feel like postponing that report you keep threatening.”

  That really got Tae’s attention, and for the first time, Lakma noticed a hint of a facial expression that wasn’t her default sneering hatred.

  “So, Automatons run off an automated patrol system,” He began his explanation as he booted up the view monitor, “The paths are chosen with a super complicated algorithm, or whatever, and once a convict has been found they will run off a more intense pursuing program.”

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  Tae nodded along, uncharacteristically invested in his explanation.

  “Now, Automaton AI is only really allowed to follow a single route, and their pursuit mode is more of a flowchart than an actual ‘mode’, if ‘x’ do ‘y’, that kind of thing. There is, however, a way to get them to act much more independently. Automatons have an extra ‘tracking’ mode that can allow them to purposefully search for a specific convict. This program is a holdover from the rebellion, likely not removed because it’d fuck with the legacy code too much, and we are very much not allowed to use it. We let the Automatons run free for a bit, they start tracking people down, then we get a visit from U.R.O. Agents and never see the light of day again. Saying that, there’s no real harm with us using it for a single convict, especially since the AI all runs on a closed network now, so the program won’t spread intergalactically like last time.” He laughed nervously, “But, if anyone asks, we can just put it down to a software glitch or something.” Lakma found himself desperate to go into more detail, but forced himself to remain on topic, he really wanted to show off, “Now there’s no way to really enable this mode normally, all the commands have been removed, but their AI is kind of stupid, like REALLY stupid, so we can sort of… trick them, into entering it. Frankly, it is far too easy to enable for how disastrous the consequences could be, but everyone who works with these guys just turns them on and doesn’t bother trying to make them work better, and as long as we limit it to Sector 28, we should avoid any hot water. Has Props gotten back to us yet?”

  Tae checked her own monitor that had been turned on earlier, “Yep, says the alert should go live any second now.”

  “Perfect.” Lakma sighed satisfied. He connected his screen to one of the currently patrolling automatons.

  The view through the monitor was a grainy mess, the screen was a low resolution, the cameras built into automatons were also lacking in fidelity, the connection was spotty, Garant’s regular storms were not doing the line any favours either, but it still was somewhat legible. The wall in front of the camera lit up with a public announcement, one of the many that would be dotted across the city, Lakma panned the camera to depiction of their target, one that had been hastily drawn using the limited views of Everhart’s quarter’s surveillance footage.

  SCAN FOR CONVICT.

  CONVICT NOT FOUND.

  SCAN FOR CONVICT.

  CONVICT NOT FOUND.

  Lakma looked back at Tae and smiled awkwardly, “It takes a few tries sometimes.”

  SCAN FOR CONVICT.

  CONVICT NOT FOUND

  SCAN FOR CONVICT.

  CONVICT FOUND.

  CONVICT LOST.

  TRACKING MISSING CONVICT.