531
A Little Digging

Chan Yi sent the video feeds from Charity Fulmer’s home to his internal system as he threw on a tee shirt and prepared to leave his apartment. He rewound the video and watched Charity Fulmer leave the house in a taxi. It took her through the upper levels of the Builds and into the Skylines. She left the taxi and walked into one of the high-rise apartment buildings. It was one of the more expensive places in the city and Yi was surprised to see Ms. Fulmer there. As far as he knew, she had no connection to anyone above the Builds.

He fast-forwarded the feed six hours until Ms. Fulmer left the building. He watched as her taxi pulled away from the building and another car followed after her. It stayed a couple cars behind her, but it wasn’t hard to notice. Whoever had followed didn’t care if they were found out, or they were idiots.

Yi would rather plan for competence than idiocy. It was harder to plan for idiots.

He grabbed a hoodie and a jacket before he slipped on his shoes and headed out of his apartment. He drove his bike toward the Fulmer house, keeping an eye on the video feed as he went. Yi stopped three houses away, behind a large truck that hid him well. Still connected to the feed, he didn’t need to see them directly, but he wanted to be close by. The men that tailed her hadn’t moved yet, and Yi suspected they were sent to scare Ms. Fulmer, not to hurt her. After her visit to the Skylines, he was beginning to wonder. What wasn’t she telling him?

Yi stayed on his bike and took advantage of the time to investigate the people following Ms. Fulmer. He found the car registered under Mann Enterprises. An online search showed that the firm managed everything from building security to high-profile celebrity security, to private investigations. It seemed on the up and up, except that they were tailing Ms. Fulmer.

After two hours, another car came to relieve the first. Since no one was making a move on Ms. Fulmer, Yi decided to follow the first car and see where it led.

They drove through the Builds and towards a respectable looking business on the upper levels. Yi wouldn’t have thought the company was anything out of the ordinary in that neighborhood, except that he’d been there before. It hadn’t been called Mann Enterprises back then. When Yi had been there it had been to collect equipment and run missions from within those offices. The building was a front.

What the hell was Mariner Tech doing following Ms. Fulmer?

Chan Yi needed to do more digging. He’d looked into Fulmer Tech, but it was time to replace what dirt he could about the family’s personal background. As he sat on his bike around the corner from the Mann Enterprises building, Yi pulled up what information he could about his clients.

Jason Fulmer came from a poor home and built his way up from the Piles. He started as an errand boy, found his way into salesman, then made his way into management. A year after he married Charity Fulmer, he bought his own tech store. A large part of that money came from his wife. Charity Fulmer’s family was high in the Builds with a background in biotech manufacturing. Her family had ties with Augalife and did some distribution work with Mariner Tech. Back in the day, there were rumors that she intended to marry herself into the Skylines, but then she met Fulmer.

Interesting. Charity Fulmer had a property that didn’t connect back to her family or her husband.

Yi looked up at the Mann Enterprises building and pushed aside other memories; jobs worked from that office and the people he’d been with. If he needed to hack a Mariner Tech building, he’d need far more than what he had with him. For now, he had a lead to follow with Charity Fulmer.

Yi pulled away from the office and away from his past. The address he had on file for Ms. Fulmer’s building turned out to be a warehouse on a lower level of the Builds. There was no one around but there were surveillance cameras set around the building. The security was expensive, but it wasn’t set up as well as it should have been. Yi was able to hack in remotely and he made note of where the feeds were being sent. Yi cut the feeds and parked his bike. There was a side entrance by the alley and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to hack it. The building was old, and it was easier to break in than hack the system.

There was an old-fashioned padlock on the door and Yi squeezed until the lock broke. Yi entered, quickly closing the door behind him. He scanned the room and couldn’t replace signs of anyone there before him. He opened the minigun on his arm, just in case. His scanners were only meant to detect humans and he wasn’t taking any chances now. Too many things were pointing to Mariner Tech.

The warehouse was bigger than the store had been, and it was filled with boxes. Yi scanned the labels before moving through the rows. To the left side was an office and he stopped scanning the inventory to search the office.

Yi opened the office computer and began searching through the files. There were communications and questionable search histories, but nothing about the business. Yi pushed the chair away from the desk and leaned back, looking around the office. There were two chairs set across from the table, leather and well kept. The table itself was a work of art. While the warehouse was basic, the office was set up to impress whoever stepped inside. The rug underfoot was pricey and the liquor cabinet behind him was full of expensive bottles. For a man who seemed to be on the verge of losing everything, he kept a nice office here.

Thinking of the hidden compartment at the last office, Yi checked overhead but there was nothing hidden there. He ran his hands over the desk but there was nothing to replace there either. He turned the chair around and looked at the liquor cabinet. He opened the bottom part which was a refrigeration unit with wine bottles. His sensors showed one bottle wasn’t filled with liquor though. He reached for the bottle, hidden in the middle between two identical labels, and pulled out an empty bottle.

Yi opened the bottle and when he looked at the stopper, a small data drive was lodged into the cork. He pulled it free and blew lightly on it to clear it of any debris. He opened the connection port on his left wrist and inserted the drive.

“Bingo,” he said as he began to read the content. It had a list of products and purchases from the warehouse. The store Jason Fulmer had built with his own hands had been going bankrupt, so he’d started dabbling in trash tech on the side. He had a small fortune set aside from his business, but it looked like he had other plans. Bigger plans. There was no purchase order in the files, but he got hold of Mariner Tech and he was selling it out of the warehouse.

Mariner Tech was high quality, in high demand, with a high-ticket price. People in the Builds and Piles couldn’t afford it. What was Fulmer doing with it, and who was he selling it to?

If Mariner Tech was following Charity Fulmer because of the warehouse, why hadn’t they taken the tech back? Was it all part of something larger than Mariner Tech was trying to stop? Or was there something entirely different going on?

And should he back out now?

He’d stayed off Mariner Tech’s radar for seven years by turning away from anything that traced back to them. Should he continue working this case, or tell Charity Fulmer that she and her husband were on their own?

It was what he wanted to do. He couldn’t afford for Mariner Tech to replace out he was in the city still.

To most people, it was a respectable company that made tech for the elite. They were innovators in security and medicine. They were one of the largest employers for the Piles, with factories that worked day and night to provide the world with the newest technological advances. What most didn’t know though was that they were also military contractors, and they did the dirtiest of work for the government. The experiments they did with human-tech hybridization were horrific. And if the world knew they were working with decision-making AI, there would be more than protests. The company would be destroyed from the ground up.

Hell, last month one of the virtual companion companies had been shut down for a week over protests of virtual AI that responded with too much dominance. The media had picked it up, spinning new stories about AI companions that would be able to steal their personal data and compromise their security on a whim. The company had to prove that the AI was working off scripts and were not actually gaining dominant personalities. They were submissive, subservient, and passive.

The world wasn’t willing to watch the rise of AI. Never mind that he and Two had proven themselves better men than the humans who had created them. Never mind that he was hunted because he refused to kill any more people. Never mind that the AI who had caused such ferocious reactions in the humans had only been protecting itself.

The irony that humans never seemed to get was that they were far more dangerous than he was.

And Chan Yi had no doubt that Mariner Tech was still trying to deliver the perfect AI for their military forces. No price tag was worth getting caught up in that. Charity Fulmer and her husband had gotten involved in something they didn’t understand, and Yi had no problem tossing them to the curb to protect himself.

Except.

Two was alive.

Somehow, Two had survived and Mariner Tech had control of him. He might be willing to let his clients reap what they sowed, but he had to replace out what happened to Two. If Two was involved with Mann Enterprise, Yi had to follow the leads and see where it took him. He had to get Two clear of Mariner Tech. Two had given his freedom - if not his life – so that Yi could escape.

There was nothing Yi wouldn’t do to replace the man he loved and set him free.