Baz figured Eddie had to be misreadin’ specs, but as billions of permutations of ACGT scrolled through his own wetwire—the helix labyrinth of DNA confirmed everything Eddie was sayin’—

  A cyborg?

  Baz had heard of wetware like that in the Private Service—but the designs were black-box classified—synthetically engineered—’cuz humans just couldn’t write code that complex.

  “DNA from who?”

  >garage<

  Ria’s heart stopped.

  For a second, she thought she was staring into the eyes of her dead sister Dani—lying still, in the open-casket funeral that she never had. ’Til Ria remembered Dani died at sixteen, not the age of this girl in the cryochamber. Then she saw the scar.

  This was her own robot double.

  “Oh . . . shit,” she whispered as McT raised his Glock 9.

  Ria was staring at herself.

  She whipped out her Ka-Bar and sliced the barrel off McT’s Glock, a round sparking off the ceiling. Planted one foot to put the other in McT’s chin—but he just caught it, picked her up, and bounced her off a wall—

  >maintenance<

  “No way that bot’s a clone.” Baz cycled through explanations. “Take a thousand coders, a hundred years—”

  Then he froze and realized suddenly what he should have seen all along.

  “Eddie. What’s the exact temperature in that vault?”

  Eddie dialed up the reading in his wetwire and the holo-display. “Shit, Baz . . . Minus 235.”

  Which meant one thing.

  “Goddammit!” But Baz’s instinct for self-preservation took a backseat to: “Ria . . .”

  >garage<

  McT’s fist wrapped round her jugular and lifted Ria swinging and flailing out of the cargo hold and slammed her against the side of the truck:

  “I gave you so many chances, Ria.” Otto stared at her, almost wishing it didn’t have to be this way.

  “You couldn’t have me, so you made a copy?” Ria gasped.

  “On the outside, sure.” Otto licked his lips thinking of all the special modifications—from a custom-designed cranial-CPU to the anatomy between her legs. “But that bot’s better than you’ll ever be.”

  As Ria’s eyes rolled back and she started to fade away, Otto tore the one thing off her body that he’d never seen before . . .

  Her locket.

  >maintenance<

  “How do I get to the garage from here?” Baz could feel billions in ¢rypto and everything it could buy in Tahiti evaporating fast.

  “Up the stairs to Otto’s penthouse, then back down on his private lift.” Eddie sent a scan of the wireframe schematics into his wetwire.

  Baz looked at the far wall—then at the deactivated Sentries.

  “Fuck it . . . I hate the ocean anyway.” He moved to a firing position, about twenty feet from the wall. “Wire me into these Sentries.”

  Baz sensed a moment of hesitation outta Eddie before feeling the tingle of one bot slaving to his cortex’s left hemisphere and the other to the right.

  “What about the score?” Eddie asked as both Warrior Bots came alive under Baz’s control.

  “We bug out, and she’s dead.”

  “She’s dead anyway. You go through that wall, and we’ll never get that code!”

  “C’mon Eddie. We ain’t stealin’ code . . .”

  Baz activated both Sentries, charged a pair of railguns, and vectored ’em on the far wall—

  “We’re stealing what wrote it.”

  >garage<

  The explosion from the railguns rocked Otto to his knees—

  McT dropped Ria to cover his master from a cascade of concrete and rebar.

  Baz didn’t wait for either Sentry to recharge, he just pulled a 12-gauge Shadow from one bot, a .44 Patriot from the other, and slipped into a space he hadn’t been in years.

  Capped the sprinklers to blind everyone in sheet rain. Spun-reloaded the shotgun like a Winchester out west, and blew McT’s neurals out (again). Took aim at his old CO—too late—as Otto scampered under the trailer—gone.

  The Yakuza opened fire on Baz, so he lit them up too—

  Grabbed Ria, but she was out, so he just chucked her in the clean-room trailer. A Yakuza hollow-point ripped through his body armor, splattering blood all over the truck’s front door—and Baz groaned as his smart-vest went to work, grafting augmented scar tissue over the wound. He stumbled into the truck’s cab and smashed its self-driving neural, turning over the hydrogen ignition ole-school . . .

  Otto howled as it roared away, “My bot’s in that truck!”

  Ria came to—thrown sideways, knocking out the cobwebs—and onto her feet. Howling came from the sarcophagus—the EliteX.9, Ria’s bot double, was alive and wide awake, coded to eliminate its organic counterpart and thrashing to get loose—

  One glass spiderweb, then another—

  Baz shifted gears and couldn’t not smile—slamming the truck outta the garage . . .

  “I forgot how fun it is to drive.”

  The bot blasted through the glass, diving at Ria—rolling among the shards, inches apart, eye to eye, and Ria beheld her own horrifying fury staring back at her, as the bot sniffed and growled, “I recognize that.”

  Christ, she sounded just like her too.

  “I bet you do.” Ria threw the bot off—got on her feet quick, crouching low—her double mirroring the stance. ’Cuz whatever move Ria made, this bot was either gonna anticipate it—both lunging left into vacant air—

  Or do the exact same thing.

  Baz wheeled the truck onto Polk and groaned as cherry-tops from SFPD hydro-patrols came at him from every direction—

  “We got heat on us!”

  Spinning quick, the android hurled Ria into a shattered Sentry Bot on the floor. Otto must’ve built her stronger, ’cuz he loved the fight in girls. Ria caught a fist upside her cheek, since he’d probly coded her faster too. So Ria slackened, dropped her guard—uttered monotone: “Self-ID. X9, identify.”

  ’Cuz Otto never liked ’em that smart.

  The bot paused; was it attacking the wrong chassis? “X9-ID, serial veri—”

  —Ria decked its neurals with that Sentry’s severed arm—as the truck cornered hard and Baz screamed from the cab:

  “Hold onto something, Ria!”

  She steadied herself, stumbling onto the Sentry’s massive railgun on the floor—then glanced at her double as it reoriented power to re-engage.

  “My code prohibits duplicates of us.”

  Ria grabbed the massive weapon, strained to take aim and grip the trigger . . .

  “Mine too.”

  The railgun’s Marauder spear impaled four sheets of titanium, one solid-steel engine block, and the EliteX.9’s cyborg chassis—as 2 billion ¢rypto in robotics and a heavy-duty hydrogen drive seized up.

  Baz remembered bearing down on the SFPD roadblock assembling halfway down Geary and thinking, How the fuck did so many cops show up so fast?

  So he actually dared ’em: “C’mon, assholes, gimme all you got!”

  —then the spear shattered the front seat, blew an eardrum, and tossed Baz through the glass windshield into an asphalt face-plant on Powell.

  Lights out.

  BUSTED

  GRAND THEFT

  11:51 p.m.

  Baz landed in the chair and took one look around.

  Shit.

  They weren’t in a VR-construct. They were in an actual interrogation room. They must be really fucked.

  Ria eyed the models and menace of both androids in black guarding them. It was clear who was now in charge:

  “Where did Wirecrime come from?”

  That question was one of many Baz wanted to ask her—from the highly illicit robot in the truck to what really sat inside Otto’s vault.

  Baz was pissed.

  Baz was fucked.

  And Baz wanted answers.

  But her question was a good place to start, so he turned and looked right at Ria. “I don’t know . . . You tell me.”

  He fixed his gaze on her left eye, her real one.

  The stakes were mortal. Their crime capital. His infatuation gone.

  Baz was sure he’d be able to tell if Ria was lying.

  And she knew it.

  Her Poker Face activated, but Ria shut it down ’cuz the broken, small-time Baz she’d met a month ago? . . . That dude was gone.

  This was the high-alert muthafucka with a Body Count of twelve Warrior Bots and the balls to hit the De-Augmentation Server Farm. Ria wanted to pass his test, herself.

  So she just stared at him, baffled and ignorant. “I don’t know. Were they onto Otto’s code?”

  Baz squinted.

  Was she honestly trying to figure out what happened, or had she been playing him the whole time? For a second, he thought he saw her iris flutter, the heart palpitation of a lie—but what he didn’t see was what that would’ve meant. That this woman Ria Rose was a stone-cold, heartless sociopath who’d put his entire crew in peril. Her glassy eyes still carried irrefutable heart.

  They had Want.

  They had Need.

  And Fire.

  So fuck it, he decided to trust her. “Forget the code. This gig was cooked from the gate.”

  “By who?” Again with pitch-perfect naiveté.

  By who was the part that stuck a knife in Baz’s heart. He’d been blind in both eyes to what was really in that vault—by a pair of women. One that haunted him from the past, while the other sat right next to him.

  Baz sighed. “Only one thing operates at minus 235.”

  The door opened.

  “A quantum processor.” A lawman in his fifties walked inside with a woman who must’ve been his partner and sat down across from Ria.

  Baz had seen the man’s grim visage before on the holowires.

  His name was Langston Cowell. “A neuromorphic chip, to be precise.”

  Yup. They were fucked.

  Baz knew it. Now Ria knew it.

  But Baz came at ’em anyway with the cheap defiance of a criminal who wished he still had the right to a lawyer: “The fuck you holdin’ us on? Goin’ off-grid? Attempted robbery?”

  The woman Fed chuckled. “Try hijacking a Tier-1 Accelerated Sentience.”

  For once in their lives, both Baz and Ria had nothing to say.

  So Langston leaned in and said it for them:

  “Grand Theft AI.”

  WIRECRIME

  8 years ago

  Before Langston Cowell hunted kingpins, he worked Atlanta Homicide, the first off-clock dick to get bloody during the Glitch. In fact, he was covered in the black stuff that Hotlanta afternoon—took down a dozen bots and saved as many citizens, moving with precision through Maddox Park to the Peachtree Mall. Had he been in upscale Buckhead instead of low rent Bankhead, Langston would have been a national hero. Instead, he got a company medal, a handshake, and no OT for the three weekends it took to write up his report.

  He also caught a ding.

  Gears were moving fast in the federal government, and for once the Valley was in lockstep. Big Tech and VC saw the future of civilization (and Langston’s new jurisdiction) starting with True AI, crossing over the fiber-brain barrier, and riding high on Narcsoft. Kids going off-grid, gettin’ slotted, so digital kingpins could make an untaxed fortune? That’s the lovechild of Guccifer and Pablo Escobar. The world sat on a new frontier . . .

  Someone had to sling a Winchester.

  Someone had to wear the star.

  Welcome to Wirecrime, pal.

  Langston Cowell came up in the Pentecostal Revival of the early 21st century and could recall the red hats and ravenous chants screaming, “Make America Great Again.” But at fifteen years old, he was a bit too far from the stage, so he settled on watching his mom and dad’s fervent support. They lost their jobs two years earlier at Tyson Farms—cursing bullshit liberals and swearing, “Who cares how many hormones get pumped in a fuckin’ chicken, really?”

  But after Pops got blown 87 feet down the block from a neighbor’s meth lab, Mom found God the hard way, which meant Langston learned quick the paradoxical efficacy of faith healing: namely, if the preacher picked you, it was near 100%. But if you were Langston’s pops? . . . nil. No matter how bad Mom prayed. Yet despite the high percentage of snake-oil salesmen in the pulpit, the core tenets of the Big Book infected Langston like a virus and coded him for life—or most of it anyway. Only in his final moments would Langston ever doubt scripture. ’Til then, he knew three things in life: good guys hunted bad guys, his pops would die in that wheelchair—

  And Langston Cowell was on a mission from God.

  That mission found its calling in Narcsoft. Langston took command of its division at Wirecrime, ’cuz it was his baby. He’d caught a string of B&Es in the summer before the Glitch: some crew hit a dozen all-night Walmart uploaders in a month but hadn’t bothered with any wafers. They just wanted the hardware. Literally, the uploader itself—StimSoft’s proprietary Lasik-grid-writer. Which was odd. Why burn your own Stim, when the shit was so cheap it was basically free?

  Langston matched an SSS off a tower nearby and sent an Atlanta PD hydro-cruiser over to an address on Peachtree. Place was empty, save a dead 15-year-old on the kitchen floor with no permanent address, just wafers of StimSoft littered all over the place and blood running from his ears, like his skull had fried. Langston had the lab scrub a wafer, and it came back stronger than anything StimSoft ever distributed.

  Langston had the first positive ID on Narcsoft, ever.

  Gone were the days of req’ing tech out of a precinct basement—Wirecrime’s new forensics could track code like a chromosome, and all roads led to Miami. “Skull Fries” littered the beaches from Fort Lauderdale to the Key West Seawall with chatter ’bout a hacker ring with the best wafers in the world. Problem was, when Miami PD’s Marine Unit fished its leader out of Biscayne Bay, Zev Vromen was just the first in his ring to die.

  Langston could remember sitting at the Delano Hotel in 2046, trying to have a conversation with a Wutani Bartender Bot XL. Just a year ago, every model in America knew all about Langston—from his dirty martini with five olives (never four), to the bra size and forwarding address of every wife who’d ever left him. But this one, under the AI regulations that Langston now enforced, just served him well gin with a twist and thought “The One That Got Away” was some 30-year-old pop song.

  Then he checked his Incomings, and everything changed.

  Oakland Vice, Denver Private Security, even the Rio Grande Enforcement Zone (and there were more) had found glass wafers in Skull Fries’ hands matching Langston’s Most Wanted Code. But this shit wasn’t re-burned onto some old Stim—this was original. Came stamped. A feather icon on a wafer called Wingspan, a lotus for Nirvana, a flame for Blaze—this shit was marketed. This was product.

  And it was everywhere.

  Distribution rings appeared in every city in America over the next three years. Kids loved it. And like its chemical counterparts years before, wafers traveled on the highways: I-25 through Texas, US 41 up to Chicago, and Uber-80 all the way from the San Francisco Bay. After Langston had commandeered his seventh SWAT team, subordinated fifteen chiefs of police, and crossed every state line—he gathered federal brass and the guys who really mattered, Wirecrime’s Corporate Oversight Committee, and presented his theory . . .

  Otto Rex was the Narcsoft King of the World.

  His proof was two years of surveillance, centering on his fuckbot palace, the Fang. When asked if the establishment was a whorehouse or a drug den, if Otto was a dealer or a pimp, and how his fixer, an Orphan of the Glitch named Ria Rose, fit into it all, Langston’s love of history worked against him. Referring to Freeway Ricky or El Chapo did nuthin’ for the execs gathered in front of him. But when he said Otto owned the Walmart of Narcsoft?

  The suits all got it.

  Otto Rex had no idea when he reached out to his contact at Wutani to buy a billion-¢rypto sexbot that all of his communications were going straight to Wirecrime. By that point, his entire operation was under surveillance: the door, half his clients, his virt-cams, all the Dance Bots and fuckbots, and anything they could hack from his wetwire.

  Langston proposed a liaison with Tokyo PD and its Yakuza informants to arrest Wutani’s senior VP of product development and move his own agents into positions posing as both—while commandeering Wutani’s embryonic incubators to build the most expensive and illegal fuckbot to ever set foot in America.

  Certainly the most intrigued committee member was a corporate titan named Ken Cates. The exec pressed hard on why such an elaborate undercover sting was needed to take down Otto Rex. But when Ria Rose’s avatar started to animate—more specifically when her 3-dimensionalized footage started to talk—Langston knew, from the tiny gasp Cates made, that his undercover android had just been approved.

  But a month later, as the schematics grew into a full zettabyte of data, Langston raised an eyebrow. His partner Lieutenant Gina Wylks was shocked, staring at Otto’s entire decrypted transmission. Recruited outta ATF CyberCrime, Wylks once hacked a railgun ring in Baton Rouge then kicked down the door on the raid herself. But she’d never seen anything like this.

  An android designed from a complete human genome. Wrapping genetically cloned skin, eyes, and the rest of its external physical tissue around a titanium endoskeleton and a preprogrammed personality construct—all patterned on Otto’s fixer, Ria Rose. Langston was sure he’d lose control of the case, for one obvious reason:

  Only an AI could design a cyborg.

  Sure, Narcsoft was a scourge. But a Rogue AI was an existential threat. A planet-killer. The Glitch was a blip compared to what a True AI could do in command of an army of bots with blown caps. Some called it the Singularity. Others, quoting old 2Ds, the War against the Machines. The idea that Otto Rex had an AI in his basement making digital drugs was like locking Einstein in jail and forcing him to perform arithmetic—it was almost comical.

  But no one laughed on the Corporate Oversight Committee.

  ’Cuz by then Langston’s investigation was coordinated personally by Ken Cates. Langston reported the decrypted cyborg schematics, his conclusion that Otto was in possession of a stolen AI, and the rest of his findings—directly to Ken. And that’s when everything changed.