'Shit….I wonder if there are any cameras in here. Probably are.'
I looked over the yellowish files made out of a paper cover with colored labels sticking out of their sides at random intervals.
'Who put down those labels on the thing? Who even had the time to go through all this page by page?'
'Damn crooks, why do they want to slow me down from helping them? Did their AI model give them this solution? It's shit like this that gives AI a bad name.'
I glanced around the room as I looked for any possible escape routes or ways for me to use something inside to threaten them to let me out.
*SLIP* *BANG*
A slot opened up on the metallic door as glowing artificial eyes peered through the slot on the door and locked onto me.
"Better pick up the pace. Time's thieving from you too, brotha." K.M explained as he knocked on the metallic door twice like he was consoling someone and then shut the slot back up.
With a slight nod that did its best to hide my terribly dissatisfied thoughts, I picked up the first file on the desk that had no label stuck on its cover to indicate what its internals contained.
'Case no. 18178 58151826 41515'
'Huh….that's a long ass number.'
'Victim: Neuinio Waltinger'
'Age: Thirty Two'
'Job: Banker'
'Cause of Death: Brain force trau-.'
Skipping all the remaining text that described the postmortem doctor's analysis, being a camera and an algorithm, of the body 'he' was delivered, I flipped the page to look at the picture that had been mechanically stapled onto it.
The picture was taken right as the first responding drone was given access to the door commands, giving full access to the entire single room that lay behind it.
In the scene lay a man dressed in his bathrobe, limp, on the single royal sofa in the center of the room, his eyes wide open as streaks of blood washed out of their edges in a similar fashion to the ones from his nose and ears as well.
They were all generally straight, flowing down like any fluid would if left to act under the forces of gravity, but their path looked blurry, like they had been wiped or splotched with something else occasionally.
'Huh….that's one weird way to go….'
Tracing over the picture with my finger, I followed the blood trails on the face and watched a few drops of blood end up on his blue fluffy bathrobe, creating a spot slightly darker than the rest in the picture while the rest, clearly visible, ended up on the room's pristine white carpet.
'Regal white? A bit out of the times' no? And an inbuilt carpet? How did he get rich enough to afford that?'
'Since when did a handler gain enough money to be able to afford things like this?'
I scanned around the room and watched all the various antiquities stashed along the walls of the room, 'what is that?' I questioned as I watched a poster stuck onto the wall with an ancient looking white car that had a vent on top of its bonnet with a woman sitting on its edge and a man standing while leaning back in front of her.
'Are they part of some gang? And why is the poster so blurry?'
'Which gang could afford such an antique car anyway? The thing has tires, for Suimanto's sake! That thing stopped being produced like nearly a thousand years ago!'
'Is he one of those cultists that demand heritage tax?'
'Shit…this is getting weird….I need to keep looking.'
Tracing along the picture, I spotted several other antiquities along the walls, a digital clock that read 19:20, a moose head, potted plants, a telescope, and a few picture frames that held framed pictures of the last green bills that were ever used in the world.
'Huh…so all that I know about the man is that he was an antiquities' enthusiast?'
'No! You can do better, Dave…the social system raised you better!'
'I mean….you have to since the bunta's outside kidnapped you specially for this….'
'Fuck do you mean you 'have' to!? I won'-'
'Shit….'
I slammed my hand into my head for a while until I felt the voices inside calm down once again,
'I need to get those meds sometime soon if I want to keep acting normal.'
I looked around the picture once again and reasoned about the state of the crime scene.
'Hmm….so bathrobe….perhaps he had just taken a bath?'
'Maybe the messed up streaks of blood had actually been caused by the drops of water that fell down from his wet hair?'
'He was clearly rich….or knew someone that was rich? I mean, who simply owns all those things? Those antiques are worth a fortune.'
'But then why was nothing in the picture taken?'
I rescanned the picture and looked around for any areas in the picture that had some discoloration to indicate it had been covered by something else previously.
'Shit….they really didn't take anything from there….what then led the cops to A.V and K.M? Why would two random bunta's kill some stuck up rich teller?'
I shook my head as I looked at the single crime scene picture that the fools had somehow managed to steal away in the files.
'How did they stea-'
*BANG* *BANG*
With a sharp slam on the door accompanied by a loud *SCREECH* the sliding iron window opened to reveal two orange blue eyes that scoured around the room for a few seconds and then focused back onto me.
"You got anything yet, fam? It's been a few minutes already." K.M spoke.
'What did K.M stand for anyway? Killing machine perhaps?'
"....why didn't you steal any of the antiques fro-"
"How could we brotha'...? when we weren't there in the first place!" *BANG* K.M slammed the butt of his waver into the metallic wall door, thrashing it to create a loud sound that echoed inside the dimly lit mostly empty room.
I could swear I saw dust leave the ceiling and drop onto the ground. Didn't these guys have any automatic cleaners? Just how old was this trap house?
"I'm sorry, I get it, I just didn't word it properly."
"Hmm." With a slight snort, K.M's robotic eyes fixated onto my own as he spoke in a low guttural tone, "Make sure it ain't gonna happen again, mistakes aren't taken kindly among our lines."
*SCREEECH*
With a sharp sound, the viewing window shut close as I relaxed back into the chair since my body had unconsciously tensed with my hands tightly gripping the iron rebar whose grooves dug into my soft human skin.
'So he does know about the antiques….did he read the case files and see the picture?'
'Probably not….I don't put it past them to even be unable to read without having Suimanto feed the information into their brains.'
I stared at the paper in front of me as I tried to push back my chair and make it balance on its hind legs, maybe since the chair was heavy it would be easier to balance the chair like this while I was sitting on it? Not like I had ever managed to do anything of the sort though.
'Maybe one day I can prove to other people that humans are just as good as the Suimanto bots at balancing things….'
My eyes flickered back onto the papers as I looked carefully at the limp man, whose head was tilted onto the back of the sofa while blood drained out of his orifices.
'So something was damaged inside his head….internal trauma…..'
'There are no signs of a fight, so either the man opened the door himself or someone mimicked the key signals to open it on their own without any disturbances while Mr. Waltinger was taking a shower?'
'But then the home automation should've notified him off the intrusion….'
'Was he clean too?'
'He does look like he was into antiques….perhaps he valued his body enough to remain human too?'
Skipping through the pages to find the postmortem descriptions, I began reading through.
'The victim has no signs of bodily harm below the head apart from simple re-alignments that have been recorded in medical history records during past artificial extension procedures.'
'Hmm…so he did have prosthetics after all…so who entered the home and how?'
'Would A.V and K.M have known how to fake the key signals?'
'Their knowledge of wavers indicates they do.'
'But is there a link between the victim and them though?'
Flipping through the pages, I began looking for all the places that mentioned A.V or K.M and pulled apart those pages from the files.
After about five minutes, I have a fresh stack of papers that simply had information to do with A.V and K.M with regard to this case.
*BANG* *BANG*
With another sharp knock on the door and the same loud *SCREEECH* I watched the metallic panel slide open with A.V looking down on me with his pitch black pupils this time instead of K.M.
"Done yet?" He asked in an impatient tone as I could hear his metallic foot tap the floor panels on the other side of the door continuously like he was jack hammering nails into the floor below.
"....not yet."
"*BANG* Get it done quick you fuc-"
I watched what I recognized was K.M's hand push him away as he peered back at me with his eerily glowing eyes that held no emotion for a second and then readjusted in real time to look apologetic as his generic voice shifted in tones perfectly to convey, "I'm sorry about that. A.V here's just a little jumpy, I'm sure you'll be done soon. Right?" K.M asked, as he looked at me through the slot in a stringent manner that demanded a proper answer to the question.
"In a little bit." I said in as vague a manner as I could and began focusing on the case files even before he could close the slot to show him my focus and ask him to stop disturbing me politely. 'Hopefully he takes the hint and leaves me alone. I need time to think of a way so that he'll have a reason to keep me around after I'm finished.'
'What's with the one-hour deadline anyway?'
'What's got them so spooked? It's not like I'm going to take over their entire network or something.'
Scanning through the first of the pages in front of me, my mind fell into a free-falling spiral as I read through the evidence they had on K.M and A.V.
'What the hell....what in Suimanto's name is this...how do they believe they'll get away with this? Although not fully reliable, given their background I doubt anyone would care when there are no other suspects.'
I rechecked the papers just to be sure, but I couldn't believe it.
With a slump in my shoulders, I leaned back into the chair, only to realize I couldn't lean beack because of the rebar sticking out and having no cushioning, not even my thick coat helped.
*Knock* *Knock*
I knocked softly on the hollow metallic table that instantly got K.M's attention since he opened the viewing slot in the door and peered through at me, at my dead like eyes that were partially glaring at him.
"What happened brotha'?" K.M asked me in the most innocent tone I had heard him use since I'd woken up.
"Nothing. Just tell me why your wavelength ID was caught all over the route from here to the victim's house?" I asked in a deadpanning rhetorical manner that quickly infuriated him, given the constant fidgeting of his eyes as they spun around in their little calcium sockets, a typical symptom of lying that was amplified in prosthetics.
"I tell to you brotha' we weren't there!" K.M shouted, almost banging his hands on the door but stopping and then glancing back at me only to use the door handle to push open the heavy door after a loud *SCREEEECH* signified the opening of the bolt that had kept it shut.
A little worry shot up my spine as I wondered if he'd kill me now that he was mad, but I kept my calm outwardly.
'He had to keep me alive. For now at least.'
K.M walked in with heavy footsteps after he pushed open the metallic door with A.V following behind him holding and swinging around the waver in his hands while I felt a sense of dread each time it moved over my direction.
Before K.M could speak, I pushed the paper with his coordinates on it in his direction and spoke in the same deadpanned relaxed voice, "Here. They have your entire movements for the day." I said.
I expected K.M to relax, but instead his speed only increased, with my heart beating out of my chest, I watched as K.M stopped right in front of me and ducked lower, his face moving closer and closer every passing moment.