Tracy was not going to walk right up to the Red Spider clan and talk to them. That of course would be suicide. However, Jessica’s story had given her an idea.
“We need to find the nearest exit to this place.”
“That’s pretty simple. Turn off all the lights, let your eyes adjust and look for anything like a hint of light - that’ll be a sewer cover or some kind of exit.”
Tracy looked at her friend, then switched off her phone light. Jessica did the same. She also amplified her vision to the max with her nanites and scanned the long dark tunnel. From a distance she could make out a feint glow down a branch to their right. “That way,” Tracy took this lead this time.
“If what you said is true,” Tracy said as they picked their way through the blackness, “is for us to be spying on them.”
“Right, because that would be suicide,” Jessica answered.
“Yeah, but we’re not going to spy on them. Well, not exactly.”
They found the manhole cover, and climbed the ladder. Carefully they lifted it, and squeezed out into a back ally. No one was around. She heard the sound of fire trucks from closer than she expected. It felt like they had run miles, but in reality it had only been a few blocks.
She checked her wrist comp and scanned the neighborhoods. “This way,” she lead Jessica South West, away from the burning business toward South Field. They were able to move faster above ground, and the city quickly changed. It was the same kind of dense buildings mixed among trees. How long before dawn? She wan’t sure. But the lack of light in any of the windows was the main indication they had moved into the mosoleum.
When the first serious waves of depopulation rolled through Earth, the industrial zones were among the hardest hit. Robots quickly replaced physical labor which had become increasingly scarce. It did not make economic sense to pay people act like machines. You wanted machines to act like machines. People were still trying to figure out what to pay people to do when the exodus started. The apparent answer to the question, “what are humans good at?” Seemed to be “go forth and breed.”
Only they weren’t breeding any faster on new worlds than they did on Earth which put even more stress on the system. However, their economic outlook and quality of life improved dramatically with access to more resources and space. The great human expansion into the stars had left entire regions, once dense with people baren.
When Detroit had experienced its first diaspora almost two hundred years earlier, the city had become an inferno. Arsonists burned vast tracks of abandoned homes and shops. This time, the cities, banks, and landlords took a different approach. They called it mothballing, but in reality it was a form of armored preservation. With more machine automation, monitoring, and patrolling they sterilized and then safeguarded the properties. They would be preserved for future use, should the need ever arise.
They called these sections of cities the mosoleums. Investors automated what they could. They didn’t want the infrastructure to rot, to become a drain on already stretched resources but they also recognized the economic value of solitude. Some people liked the ghost town feel of a city stuck in time.
Tracy found the ghost-motel about a mile down the road. The signs and front office window blinked to life as she and Tracy approached, like a behemoth waking up from a slumber. She wondered how long it had waited for a client.
This was one of the cheaper Configurations. No humanoid servants, just a screen and keyboard. The rooms would not be cleaned until after they checked out. The whole process wasn’t safe for humans. They cleaned by spraying the rooms with dissenfectant then inducing a drying cyclone - like a car wash turned inside out. Spider drones would pick up any refuse or replace anything disturbed by whirlwind. Within minutes everything would be restored to pristine conditions, ready for the next guest - should they ever arrive.
She flashed her company credit chip - the one Rodney had given her for projects, and then ordered a room with two queen beds. She could have afforded a room each but it was better to stick together.
The machine showed her a room number and transferred her the digital key. She turned and motioned for Jessica to follow. They found the second floor room and the door swung open upon her arrival. Tracy held the door open for Jessica and then she slipped off a shoe and stuck it under the door to prevent it from closing.
Jessica raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t want to get locked in,” Tracy informed her. Maybe the internet stories of mummified guests being found months later wasn’t true, but what if it was? Machines weren’t perfect.
They showered and changed, and ordered food from a delivery service. A drone dropped them coney dogs and a pepperoni pizza on a pretzel crust with two beers.
“So how exactly are you going to ask the Red Spider clan what they are looking for?” Jessica said, a mouth full of greasy Detroit style pizza.
“Insurance,” Tracy replied.
“Insurance?”
“They had their own vechicle. That means they will have insurance.”. If there was one thing, Tracy knew it was insurance. “They might be professional criminals, but they are not going to want to get pulled over for not having plates or proper insurance. Last nights activity will more thank likely trigger an insurance claim. They might have deactivated the Wellness Monitor - I’m not sure you shooting the driver would have called 911 automatically, but the automated systems would have also initiated an insurance claim. A vehicle involved in an injury incident would need to be inspected.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“The Clans might think they run the world, but no one has more authority or control than the insurance companies,” Tracy. Systematically generating profit from virtually everyone by of generating fear? And doing it for centuries? And legally? Organized crime had nothing on the insurance industry.
“Even crooks insure their cars,”. Tracy logged into the agent portal and started to search the incident records. “And there it is,” She pulled up the make, model, and ownership information. Because she was an active agent investigating a claim, the system validated her access to the second tier of information. Insurance companies cared about profits, not privacy. Investigators at times had more privileges than the police.
“I’ve got everyone in the car, including Mr. Man Mountain Dean, or whoever it was that torched the office.”
“Impressive,” Jessica took another slice of pizza and opened a can of beer.
Tracy accessed the insurance portal link, and scanned for hospital, or medi-clinic records. “There, also found the medi-clinic they used to treat the driver and his passenger. Sweet Jesus, you did not kill them but you fucked them up pretty good,” Tracy said accessing the medical records. “But no police report generated,” she noted. How had they avoided that?
She dug into the filing data and found that they had used a contracting license to explain the injuries. This would in turn lead to a different kind of claim; workers compensation. “Damn they’re clever,” she shook her head. “They got paid for getting shot.”. But the contracting license gave her another avenue to explore. Within fifteen minutes she had all the information she needed, and she registered a request for follow up. It was a bit risky, but it was not completely out of the ordinary.
“The car and driver both filed a claim,” She told Jessica what she was doing. “Those records might, or might not be correlated, but it’s odd enough to warrant investigation. That gives us the excuse we need to pay a visit to one Christopher Henly, Esquire. Do you know that name?”
Jessica shook her head. “Never heard of him.”
“Probably an attorney,” Tracy said, “But I’ve already submitted requests to interview the driver and all the passengers. Let’s hope their greed outweighs their paranoia.”
“How so?”
“If they reject the request - it will slow down or void their reimbursement.”
“They’ll want the money.”
“Let’s hope so.”
With the detective work done, Tracy turned her attention to the picture she had pulled off Geoffrey Stikine’s wall. She stared at the tall handsome man standing next to Geoff. She scanned the info-blurb encoded into the photo graphs pixels. She suspected that everyone in that photo would be correctly identified except one man. The system had identified Geoff, his wife Sarah, and their two kids. It also identified Debra Connacher, and the two children. But the one name it did not get right was the man standing with his arm around Geoff’s shoulders. The system labeled him as Tim Connacher.
He was tall, handsome, and lithe. Exactly the way Tracy had remembered him. Only she knew him as Edward Theodor Weidner, aka “Teddy.”.
Teddy, what the hell are you doing mixed up in all of this? Tracy asked herself. She felt disappointed, but not completely surprised.
Using her tablet, Tracy initiated another insurance investigation. “Let’s find out what the eye in the sky knows about Teddy.”