“What took you so long?” asked Bryant as Karen entered through the front door, the retina scanner resetting itself.
“I had to do some searching to find all of the evidence, For example, I found out that they waited for him to come home to attack,” she said matter-of-factly.
“That’s all well and good, but it shouldn’t have taken you that long, I stopped a suicide, comforted her, and watched a movie with Abby.”
“You went out? How did you get back in? I didn’t enter permission for your retina.”
“Unfortunately you didn’t, so I had to ask Abby to hack in.”
“You had your AI hack into my security mainframe?!”
“She is more than just an AI, she’s my friend. And yes, yes I did. She also set up a way to capture the kidnappers if they try to use Howard’s retina to get in. Pretty cool, huh?”
“No! This is my house! I didn’t give you permission to change my security settings!”
“Well you don’t have to worry about that anymore, because Abby is not going to do it again and she reinforced your firewall so nobody else could hack into it.”
I deserve a thank you,” said Abby, in Bryant’s head.
“She says she deserves a thank you.”
“I am not going to thank her for messing with my security system!”
“This isn’t helping us. What did you find out?”
“I’m not telling you until you fix it.”
“Fine. Abby, change it back,” he said while inserting his chip that contained Abby into the security control box. She downloaded herself into the system, destroyed the reinforced firewall, changed Bryant’s and Howard’s security settings, and uploaded herself back into the chip in about a second.
“There. Done,” Bryant said.
Thank you. Now, I found that there were four guys that took Howard. They took him-“
“Are their names in the database?”
“Yes, but please don’t interrupt me. They took him unconscious, so weven if we were able to get a remote security plug, he wouldn’t know where he is. Did you install a GPS chip on him by any chance?”
“He’s my best friend, not some suspiciously acting girlfriend.”
“Well then all we can do is try to track down the guys that did this.”
“Do any of them have GPS chips?”
“I don’t know, my AI deserved a break after-“
“One does. Abby checked. Oh, sorry. Continue.”
“Thank you. As I was saying: it deserved a break after all of the scans I had it do. Which one had the GPS chip?”
“Cecil. That’s an old Brittish name, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. He’s probably wealthy and sophisticated, stupid snops. Any background info?”
“Nope. He just moved here from the Brittish ghetto. Does England have holo tech yet?”
“Some, but not as responsive as ours.”
“He is probably still getting used to efverything. His house is probably unsecured at the moment.”
“Wait, are we planning on jumping him like he jumped Howard? Isn’t that bad karma?”
“Yeah, but it’s time to turn the tables. We can’t just sit around waiting to respond to something, how boring would that be?”
