It’s been a while. Aside from allowing myself to recover so my ribs wouldn’t mend themselves wrong, Vera Wright, the owner of The Technosexual, paid me a visit the other day. Sounds like the girls had an issue with some gang and were prepared to go to war with them. Even though I’m banned from The Technosexual for reasons that are honestly BS, I still offer my services to them, professional or otherwise. They’re good people, and they need all the allies they can get.

That and a good street war was just the thing to lift my spirits, just in case investigating this bio-augment was going to turn up empty.

I have to say, though, I should have known the girls were going to bring the noise. So many of them are heavily augmented, some of them equipped with tech that I’ve only seen in cyberpunk games. Vera said afterwards that she and the others really appreciated my help, but I felt like a fifth wheel with my little subcompact Glock when the girl next to me had a fucking shotgun installed in her arm.

Anyways, nobody got hurt who didn’t have it coming, the girls are safe and sound, and I’m ready to continue my investigation into this augment and the secret Project Ambrosia.

*    *    *

Okay, it’s been a week. I suddenly got swamped with my actual work that makes money.  A lot of subpoenas were handed out this week, and I can’t imagine why.

Anyways, with that out of the way, I’m ready to continue this investigation into Project Ambrosia.

*    *    *

One week later. More distractions from my actual detective work, doing background checks on those anti-aug terrorists that were killed when the Special Forces team went in. But it’s been over a month, why are they being investigated now? The Prime Minister apparently wanted this whole fiasco swept under the rug quickly and quietly; GEE I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY. If he wants to continue playing coy about the anti-aug movement that he fomented, I’m going to open an investigation into him and see what kind of skeletons I can dig out of his closet!

But that would come later. Right now, I have a more pressing side project to attend to.

*    *    *

Apparently the city is very active right now. It’s been another week of mainstream detective work that has been eating up my time. If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was trying to stall me. Well it ain’t happening! I will get to the bottom of this Ambrosia nonsense, come Hell or high water!

*    *    *

I’m in between giggle fits right now. There was a calling card bandit that appeared in the city this weekend; the Black Cross Bandit. They sent their card to the police department, presumably as some sort of challenge on the eve of a big score.

This isn’t a movie; he was caught in like five minutes. Apparently nobody told him that calling cards are a massive liability to would-be criminals, even a skilled one, because the police have all kinds of techniques and resources to track down criminals based on evidence, especially intentionally left evidence. The dude was absolutely stumped and humiliated when he was cuffed.

Anyways, this is all side stuff that happened when I went down to the police department to call in a favor. Borrowing their sketch artist for an hour, I had him draw up a depiction of the bio-augment I encountered at the augmentation facility. Whoever was in charge of this operation, they knew what they were doing. The CCTV cameras were disabled up to half an hour before the attack, and most of the staff never saw any faces, at least not the one that got away. 

They don’t give the sketch artists enough credit; with eyewitness accounts alone, they can come up with some startlingly accurate depictions of the perps. Of course, that could also just be my superior memory. Or he’s very talented.

From there, it was a simple, if tedious and time-consuming matter of canvasing the city and seeing if anyone recognized the portrait. Naturally, most of my canvasing turned up nothing; most of the younger women I talked to said he looked like the kind of guy they’d ask out on a date. Thanks, but that ain’t the question, and if you’re fishing for a date, you could always ask me out. Sure, I’m not what most women would go for, but I’m just saying, I’m available.

I’m sorry, I should be more on-topic in these entries. The thing is, detective work ends up being an exercise in tedium more often than not, and I feel like I have now hit the most boring part. I’m tracking down a guy, and that took most of a day.

I eventually found one person who recognized him. He was a tenant in an apartment building, conveniently only a few blocks away from my own. I already knew about the place; it was a hotbed of anti-aug sentiment. When I was still on the service, whenever a dispatch was sent there, we only sent organics, just because of how caustic the tenants there got at the sight of augments.

It’s fitting that someone involved in the hostage situation would be in such a radicalized block. But then about half of the terrorists, based on the background checks I ran, also came from this same apartment building. It probably doesn’t mean much beyond that.

I asked around the building about the man. I tested some various acts and stories, pretending to first be a friend from high school, then being a fling he hooked up with at a bar… that one bothered me, but if I’m going to be trapped in this kind of body, I might as well use it to my advantage.

The heartstruck lover act hit home with an elderly couple, who pointed me to his apartment. After making sure the coast was clear, I picked the lock and forced my way in.

Part of me was furious I didn’t take sick leave from work. The apartment was clearly very recently occupied, judging by all the furniture that was still there. Everything, however, was dishevelled and ransacked; personal effects and electronics were taken, papers shredded into mulch and packed in trash bags. Judging by the fine layer of dust that had begun to settle on everything, he must have done all this immediately after the hostage situation.

It took too long for me to track this guy down, and now he had flown the coop. I’m sure there was plenty of fur and fingerprints to be collected and analyzed by forensics, but that would take weeks to come back, and if he wasn’t already in the database, that wouldn’t really help me at all. I guess all was not lost, however. Whatever this guy was up to, he was in it deep. No normal person would have several trash bags worth of shredded documents just lying around unless they were up to no good.

I left the apartment, and as I closed the door, I ran into one of the other tenants, some young girl. She asked if I was looking for Keaton. Playing it cool, I said yes. She replied that he was returning to the Western Republic for a family reunion several weeks ago and should be back within a month.

The ransacked and derelict apartment on the other side of the door told a different story. I thanked her and left the building as calm as possible, only breaking off into a sprint the instant I left the front door. I had multiple leads now. The name the bio-augment was using was Keaton, apparently, and if he was telling the truth, he had boarded a plane back to the Western Republic. If both were true, I could use them to track him down.

Travelling to the airport gave me some time to think. Was it possible this bio-augment was Subject 404? The idea was absurd; that he was a bio-augment was, in and of itself, not an absolute link to Doctor G and Project Ambrosia, but I had to seriously wonder at the possibility. If not, then what was this guy involved in? How deep was this rabbit hole going to go? Was I actually on the precipice of a far greater conspiracy? It could be a dead-end to my investigation, but now my current obsession was finding this guy and what he was involved with. That and bring him in for being a fucking terrorist.

Once I got to the airport, I dropped the charade. I contacted airport security and showed them the sketch photo, explaining, with a flash of my badge, that the man was under investigation. They agreed to let me study their security footage. Once again, it was another long tedious slog of studying all the camera footage going back one month to two weeks ago. Even on fast forward, and with the very narrow criteria I established, it was an unfun experience looking through every second of all that footage. I don't envy the people who have to do that full time.

Eventually, miraculously, thankfully, I found the guy. Sure enough, he had boarded a plane to the Western Republic less than a week after the hostage situation. Flight 172, to Angel Airport, just outside of Angel City.

It really looked like he was heading home, to wherever the lab was located. With that knowledge in mind, I returned to my apartment to consider my next course of action.

Angel City was rebuilt from the scattered ruins of a major metropolitan area from the western end of the old country. When you counted the surrounding counties and regions, it was roughly half the size of one of the Eastern Union's smaller countries. This was no small area; we are talking about an area of 35,000 square miles and a population of around 20 million. And then you had to consider the fact that the Republic was currently recovering from a brutal civil war. There were independent militias wandering about, killing anyone who looked suspicious or for wearing colors they didn't like. Then there were the enforcers, who also didn't take kindly to anyone looking suspicious or wearing colors they didn't like. 

And then, once I got past all that, I would have to investigate the lab, who also might not take kindly to strangers snooping around. Likely they had their own contingent of armed guards, possibly augmented, with itchy trigger fingers. It was, in every possible way, a suicide mission.

It shouldn't take longer than a month to travel to the Western Republic, perform my investigation, and be back in the EU before anyone starts to miss me.