1. Shooting, Beating, Stabbing

[tibbius]

Shift jacks into the power supply and activates his neutrino detector for a six hour charge cycle. The detector gives him a pleasantly random time sequence of bits to contemplate. Is this how humans dream? he wonders.

Clark and Angus and Louis do their human bedtime things.

- - -

Morning. The sun drags itself up into the brown ring of coal and diesel smoke round the horizon. Lights powered by that smoke switch on throughout the city. Cabs and buses move in the streets of Strive.

What do you do?

[shaidar]

Shift unplugs himself, connects to the meshwork and messages the others

"It would be efficient if those of us without employment spend time today researching these locations for a meeting later. If nobody else is available I can spend time online looking for links between the murder sites, but my skill in this area is far lesser than Louis. I could visit the sites physically, my optics may detect something of interest. I understand the correct term to be a lead"

[thenewflesh]

A long night filled with flickering screens and the frenetic polychromatic thrashing of Newjazz. Louis falls asleep in his chair at 3, wakes up at 10. German hackers were busy last night; Unixty forum threads blew up overnight. Louis checks them while filling his body with trashy cereals. He takes a shower, brushes his teeth, makes an abortive attempt at home exercise, and checks his emails and messages.

"Shift, good idea," he replies.

He goes outside for a walk and a smoke. Eventually he'll have to get back to his actual coding work.

[tibbius]

Shift heads over to the neighborhood northeast of Crown and G and starts to amble roll? around, scanning with both visible-light and organic-stain-detection (UV) optics. There's certainly a lot of organic stains in the area. roll for something - can Shift identify blood stains? There's also, he notices, a makeshift memorial at the corner of Crown and G - a little weather-beaten, it has rained twice in the past week and looks like it might start dribbling dilute acid from the dirty sky again.

Louis has almost finished his coffin nail when he gets a message alert. It's Vasily with two red bangs on the message. Moments later Tatev hits him up as well.

Who does he answer first?

[thenewflesh]

Louis thinks for a moment, then checks Vasily's message.

[shaidar]

Shift has legs, rather than wheels, makes it easier to clean stairs

Finding blood stains - Perception: [1d6]=3

[tibbius]

Louis Vasily's message:

"Stevie's in hospital. Rally at Crown and G, 2 pm."

Shift

There's a bunch of stains that could be blood ... One big one on the sidewalk just about a foot to the left of the memorial with its rain-chewed tissue-paper hearts and flowers.

Bloody footprints lead from that mark up the street, toward the industrial district. The prints fade after about fifty feet. They could be from a human wearing tire-tread boots; those aren't very common. They also could be from a middle-grade android like Shift, one with all-terrain legs and feet that have integrated treads. Shift thinks they somewhat resemble his memory of his own footprints - kinda close but definitely different.

[shaidar]

Shift

With the day to himself Shift decides to continue along the path towards the industrial district.

Is this taking him towards the site of another of the murders? He wants to note things like businesses, particularly those relating to robots, as he's looking for elements common to all murder sites. I assume robots have perfect recall.

[thenewflesh]

"Copy that."

Louis checks Tatev's message.

[BackworldTraveller]

Angus runs through the morning routine oblivious to the world outside and then heads to the Police Precinct (re: here) to check up on the lists of missing before work - He has several Students that have gone missing, and it's always prudent to check they aren't dead before he claims pay for teaching them. So I'll do my usual "Hi, I'm the social Worker" routine before I head to work - maybe I can find some info about the latest murders there.

[tibbius]

Shift heads up the street. In this direction it's about two blocks until he'll reach the next murder scene, a midpoint at the west side of the rectangle formed by the eight killings. The first scene was Pete Jenkins. The next is Pheng Sokha.

The traces of blood fade almost to nothing. Then they cross the street, about a half block short of the second murder scene.

Louis scans Tatev's message. "Good luck with that don't get a virus lolol I reckon 247 have got other things on their minds rn, GC icing the cake for them" the last part suggesting that Govcorp once again is trying to crackdown on the online community of dissent.

Angus surveys the bleakly brutalist façade of the Precinct before reluctantly entering under its massive portico and stepping through the grudgingly retracting automatic door. Inside it is just as cold as outside. This is the front desk, not the booking area. The furnishings are in good shape and look like any professional office space of twenty years ago. One uniformed officer sits behind the high-fronted desk, chin on a fist, apparently perusing a mobile device concealed behind the front of the desk. She looks up when Angus enters.

"Good morning," she says cheerfully. "How can I help you?"

Angus explains his purpose roll something

[BackworldTraveller]

I tried trees, but had to settle for dice
Information [1d8]=6

[shaidar]

Shift crosses the road to follow the trail

Does he know which side of the street the murder was?

[tibbius]

Still cheerful, the desk sergeant scrawls something and stamps something on a shirt sticker and hands it to Angus, along with directions to the public records terminal room. "Ask Sidney for assistance," she offers. "Big fat smelly civilian dude, really nice guy."

Sidney is exactly as described. It turns out that Pete Jenkins probably was one of Angus' students. The Govcorp file shows that he obtained his electronics technician certificate a couple of years ago. Edward Amfokovy almost certainly would have been in Angus' intro philosophy class - he was a remedial student. The Govcorp files are quite detailed about people's personal lives. Angus has had a background awareness of pervasive surveillance, but the files really bring it to the front of his mind.
---
The news reports that Shift has accessed were not specific as to which side of the street the murders occurred on, just gave block numbers. However, on this side of the street there's another rain-wilted memorial with peeling duct tape loosely attaching a few posters to the brick wall. Another blood patch in a doorway near the memorial. Shift's memory coughs up Pheng Sokha as the victim. Age 26, Kiomwa immigrant, the news report has that comment from XK7-8JR. XK7 is a real unit type, probably some humans would know that. A few more posters have responded to the inflammatory remarks with fake serial numbers as their tags. Most are "crush the droids" but one says "all living must be pulped - droids and the ancients unite!"

[BackworldTraveller]

Angus
Ah Sydney, One of my students has been killed at Crown and G - Great shame, nice kid - and that means I have to find another one or lose the income.

What's the news there. It seems to be becoming a down-and-going sort of location. Next we'll have the necromancers moving in!

Perception [1d8]=1

[shaidar]

Shift

The 'bot compiles a subroutine to run in the background of his meshware interface, slowly crawling the net and searching for other references on public news sites to tag XK7-8JR and the tag that talked about killing the living:

search subroutine: [1d6]=5

Once the subroutine is active, Shift refocuses his attention back to the street, looking for signs of a fresh blood trail, or the original one:

Perception: [1d6]=5


I hope I haven't taken too much of a liberty with the background sub-routine idea, just seemed like something a robot might be able to do, not hugely significant, but useful. If you'd rather I can have Shift send the info to Louis to look for

[tibbius]

That's really clever and exactly the kind of player agency that I enjoy. I'll have to think about appropriate info given your good rolls.

There's another faded blood trail. It seems like whoever does these killings might be making a point of walking through the mess. Shift tries to speculate about reasons for that. And why hasn't anyone followed the footprints? They lead further up the street.

[shaidar]

Shift thinks about the footprints. He understood that humans can be inefficient, but to miss this would be sheer incompetence, even for them.

He applies his visual algorithms to see if there is a match between the original tread pattern and that of the new trail:

Perception: [1d6]=4

[tibbius]

Louis gets another message from Tatev: eggplant peach laughing sweaty face.

Has Louis met Tatev irl?

[thenewflesh]

Louis grins. "Your help is invaluable. How did you get in touch with them? Asking... for a friend..." he replies.

He has not. But they've corresponded a bunch, about 50% of it in a professional context.