The Machine Detective by Greg Dragon

Author:Greg Dragon [Dragon, By Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Private Investigators, Thrillers, Technological, Cyberpunk
Publisher: Thirsty Bird Productions
Published: 2021-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Into the Woods

If Aaron Tang was to be believed, Manton Paradise had a twin. Ariana, tried to corroborate this by running a background check, but the only brother on record was much younger than him. He too had changed his surname to Paradise, but while he favored his brother, the two men were born a year apart, if the records were accurate.

In the arrest database, the brother had been jailed for several misdemeanors dealing with assault. Most of these were egregious, but since the victims were synths, he had been allowed to retain his freedom. Before joining his brother, he was Stephen Ploski, relatively unknown by anyone outside of his immediate family. Within the system, he was Sherwood Paradise, allegedly a “Thorn,” which was a recruitment enforcer for the cult of Paradise.

“Wood,” which was his known alias, was a knucklehead on the pendulum, swinging in and out of jail his entire life. When Ariana pushed his rap sheet to the G11’s console, Dhata wondered why they’d even bothered letting him out. Synth crime was punishable by law. This included assault, rape, and kidnapping, though most Johns refused to carry out the arrests since they still deemed the synths as being nothing short of robots.

Here was an objectively dangerous man, walking free because his victims weren’t human. With his ties to Paradise, Dhata needed to question him, even though Ariana forbade him from doing so. Parked beneath a bridge in the dark of the evening, Dhata skimmed through Wood’s records to see if he could find an address. He expected him to live in St. Pete with the other remnants of his brother’s collective, but since his last arrest the records revealed that he’d left the city.

The last shown record of his whereabouts was somewhere deep in the badlands outside of Gainesville. He had been given a ticket for driving recklessly, and was in the company of a biker gang known as the Killer Khans. The Khans were anarchists with a deep love for synth Marys, and various other forms of flesh trade. Wood was eventually released with a generous warning, but the arresting officer was smart and had planted a tracker on his implant.

With access to this tracker through Wood’s file, Dhata was able to find his new location. Now all he needed was a reliable partner to watch his back, and he could question Paradise’s brother to learn who killed Ida. Ariana was the automatic answer, but he didn’t want to hear her mouth. She would first scold him and remind him that he was no longer a young man, and shooting it out with gangsters wasn’t worth it.

But who else can I ask? he thought. Lur wasn’t a soldier, and Hiroshi was missing in action. A cypher’s strength was inside a rack, not interrogating hools and trading shots. There was The Unsung, his most powerful resource, but that would take speaking at length with Robert Ito and trying to explain the logical reason for the assault.

Dhata decided to go it alone, though in the back of his head he knew it was foolish.

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