A Strange Case

This is Part 2 of what has now become (by popular demand) a multi-part series. To start at the beginning, read The Dog.

Something just felt off with Dean today. Maybe it was the monthly workout yesterday, maybe it was the strange case in his task list. It still felt kind of barbaric to actually go out there and get sweaty with a bunch of other people in person. He rarely went out, because why bother? Well, you did what you had to do to keep your body strong and healthy.

And there were more than enough people in this facility to keep the matches interesting. A few fanatics too who, like himself, practiced in their augmented reality pods the best ways to get past another person’s guard and get a lethal blow in. As realistic as augmented reality was, sparring with a dummy dressed up as a human still couldn’t capture all the subtle nuances of different body types, flexibility, and strength levels that sparring with real people entailed.

Well, anyway, at least his morning coffee was nice and hot and comforting. He had it dialed in just the way he liked it after some trial and error, and it was nice to start each day with a familiar routine even if he wasn’t relishing the task in front of him. The generated view outside this morning looked kind of nice.

With a sigh of resignation, he stepped into his pod and closed his eyes as the skinsuit shrank around him. When he opened his eyes he was sitting next to his wife, Martha, in an unfamiliar cafe.

“Oh, this place is nice. Where are we?” Dean asked distractedly.

“Oh, I decided to have breakfast in Mumbai.”

“Fine, fine. Well, enjoy your day. I have to get started on a tough case.”

“Alright dear, I’ll see you for lunch?”

“Sure, sure.”

With that he popped into his regular workspace. Everything was arranged exactly the way he liked it, but somehow today it just didn’t seem good enough. This case really had him puzzled.

Thomas, age 38, an academic researcher in the field of cyber security. Currently sequestered away in a medical facility, being kept on life support. Apparently he had been attacked by an artificial pet dog at his new house. But given the stringent security and transparency protocols that had been in place for decades now, this should have been utterly impossible. Nothing this severe had ever happened in his lifetime. And now the case was on his desk.

A feeling of panicked terror started creeping its way up his stomach and into his chest. It had been so long since he had taken on a challenging case, he wasn’t sure he even remembered all the details of how the work tracking and auditing system worked. Most cases were relatively minor complaints with simple oversights as their root cause. AI usually found 95% of the problems, and he was there to sign off and double check the remaining 5%. But in this case, the AI had found absolutely nothing.

He resolved to go over every detail of the dog’s design, manufacture, and allocation with a fine toothed comb again. He had navigated through it before, but nothing had jumped out at him as obviously missing, negligent, defective, or malicious. As far as he could tell from the official records, everything was perfectly in order. The dog was pre-owned, but had been factory wiped and thoroughly tested before being reallocated.

Of course, some of the most sensitive technical details were redacted and only available in the company’s private records. But even if he requested security clearance to access them, he had a near zero chance of understanding those kinds of details, even with the help of AI. It was just too much out of his depth. He was trained to look for ethical violations, not security vulnerabilities.

If this second search turned up nothing, he might need to put a request out to the Worldnet system to pull in some relevant experts. That would likely blow this up into a larger investigation, which again was exceedingly rare in this day and age. The escalation procedures had been used a lot in the beginning when companies were still in the habit of hiding things, but everyone was used to transparency these days. It would be nearly impossible to hide something as big as malware in a dangerous artificial animal!

Ironically, the man best suited to understand the details of the dog’s security protocols was lying in a coma, lacerations all over his body, barely alive. Fortunately they had been able to retrieve a record of the incident: camera recordings of the dog’s attack and the last few minutes of Thomas’ brain recording. So they knew the thoughts that were going through his mind at the time.

Unfortunately, Thomas was in such a deep coma that he couldn’t consent to an interview via Neuralink, nor did he have any next of kin who could consent on his behalf. His brain was likely too damaged to really salvage anything useful anyway.

Dean chugged a virtual malt whiskey and started digging into the records. Some real alcohol really would have helped give him the kick he needed for this job though…