The Wasteland

My little girl is lost! Have any of you seen her?

Chapter V

Sal Fiori was stumped. "Look up what I was actually doing at that time." No matter what the video showed, there sure as hell oughta be video that showed what he had been really doing. Vinny obliged, but as he did, a slight smile curled the edges of his lips.

Sal had been overseeing the girls in the gym, one of his favorite things to do, when an alert had come up. His phone had revealed a message that was too large to view on his phone, and that had been strange. He'd called Vinny, the sender of the alert, and was told he could view the message in his office, so he'd come and seen it.

It showed Alice Sorne removing her implants - no, prosthetics, he reminded himself - and running out of her house, to the obvious shock of her father, and down to the park, where Sal himself appeared to get out of a moto and urge her to get in, flip off the camera, and drive off with her.

Now the video showing him at home was defaced. He was sporting a cartoon mustache, fangs, and had a crudely drawn penis on his bald spot. Whoever had screwed with the video hadn't been shy about letting them know.

Sal was furious. "Is this a joke?", he scowled at the screen, where it appeared that Vinny thought it was. "Well, looks like this is, but Sorne is gone. That's no joke." Vinny stopped smiling, and the video ended. His eyes grew hard.

"You weren't the guy that picked her up, and none of our guys is either. We don't know where she is, and whoever did it set you up for it." He leaned forward, "So you tell me, are you laughing?"

"Whose moto is that?" Sal asked. He was going to find out who did this. No one takes his girls and made him look bad. Dubai would be furious!

"How the fuck should we know?" Vinny said belligerently. "It doesn't exist. It's a Ford, from the badging, but it's not a model they make. It's not licensed. There's no GPS, nothing. It went into the tunnel and never came out. We think it's still in the ARC, but we don't know for sure. We've modeled it's aural signature, so when it pops up again, we'll get an alert."

"We need you to put some feet on the street, and some heat on the meat." Vinny frowned, and his voice dropped. Instead of reducing the tension, it made him even more menacing. "If any more girls, even others not in the program, get stolen, our buyers are gonna get cold feet, and ARC is gonna find new pimps."

"It's Vick. It's gotta be." Sal was frightened now. He'd worked a long time for this job. Hell, the Advanced Research Center was mostly his work. Vick and Sarah were onboarded because of their competence and malleability, according to the psych reports. Vick was wrapped around Sarah's finger, and Sarah had eaten up the propaganda like it was her favorite flavor of ice cream.

When Sarah had gone off the rails, he'd been certain Vick had been in on it, but the scans clearly showed he'd had no idea, and he'd never even spoken a word to Sarah about any of it on the surveillance. They'd taken Sarah off the reservation, and they'd put Vick on the hook: he kept his little girl in line, or there'd be an accident for her too.

Vick had been a model citizen, until now.

Vinny popped up another video. This one showed Vick jogging down the street, calling for AC. When he got to the park, he shouted to the people there, "My little girl is lost. Has anyone seen her?" Getting no reply, he continued jogging in the direction the moto with her in it had taken.

The video vanished, and Vinny said, "He went into the tunnel after the moto, and vanished. We can't find him either." Vinny looked thoughtful, and drummed his fingers on the table. "We'll find them. They'll turn up, sooner or later." There was a pause, and Sal jumped back in.

"He had to know about Sarah.", Sal said. "If these guys can draw dicks on people's heads they can mess with the scans. They're getting to you, somehow." He kept his face flat, but inside he was smiling. This was all Vinny's fault, and he was damn sure he wasn't gonna take the fall for this!

"They can't mess with the fucking scans!" Vinny was almost shouting. "It's a separate system. The data is never on the net until we put it there." He continued, even angrier than before. "He was looking for his precious little snowflake. We've got competition! Some bastards are taking our product, and we're gonna find out who!"

The call ended. Vinny was pissed, but not at him, Sal thought. He was relieved about that, but even having Vinny's job up for grabs didn't make him feel better about Vick. Somehow that guy had fucked with their setup. Sarah had got wind of it, and Sal knew she'd been cagey. She'd fooled him for weeks, before they caught her.

Her profile was very clear. She'd have told Vick, her primary asset, to recruit him. Somehow the video was being corrupted, and the scans had to be too. He briefly grieved at the realization he wouldn't be able to go back to watching the girls in their yoga pants and bike shorts doing their exercises.

He had work to do, no time for fun.