Beata’s wrinkled fingers danced across her keyboard, her gaze flitting between half a dozen screens filled with scrolling code and decompiled firmware. AI assistants wrote and tested alternative routines, working to construct the robotic malware she needed. Occasionally, something would catch her eye on one screen, and she would crab along her workstation on the wheels of her chair, eager to see if one of the bots was onto a winner. Anything promising she shared with the other bots; anything she deemed a dead end she halted, prompting the AI assistants to explore a new direction.
A video call came through from Emz, which she frantically accepted on her main workstation.
“Did you find her?”
“Yes,” Emz replied, but his expression conveyed that it wasn’t all good news. “We tracked their van to a safehouse in Sch?newik. She was there, alive and unharmed, and we went in to get her—”
“Is she with you now? Is she okay?” Beata eagerly interrupted.
“Not yet, I’m sorry. We took out all the hired thugs, but the guy in charge escaped in a mini-copter with her.”
“Eina sau!” she cried to the heavens. “Emz, you have made it worse. He will be angry and hurt her.”
“She’ll be okay—he needs her,” Emz stressed. “We questioned one of his thugs. He’s a civilian out of his depth. We’ve just got to work out where he’s gone. So don’t send them the code, or he’ll have no more use for her. Do not send the code until you’ve spoken to me, it’ll be used for terrorism.”
Beata didn’t answer, just looked across at her screens scrolling with lines upon lines of code.
Emz changed tack. “Luki is trying to track the copter. It flew west from my position towards the sea. He’s checking with satellite imagery. We’ll find them.”
“Luki? Luká? Novák is helping you?”
“Yes, he’s my new tech guy. He’s here with me.”
Beata nodded. “He is good,” she quietly acknowledged.
“And that merc, Idrissa Bamba, from the crypto thing,” Emz added. “We took out all of his muscle. His plan is screwed, he’s on the run—we just have to find him.”
Beata didn’t respond, just closed her moist eyes and dipped her head, letting her long silver locks fall across her face.
“I’ll send you his photo. We got some drone footage before he moved out of range,” Emz carefully explained, not wanting to mention that he’d shot the drone down. “Luki is also doing a search to identify him, but it’ll be quicker if you help too.”
Beata opened her eyes and looked back up to see her mysterious tormentor. A wave of emotions crossed her face when she saw Blazer. It was dark, but the camera had captured him well in the low light, and she recognised him immediately.
“Emz, do nothing more. He will kill her. I will take care of this,” Beata said with venom in her voice, then closed the call on Emz’s confused expression and blocked him.
Beata redoubled her efforts; pitiful anxiety had given way to steely resolve. She was dragging the robot, its bloody mechanical hand removed, into her workroom—or hobby room, as Asta routinely called it—when the cleaners arrived.
Three people exited the elevator on the sixth floor, wearing matching coveralls, caps, and shaded glasses. Two were guiding motorised trolleys loaded high with bulky equipment into the corridor. The third ensured the elevator doors didn’t close and locked them open, then quickly secured the nearby fire exit and covered the glass panel with a strip of opaque plastic sheeting from a bag. She then outpaced the other two and briskly moved past the two dead bodies and Beata’s door, showing no reaction, to reach the large window at the end of the corridor and began covering that with opaque sheeting too.
The other two stopped short of the bodies. A second, taller woman left her trolley by the corpses and slowly approached the apartment, calling out calmly to announce their presence.
“Hello. We’re the cleaning crew.”
Beata stopped dragging the robot and went to meet them at the door, stepping over the body with its head caved in and the bloody robot hand beside it. She nodded a greeting.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Those two bodies out there and one in here,” Beata said, pointing at each location.
The cleaner noted each spot with a calculating glance. “Neighbours?”
Beata shook her head. “No neighbours. We are the only ones on this floor.”
“Good,” the cleaner replied with a nod. “We’ll be done and gone in twenty minutes.” 03:10.
Beata nodded back and returned to moving the robot to her workroom as the cleaners got to work without further comment. As soon as the brief conversation ended, the other female cleaner began photographing the corridor scene, while the male cleaner quickly taped down a large stretch of opaque plastic sheeting on the floor, running from the two shot-up bodies to the two trolleys. 03:11.
The taller woman who had spoken to Beata surveyed the inner hallway, then photographed the bloody scene before dragging the body with the caved-in skull out into the corridor and onto the plastic sheeting. The shorter woman activated some bulky trolley equipment—two tall material printers—configuring them with both sets of imagery to produce new carpet tiles and laminate lengths. The male cleaner unloaded a stack of heavy-duty bins from the other trolley and positioned one by the apartment door. 03:13.
The shorter woman dragged the dead ginger man and then the Southeast Asian man onto the plastic sheeting, while the taller woman brought tools from a trolley into the inner hallway. With a utility blade, she quickly pried up several blood-stained lengths of laminate flooring, sliced them in half with powered snips, collected them along with the robot hand, and tossed them into the bin by the door. After shifting the bodies, the shorter woman started tearing up the stained corridor carpet tiles. Meanwhile, the male cleaner secured harnesses to all three corpses laid out on the sheeting. 03:16.
Both women unpacked robotic units with sturdy legs, placing one at each grisly scene—one in the corridor, the other in the inner hallway. The units featured hooded heads that precisely targeted bloodied patches of concrete floor or wall plaster, pressing their wide hoods firmly against the surfaces. They sprayed viscous mists to suppress dust, then deployed cutting tools to rapidly chip away debris, with vacuum lines sucking it into their storage compartments. As the units hummed to life, the women readied cartridges of quick-drying concrete mix, plaster, and perfectly dyed paint. Meanwhile, the male cleaner, having secured the harnesses, triggered controls that engaged high-torque motors. A web of steel cables tightened, wrenching the bodies into tight foetal curls—bones snapping and tendons ripping as they were compacted as far as possible. 03:10.
The male cleaner laid heavy-duty bins on their sides with plastic sacks adjacent to the crunched bodies. He then pulled them one by one into thick sacks, tied them off tightly, pushed them into the prepared bins, rocked them upright, and secured the lids. Meanwhile, the women switched the heads on the robotic units, connected the cartridges, and set them to repair and paint. 03:13.
The male cleaner loaded two bins onto his motorised trolley and was quickly in the elevator, heading down to their van. The women packed away the robotic units—the touch-up jobs complete—and used handheld heaters to speed up the drying process. 03:16.
Once dry, the women laid down the printed carpet tiles and hallway laminate. The male cleaner returned, loaded the third body-filled bin and the waste bin onto his trolley, and removed all the opaque sheeting, dumping it into the waste bin before sealing the lid. Without a word to Beata, they wiped down and closed her door and descended in the elevator with their trolleys. 03:20.
While the cleaning crew worked, Beata had her broken robot hardwired into her main rig—a one-off creation made by taking a commercial robot, disabling all its safety guardrails, and sculpting its neural pathways with years of hacks and brute-force learning, paired with a custom chipset. It worked, but it wasn’t pure code. She directed half her AI assistants to reverse-engineer the operating system, replicating what the custom hardware did as software. Eventually, working lines of code began to emerge. Each time she shared positive elements across all the bots, they began to coalesce into similar-looking results until one configuration of code met the criteria and passed all the test simulations.
She sat back and blinked, taking a moment to rationalise that her endeavours had paid off. She reran the simulations, which passed, and then again, which also passed. Beata paused, thinking about her next steps. She wasn’t foolish; she knew this malware could be devastating in the wrong hands, but she had to get Asta back. She downloaded the malware onto a secure portable drive with a small screen, entered a long, cryptic password, then deeply scrubbed her system of any traces of the malware. She removed the custom chips and memory from the robot—Hugo—and microwaved them to destruction. The only solution now existed on the portable drive, accessible only by the complex password in her head.
She retrieved a gun from her stores and glanced at the map on her screen. Beata had Emz’s position from when he’d called. She zoomed out and roughly west of him was the last place she’d seen Blazer—or Vitya, as she’d known him—many years ago. She knew it was no coincidence; beyond nostalgia, there was a technical reason he was likely heading there.
Beata sprayed bleach across Hugo and wiped him down meticulously, then powered off her workstation. She paused, gazing at her workroom—a space where she’d spent most of the past decade. Grabbing a coat, she slipped the gun into one pocket and the portable drive into the other, then hailed a taxi. As it approached her building, she moved to her apartment door, reactivated the electric lock—somehow disabled by the attackers—and closed it behind her. She didn’t even notice the seamless work of the cleaning crew as she took the lift down to the small lobby and stepped out of the building.
The taxi was waiting at the kerb. She got in, and the vehicle gently pulled away.
