Carolina held up her hands, and took a deep breath. Simmons tried to do the same, while Doc sat next to him with a steady hand on his back. Simmons voice was less shaky than it was before. "I'm sorry about all that."

Carolina spoke calmly. "It's alright. But I need you to start from the beginning." She lowered one hand, and pointed at Donut with the other. "And this time we'll take turns."

Donut shrugged, and Simmons took a longer breath. "Okay, the beginning." He stopped. "Do we mean when Donut showed up and you were gone, or way before that when Donut got taken-"

"How about a year before this all started?" Donut interrupted. Carolina gave him a look, but Simmons nodded.

"Right." He sat up straighter. "A year ago, Donut and I came up with an idea for a computer program. It was like a keylogger, all it did was collect data on pages that had certain, types of information." He clasped his hands. "It never worked the way we wanted it to, topics we wanted it to find were either too broad or so specific that little would turn up."

Doc looked confused for a moment. "Why would you need something like that when there's tons of search engine's readily available?"

Simmons didn't respond, only gestured to Donut. Donut stepped forward, taking the torch. "To get to things that search engines can't."

Carolina raised her eyebrows. "The Deep Web?"

Donut waved a finger in the air. "Close, but not quite." He smirked. "We wanted a program that could find data on the Dark Net, which is much more insidious than just a series of web results that you can't find on Google." He looked at the ground. "But, it wasn't as easy as I'm making it sound. So we had to start small." He looked back up at Simmons.

Simmons picked it back up. "Certain... sites and users used the same kind of ways to encrypt themselves. Not all of them, but there were patterns and obvious methods popped up." He shrugged his shoulders loosely, relaxing slightly. "We figured if it the Dark Net was made and manipulated by humans, there was a way to backtrack it. Afterall, nothing is really destroyed on the internet, and corrupted data is still data."

"But why?" Carolina mind reeled with the possible answers as Simmons and Donut glanced at each other.

Donut snorted. "The Good Samaritan in me wants to say we did it to help others, stop people from getting hurt."

Simmons voice was weary now. "There was a professor that wanted to put in a good word for us and our project, and promised that we could get a large grant if we made good on our 'Dark Net Bot'." He sighed. "After things started picking up, the project itself seemed too dangerous."

"I'll say." Doc thought back to how his employers were so adamant about those files, and wondered if this was what they were talking about.

"See, you can't make something that collects so much hidden information and not have powerful people want to have their hands on it." Donut explained. "Towards the end of the project, we decided that making something like this might lead even worse problems. So we changed it. It still found illegal sites, and was about as fast as a computer from the 1970s, but instead of keeping the data, it learned how to shut them down."

"Woah, woah." Carolina stopped him. "What do you mean, it 'learned'? You would have had to code something like that for it to work, right?"

"It was so easy." Simmons mumbled out loud. "It already knew, I still don't know how but it already knew how to take a site down as soon as it found it. It felt like it was advancing exponentially, and all we had to do was give it orders. Like a person who could write a novel by endlessly doing word search puzzles."

"An artificial intelligence, and we practically stumbled upon it. If we shut down the websites before the police got to them, we could also throw away the information right after it. As long as both of us kept the code to ourselves, the AI would stay safe, it would stay unmodified and no one would get found out."

Carolina stopped them both. "You changed a program that was supposed to collect data, only to throw it away."

Donut sounded defensive. "We did what the law couldn't, with a bot that we couldn't trust them with."

"The site I was trying to get to at my house!" Doc exclaimed.

"Bingo." Donut winked at him cheekily. "We had a good grip on a technology that could have made us heroes. Had we figured out how to protect the program, you would have seen us nominated for a Peace Prize."

"It didn't last," Simmons choked out. "We got found out by some of the people we had shut down, and before we could do anything about it, I got attacked."

"And coming in front stage left was that ruggedly handsome bouncer who we hired to keep us safe." Donut cocked his head to the side with an amused expression on his face. "Lot of good that did us."

"And so were here." Carolina finished. "Sorry about, uh, you having to rescue yourself. Pretty sure I should have done that." She said awkwardly to Donut.

"Don't worry about it. Besides," he grinned, "Prince Charming over here has been quite the white knight for me."

Doc smiled. "Well, minus the whole fainting spell I had."

"It happens."

Simmons interjected. "There's just one more thing." He stood up. "If you and Doc are here, then where are Grif and Tucker?"

Donut licked his lips, and rubbed his hands together. "That's the new million dollar question."

Doc tapped his fingers on his chin. "Do you think we could use the program to find where he's at?"

"Probably not. If they thought we could, they wouldn't let themselves get caught." Simmons admitted. "You would need someone on the inside, someone who knew how to get in and open up any kind of connection."

"I might know somebody who can help." Carolina said. "But it's going to take some research."

"Well, you've come to the right place." Donut said as he searched through the laptop. A few seconds later, a page filled with ominous government logos and red text was on the screen. "Which division?"