Chapter Three

Wilks stepped through the portal, into complete blackness.

"Mr Tucker?" he called out tentatively.

"Yo!" A muffled voice replied in the darkness.

"Did something happen to the power?"

"Hmm? Oh, right. I'm working on the generator. Come on through."

Wilks chuckled. "Unlike you, Mr Tucker, these old eyes can't see in the dark."

"I thought you had the same implants I do."

"No, no. These were the prototypes. I can't see in any other spectrum other than normal, visible light."

"Oh." Jason said, surprised. "Well, hang on a second, I've…almost…"

Somewhere, something ticked, thrummed with power, and the light slowly blinked on. Wilks stepped through into the main hall, and looked around.

"Very nice. Someone's been doing a spot of cleaning."

"Someone's had to."

Wilks followed the muffled voice down to a large power generator in one corner, with two denim clad legs sticking out from underneath it. Jason slid out, and stood up, trying to brush the oil and dirt off his white t-shirt and jeans.

As Tucker tried to make himself presentable, Wilks took a good look around. "Is that…blood on the floor? Oh, my."

"Base raid, I think." Jason grinned. "I found some of the original inhabitants, too."

"Really?"

"Well, what was left of them. At least I have plenty of meat in the fridge, now." Tucker grinned evilly, before nodding at Wilk's hand. "What's that?"

"Hmm? Oh, yes." Wilks moved over to the large monitor, trying to forget Jason's cannibalism joke. "I brought SAMI."

Jason blinked. "Sammy? Uhm…Doc? He's dead. Remember? The body in my coffin?"

"What? Oh, right, your colourful friend. No. Well, in a …uhm…this is…well…SAMI." Wilks waved a CD at Jason, who stood there, confused.

"And SAMI would be…?"

"The Synchronous Artificial Mind Index. An artificial intelligence linked up to fifteen satellites in geo-synchronous orbit over Earth, keeping track of crimes and other details, and alerting the users of the program."

"Clever." Jason nodded. "So, why is it an artificial intelligence?"

"Something has to sort out the pertinent information from the useless. That's SAMI's job."

"So…it's a sidekick?"

"No, more of a tech guru. Did you ever see an episode of…I think it was called 'Kim Possible'?"

Jason shrugged.

"Think of it as your own personal 'Wade'". Wilks slid the CD into a slot on the side of the monitor, and pressed a button.

The screen dissolved into blackness, with big white letters dominating the centre.

Synchronous

Artificial

Mind

Index

…SAMI…

Is ready.

Please enter verbal command.

"I…uhh…took the liberty of installing an Avatar into SAMI for you, to make things easier to use. I scoured through Chiron's CCTV archives, until I had an exact…"

"Woah, woah!" Jason blinked. "What's an Avatar?"

Suddenly, a giant face Jason recognised, all too well, appeared on the screen, grinning like a loon.

"I'm an Avatar. What's up, Wankenstein?"

Susan looked over her schedule for the week, and groaned. 'Another function, another dinner, and then…my weekly Friday meeting with the Mayor'.

It seemed as if Mayor Anson had taken a particular shine to Susan, and invited her, in an 'official capacity', to pretty much every event which came from his office. It made her feel as if she was constantly by his side, on his arm, like a piece of eye candy.

'Get a grip, Daniels', she chided herself. 'Maybe he's using you as a free escort, but you're getting some good stories out of this.'

Good stories.

'Since when did I consider a good story to be what businessmen from Talos Island had for dinner? ' She sighed. Life had certainly changed for her since Tucker's funeral. She had risen through the ranks of her fellow journalists ever since Anson took power, giving her exclusives and letting her listen in on 'sensitive' information that he deemed important for the people to know. In return, she felt she had become little more than a glorified PR assistant.

'The Mayor took some time from playing golf…'

'Mayor Anson, resplendent in a charcoal suit, grey shirt, and orange tie…'

'There must be some news somewhere. There MUST be!'

Scowling, Susan grabbed her jacket from her chair, and stormed off to the elevators.

It was time to hit the streets.

I stared up at Sammy. Or…SAMI.

Whatever.

"Dude, say something." Sa….the face…grinned down at me. "You look like you're about to freak out."

I realised I was swaying slightly. Turning to Wilks, who tried his best to hide an amused smile. "It…it can see me?"

"Oh, believe it, baby. It talks."

I jumped. "Okay, nobody but the real Sammy would say something like that."

"I know."

"But you're not him! Sammy's dead."

"I know that, too. I'm SAMI."

"No, you're not."

SAMI looked at me, indignantly. "Yes, I am. I'm SAMI, the Synchronous Arti…"

"SHUT UP!" I wheeled around to Wilks. "Why does that…thing think that it's Sammy?"

"Well…it is."

What?

"You see, Sammy was stunned by a Police Drone shortly before we met. Drones have a built in identification system, based on a mind scan technique which reads…well, it's very complicated. However, it takes a reading of a person's…for lack of a better term, mind. Personality, preferences, memories, that sort of thing, and compares it against the Paragon Criminal Database. Mr Edwards' file was…uh…liberated by a former police detective I know, and installed on this program. For all intents and purposes…that is Sammy Edwards, at least from a time before his death."

"True, dat, ho."

I glanced at SAMI. "You shut up."

"But…"

"That's an order."

The Avatar (I found it much more comforting to think of the face on the screen that way) frowned, but stayed silent.

"Now, explain to me. What is an Avatar?"

Wilks gestured to the screen in a grand gesture. "That is. It's an artificial intelligence algorithm, answerable only to you."

"I don't need an Avatar."

"Ah, but you do." Wilks smiled at me. "The SAMI program is too vast for any one person to traverse successfully. The Avatar, in this case, Mr Edwards…"

"Yo."

Wilks continued as if the Avatar had never spoken. "The Avatar provides a helpful graphical and verbal interface, allowing you to filter out the facts from the rumours. Also, in this…" He looked around the room in disgust "Place, you could do well to have a friendly face to keep you company. As I said, SAMI is, like it or not, an exact duplicate of Mr Edwards."

I turned back to the screen. The Avatar stuck its' tongue out at me.

"Looks like we're stuck with each other."

"What do you mean, 'stuck'? I'll have you know I'm programmed with over 1,000 verbal, visual, and audio games, and can provide stimulating conversation on a wide variety of subjects."

I was intrigued. "Oh?"

"Yeah, but let's do all that later. I found a data-feed from some internet porn. Shall I put it on the main monitor?"

This was going to be hell.

This, Susan told herself, was going to be hell.

It had been quite a while since she'd been 'on the beat', as she liked to call it. Finding her old sources, reminiscing on old times, and trying to discover something actually newsworthy. The job as she used to do it. The job she had found herself hopelessly out of touch with.

One of her old 'friends', in the Hellion Gang, took one look at her and decided to make a play for her jewellery. Running as quickly as she could to the nearest police outpost, she took a breather to compose herself, then realised she was completely and totally lost.

Founder's Falls had never looked so bad.

Once, a picturesque part of Paragon, Founder's Falls had changed from the type of place people wanted to take photos of, to the sort of place people wouldn't want to even bring their cameras. Or their children. Or themselves, for that matter. The once pristine lakes, which had shimmered gold at noon, were murky, and uncared for. Gangs roamed the streets in broad daylight, and nobody, not the police, nor the heroes, took the time to stop them. At night, things were worse.

There were rumours…an urban myth which supposedly traced back decades, as such things often did, of a hunter who prowled the streets at night. A hunter with no face, with no body, who was carried on the wind, and struck with a blazing arm made of white fire. Another rumour put this hunter as someone with no face, a body towering at eight feet high, and a cape as black as the night itself. A third placed this hunter as an old man, who hunted the streets, draining the youth and vitality out of his victims, so that he may live another night, always hunting, waiting, watching.

When questioned, why has nobody heard of this hunter until recently, the answers are always the same.

"The heroes are gone, now."

Susan didn't believe in myths, or legends, or eight feet demonic hunters with arms of fire. She believed in fact. In proven truths. It was her job as a journalist to set lies, rumours, and myths back in the trash where they belonged.

However, as she ran past a signpost reading "Pocket D", she kept a close eye on the sun, as it dipped over the horizon.

At night, she reasoned to herself, if would be more difficult to see the gangs.

At night, she tried to push the thought away, something Hunts in Paragon City.