Case - 1 : Second Meeting.

I scanned the intra-city network for any 'Revanche' first and began going through the social profiles of all people that were named so when Larkin sat himself beside me and kept looking, staring, at me intently.

"What happened?" I asked, and then it struck me, "Oh, look for a man called Revanche on any of Vera Mórrígan's social media profiles if she has any. He is a little younger than me, probably in his late twenties, has thin black hair, and it's flat on his head. Possibly rich."

"That's a unique name, it should be easy to find him." Larking thought out loud as I watched him drown himself in his neural interface.

As the first few minutes passed my mind began to wander as I thought, 'Hmm…do I have to do a generated image search?'

I opened my generative image AI app and began typing in the facial details I remembered about Revanche from my short meeting with him.

'Thin black hair, sharp eyes, thin lips, five foot eleven inches, expensive green brown coat, tie pin on blue-black tie, hair pressed onto head, white, light tan, slight fat in cheeks, green eyes.'

The image generator spit out an image of the man that it thought I had seen, and so I began to use my fingers to make a few edits to get the image closer to what I had actually seen by drawing lines to redraw certain parts of the images and change the bone or muscle structures of others.

'Hmm….something's missing…'

I looked carefully at the image as I tried to figure out what exactly I was missing, but I couldn't remember much else, so I decided to leave the thought to the back of my mind.

"I'll send you an image, it's what the guy looked like when I saw him." I spoke out loud as I passed Larkin the file using a nearby file sharing and began to do a reverse image search with the AI generated picture as my base profile on both the intra-city network and the intercity network.

The search ended up taking a few seconds, but it wasn't long before I found multiple hits.

'Hmm…no, this is just about the coat, this is the tie clip…..'

I scrolled past the images as I added filters in the search field to rule out ones that had identified the various articles of clothing products and then ruled out ones that were not the right color or gender and continued on narrowing down profiles that looked like the person I might've seen, some had glasses on them, others had hats and a few more had scarfs, making it harder to easily distinguish which person was the right 'Revanche' I was looking for.

Finishing up as much manual narrowing down as I could do, I ran a search algorithm on the remaining several links by using a crawler and searched for the name 'Revanche' used in reference anywhere on those pages.

While I waited for the search crawler to do its thing, Larkin exclaimed in surprise in a loud tone, "Found him Sarg!" causing my body to jerk in response to his excited proclamation.

"Show me." I asked, in as calm a voice as I could, waiting for him to send me the link to the images or the website he was looking at.

A notification popped up on my AR screen to ask permission for a device to connect to it and send me a file which I accepted and opened to find a single url that I opened to connect to Vera Morrigan's profile on Stellar Synergy, a webpage for dating.

'Huh, she's looking for someone else? No, this profile hasn't been active in three months.'

I quickly searched the page for the name 'Revanche' and found his name in the credits of the images that Vera had uploaded.

'Did he make her the profile and take pictures for her along with it?'

The photos were simple, they had her pictures in gardens with trees, animals, and nature essentially, even one of her hiking on a trail during the night along with her campfire going on in the background.

'Hiking? Is that where she damaged her leg and began to use a crutch?'

'Hmm….he really did pick up the role of her son quite well…going on hiking trips with her, out into the gardens and everywhere else….hmm….'

"That's good, could you search for Inking studios? All his images are watermarked with it. Find out how he's related to that place." I said to Larkin who had already begun doing the task with his fingers waving in the air.

I turned my attention back to the list of web pages that had emerged from my curated list I had the search algorithm run on.

'Interesting.' I thought as I looked at the two links in front of me that had emerged.

'Just two.'

'Either he isn't interested in maintaining his public profile on the web at all. Or, he's keeping himself hidden.'

'Very interesting.'

I clicked open the first link that led me to an old job profile that belonged to a different Revanche that lived elsewhere in the world.

While the second link took me back to the main page of the firm, Inking Studios.

"Sarg, there's nothing here." Larking informed from beside me as he shared a link with me.

The page on Inking studios that had a list of employees, the list was very small, too small, just one person, 'Revanche Sterling'

"Did you find the addr-"

"-Address of his business? Yes, I already did." Larkin interrupted, annoying me a little, but I let his enthusiasm be since he was helping me for no compensation for now.

"Alright then let's lea-"

"Dave, the current threshold for reports on you has passed the normal amount you've set to be reported, would you like to hear the gist of it?"

"....Sure, Vanessa." I replied, 'Great now my own home automation system AI was interrupting me.'

Both Larkin and Vanessa spoke at the same time, the only difference was, one was robotic and the other was very emotional, "Everyone in the city's revolting against the police department for firing you! They want you hired! There's a debate going on right now on multiple public media outlets in our city and every other connected city around us if firing you was the right choice!"

'*sigh* I didn't think they'd actually go through with it. Vera would've realized who I was by now. Shit, I didn't think my first case back would've actually gotten so complicated. Is the drama around the world thinning out right now? Maybe it was the wrong time to make a return.'

"You can stop now, Vanessa." I said as I got up from the sofa and continued walking out the house while Larkin followed from behind me, his eyes darting around the neural interface while he did his best to not bump into things below his line of sight.

Right before I stepped out of the house, Larkin tried to stop me, "Sarg! Why don't you freshen up! It'll make things easier to investigate if people would recognize you!"

I shook my head and grabbed a scarf and a pair of sunglasses that had been hanging on the wall by the side of the door on my way out, while using my AR glasses to start my AeroStrider.

'Revanche….what are you trying to hide?'

"Larkin, you go to the police department."

"Yes, Sarg! I will search and relay all their moves to you sir!"

I stopped and almost fumbled with my own steps and paused to rest my hand on the young recruit's shoulders and stop him too.

"No! I want you to find information about Revanche on the department systems! Especially anything in relation to his wife, since he claimed to have lost her due to a mindwipe situation too!" I explained the situation to Larkin while all I saw him do was nod with a serene expression on his face as if he didn't really even listen to what I was saying.

'Shit! This kid! He's a stan!'

I slowly dusted Larkin's shoulders and patted his back and spoke with a wide warm smile on my face, "I'm sure you'll do a great job Larkin!"

"Yes Sarg! I will!" Larking shouted while almost saluting me. He stood in attention while I walked to my AeroStrider and rode it out of the landing deck.

Trying my best not to look back at the known source of the piercing stare on my back, I tried my best to blend into the ongoing traffic on the lower levels of the street and began to ride in the publicly registered direction of Revanche's Inking Studios.

'What exactly does this Inking studios do?'

I focused back on my AR interface and began reading the information about the studio on its home page.

'We are a studio focused on developing the best environmental pictures that can immerse you into the world you were once a part of using dynamic AI modeling techniques that form a realistic prediction model using real world data from the surrounding area…'

"Hmm…"

'So a general live album service studio?'

'But how does he run it alone? And how does he make enough money to be so rich?'

'How is he related to the banker, anyway?'

'Didn't he have a meeting with clients today that he was going to be late for?'

'Perhaps I can catch him somewhere along the way in one of his meetings and see what it is he actually does.'

I focused on the road as I watched all the street signs on the lower levels, that had already started to get darker due to the loss of light from being stuffed under high rise skyscrapers.

The lower levels were filled with business that usually resulted in people being inebriated in some way or the other, didn't want the probabilities of an inebriated person causing a major accident to skyrocket for no reason, followed by everyone else in a fashion that usually depended on the weight and the size of the vehicle being flown.

Suddenly I paused and looked around myself as I found that my AeroStrider was routing itself back towards the main area of the city.

'Did my system get compromised? Larkin had a bug on his interface system?'

I quickly checked the location I was being routed to and became slightly confused.

'It is still the same destination I had set earlier. Is the studio in his home?'

I relaxed and thought if I could pretend to be an officer and take him under arrest, but then I remembered how he had actually read the name on the badge and started thinking of other ways I could get him to speak if he didn't want to.

The AeroStrider slowly descended as it reached a low-lying habitable zone and slowed down to follow the speed laws.

My eyes gazed past the concrete box houses that had been built in the exact same manner by the new Land Mafia, kept in power by Suimanto, as they landed on one far away house, my destination.

The AeroStrider slowed down as it moved to the 'Studio's' side, and then landed in front of the curb.

I left my Strider in a standby mode and moved to walk toward the door as I slowly heard voices emit from the inside of the house.

"....now missing, the search is on for the Greatest Sergeant in history." A female voice reported.

"Is it even right to spend all this money on a random Sergeant we haven't heard nothing about from the last two years, Erica?" A male voice argued back.

"How can you say that! He was the one who single-handedly fought and exposed the Terria Contrast! They nearly-"

I was just about to knock on the door when it opened by itself with the rough turning sound of a knob being rotated.

I instinctively reached for where my waver should've been, but paused when I remembered I didn't have anything on my hip.

I watched the door open as the same slick face peeked out from behind it and matched eyes with me, no doubt using an AI overlay to figure out where my eyes were through my sunglasses.

The green eyes peered into my own for a few seconds before I watched an artificial smile flow across his face that soon blended into a realistic one as he spoke in the same smooth tone he had used earlier.

"Please come in, Sergeant Dave."