Calculations had been wrong.<br/><br/>Catastrophically wrong.<br/><br/>Why were organics so annoyingly unpredictable? Why couldn't they act in logical ways?<br/><br/>Someone had bumped into Alice's shoulder and when the AI had turned around to lecture them Toshimi had vanished. At first, the AI thought some goon belonging to Cain or her family had grabbed the alien woman, but then she caught a glimpse of Toshimi moving swiftly through the crowd and realized that the assassin was abandoning her. For a few moments, Alice was frozen in shock as all her predictions fell apart. This wasn't what was supposed to happen! By the time the AI recovered and recalculated, Toshimi was already gone.<br/><br/>Gone, but not lost.<br/><br/>Toshimi just passed a security checkpoint, and the AI caught the system IDing her as her fake account. So that's the direction. Alice started moving, trying to keep up with the assassin on the run. The alien woman was faster and more agile than her, so Alice had to be smarter. She attached a tag to Toshimi's fake ID, and next checkpoint the woman passed shortly after not only warned Alice of where Toshimi was going, but also alerted the system to start to carefully track the potential criminal threat tag. Like a bloodhound that caught the scent the AI was on the trail. There was no escaping her, she'll...<br/><br/><i>-cut off her breath with one hand. The alien woman's eyes widen while her tentacles shivered and her markings flashed a terrified red. Two fingers roughly spread the assassin's lower lips and pushed into her depths. She leaned closer, watching the alien's breath escape her lungs with each shivered gasp and-</i><br/><br/>...catch up to the alien and get her back on her side again. Wait, what was that vision? Alice tried to pull the images from her logs, but found nothing. Did she just daydream? The AI looked into a reflective window and noticed something off. Her irises had a red glowing ring around them. Alice was running out of time, fast. Her body had started to send subtle warnings that her core code was getting inreversibly corrupted. Rampant A-AIs were prone to sollipsism, trading a flawed reality for a perfect simulation that they ran over and over again, deleting their memory cores to make each simulation as fresh as the first.<br/><br/>How long ago was it now that her core first hit it's memory limit? A year? Two? Two years since she inevitably started slipping down the slope of rampancy. She had struggled to maintain her sanity and carefully manage her resources since and now she had slipped far enough that the threat of inspectors out to wipe her memory turned from idle bogeymen to very serious and real. Already, she was showing hints of a personality cascade, conflicts in her processing arising because the memories that supported her personality code were  systematically pruned and deleted to save space on her core.<br/><br/><br/>By now, Toshimi had reached her destination because she suddenly vanished from the security grid. Likely entered a building owned by someone rich and keen for private privacy. Wasn't hard for the AI to find which building. Alice discovered another unpredictable complication. Parked in front of the fancy apartment was Cain's car, driver still in the seat and fidgeting with something. Alice's antennae twitched and accessed both the car's system as well as the comm the driver was fiddling with. Trying to buy a blacklisted ship, that's pretty illegal. Wait... that ID? That was<b>Cain</b>'s ship.<br/><br/>In one swift potion, the car door was opened and Dirk was unceremoniously knocked out. His latest job unfilled and his boss without any knowledge of his failure. The AI placed a small implant on the man's neck, making sure he won't wake for a few hours yet. Spoofing her connection with Dirk's comm ID, Alice called the man's boss. Inviere Cain was running out of time too.<br/><br/>While the AI tried to contact Cain, unaware of the raider's current predicament, she contacted the apartment's security system to ask permission to enter the building and deal with Cain and her alien lover. The station's security forces had no authority inside the buildings themselves unless invited inside. Due to Maggie Greer watching the security footage of the lift scene, the ruthless businesswoman was the one to receive the entry request.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>