She got that inward look that humans have when they’re deep in their feed. After a minute, she said, “It’s malware. Pretty standard … Maybe they thought it would get your augments, but that’s kind of amateurish for Tlacey. Hold it. There’s a message string in here, attached to the code.”

ART and I waited. Tapan’s face did something complicated, settling on worry. “This is weird.” She turned to the display surface and made the completely unnecessary gesture that some humans can’t help doing when they send something from their feed to display.

It was the message string, three words. Please help me.

*   *   *

I moved us to a different room, near an emergency exit, in another section of the hostel. The sexbot might be alert for hacking, so I removed the access plate, manually broke the lock, and replaced the plate again while Tapan watched the corridor. Once we were inside, I told Tapan some of what the sexbot had said, mostly the part about how it claimed Tlacey didn’t know Tapan was here. (I didn’t tell her our visitor had been a sexbot because Tlacey had figured out what I was and didn’t want to waste any more human bodyguards on me.) “But we don’t know that that’s true, or that this operative won’t tell Tlacey you’re here now.”

Tapan looked confused. “But why did they tell you anything?”

That was a good question. “I don’t know. They don’t like Tlacey, but that might not be the only reason.”

Tapan bit her lip, considering. “I think I should still try to keep the meeting. It’s only four hours from now.”

I’m used to humans wanting to do things that can get them killed. Maybe too used to it. I knew we should leave now. But I needed time to hack enough of the security system to get past the sexbot. Once I did that, it seemed wrong not to wait the short time to make the meeting, which Tapan was reasonably sure Tlacey didn’t know about. Reasonably sure.

It was probably a trap.

I needed to think. I told Tapan I was going to sleep for a while and laid down on my side on my section of padding. My recharge cycle isn’t obvious but it doesn’t look like a human sleeping, so what I was actually going to do was play some media in the background of my feed while I worked on my security countermeasures and looked up my old module on risk assessment.