“It’s close to the station, stores look decent,” I said, looking at the remnants of what used to be. A solid sign with plexiglass on it showed the stores the place had once had. “It’s fine for location, a little grocery store and pharmacy for the people in nearby apartment complexes, or anyone working upstairs coming down… I don’t think that’s it.”

“It’s already going to pieces,” Byron said. He kicked at the stone boundary of the fountain he was standing on. A stone or two were missing. “Problems, maybe.”

“That makes more sense to me,” I said. A safety issue and forced evacuation. It would be easier to get established somewhere else than to try to fix anything expensive.

As the blurs stretched out like so many misshapen caterpillars, many of them yellow-striped from the hard hats and vests, I saw one blur in one of the stores.

I flew down to investigate.

Dark clothes, dark hair, and a consistent slash of darkness at eye level. Blurs intersected with her.

“Can you focus your facial recognition program on any area?” I called out.

“Ummmm… I have to finish first! Which is soon!”

“When you’re finished?” I asked.

“I can choose a place as a starting point, I can start it over there,” Kenzie called out. Her voice echoed through the large space. “I’ll scan all of this before we’re done, though.”

“Sure,” I said. “I think I found the woman with the sunglasses in… I think this was a computer store.”

“Woo!”

I folded my arm over the arm I still had in the sling as I walked around the perimeter of the computer store. I tried to assess what the woman with the sunglasses was doing. Something with computers and phones. There were enough points where papers and a laptop rested on one of the long wooden tables that the table was now a blur of her work material. No chair—she’d worked from a standing position.

Was there a point where she stayed still for a long period?

“Done!” Kenzie called out. “Facial recognition one, live! Siccing it on the sunglasses woman for you, Victoria!”

The cube-frame began dancing across the sunglasses woman’s head, flowing around the room as it tracked her pacing around the computer store.

“Facial recognition two, live! Chris’s man, Leon the security guy! Facial recognition three is a go! And because it’s bratty, let’s change priority, give it a headstart annnnd… our fourth scan is live, looking for curious boxes.”

“Wait,” I could hear Chris say. “The reason it kept finding itself is because you told it to look for boxes?”

“Under a certain size, with certain internal properties, yeah. I told the compiler and the face and person searches to ignore you guys, but I forgot to make the box searcher ignore itself. Fifth scan live.”