Monday 26 March 2018

Cat and Mouse: Thursday

I ended up in a cave in the mountains, waiting for a whole day. Professor Thessifus was unexpectedly slow to respond to my deliberate false trail leading to the nearby village. Luckily, my experience with Gook’s Patience Race stood me in good stead.

When she finally arrived in the village, I was monitoring her from a drone (one of the pieces of equipment I retrieved from my East European emergency stash on my way up here). She was quite sloppy with her camouflage this time! She’d taken the form of an old woman, but the utility belt was a dead giveaway, visible from a 500m altitude by virtue of my advanced optical stabilisers.

When I hit the KILL switch and saw the image track in towards her head, I almost felt sorry for her. And for the poor villagers — I expect the explosion left quite a mess.

It seemed too easy. And of course, it was.

I was on my way home today via the tedious process of car rental. Why can’t you people just have decent teleports? It’s damn inconvenient. Anyway, my sensors suddenly alerted me to Maria T’s life signals somewhere in Hamburg. I realised, of course, what had happened. She had remote mind backups, just as I do, and had been restored into a spare body clone. This means that I now have to destroy her backup pod before killing her, otherwise she’ll just do it again and again — at least until she runs out of body clones. Bloody annoying situation.

The question is, of course: when was her last backup? Does this copy of her even remember kidnapping me? Does it remember hacking my data? I hate unknowns, and there are too many of them now.