That Nietzsche Thing by Christopher Blankley Page A

calls.”
    “Yes Detective, but...err...” the dispatcher
hedged.
    “There are no other detectives on duty, are
there?” I realized, resting my head on my freehand.
    “I’m afraid not, sir. Only your card is
listed as on active duty.”
    I was it. I was the entirety of the Seattle
Police Department. “Did you inform our new Federal Overloads?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “And?”
    “And now I’m calling you, Detective.”
    “Okay, okay,” I exhaled. Did I have a choice?
“Give me the address.”
    She read of an address on campus. I instantly
recognized it.
    It was O’Day’s lab.

 
     
     
     
     

Chapter 9
     
    The lab was burned up pretty good. Someone
had poured gasoline on the server racks and put a match to them.
The Halon system had put the fire out fast, but there was a whole
lot of melted plastic and the acrid smell of fried circuits in the
air.
    I looked over the scene with as critical eye
as I could manage. I didn’t know a damn thing about arson
investigations. But this one seemed pretty clear-cut. The gas can
was still laying where it’d been discarded in the corner of the
room. Case closed.
    I found O’Day outside, sitting on the
tailgate of the EMT’s truck, breathing through an oxygen mask. He
was black with soot, and his clothes looked singed. Damn fool must
have tried to run into the fire to save his servers.
    “You okay, Day?” I asked as I approached. The
campus quad was awash with the dancing lights of fire trucks. “What
the hell happened?”
    We lifted the mask from his face and wheezed
in a breath. “Fucking Genies,” he gasped. “A whole mob of
them.”
    “Genies did this?” I looked back at the
server room. The firefighters were rolling up their hoses. It
wasn’t like Genies to do anything wantonly destructive. Most were
far too whacked out to every consider orchestrating any sort of
attack.
    “Yes, I’m telling you,” O’Day said, returning
the mask to his face. “Fucking Genies!” he screamed through the
breather. “Crazy as shit! Just burst into the place and started
smashing shit! I got out through the back door, but when they set
my racks on fire...”
    “Bad?” I asked, nodding in sympathy.
    O’Day lowered the mask. “Bad? There’s three
million bucks of equipment in there, Sasha, that they tried to
torch!”
    “They take anything? Give you any idea what
you did to piss them off?”
    “Yes,” O’Day said, calming himself. He took a
few breaths off the mask then continued. “They came in, screaming
that they wanted the book, calling me a foul blasphemer, that sort
of thing. When they found that e-reader of yours, that’s when they
started trashing the place. Thanks again, Sasha.”
    “Shit, Day, I’m sorry.”
    “You know who those assholes were, don’t
you?” O’Day said, giving himself a coughing fit.
    “That’s not possible,” I shook my head.
    “Where did you get that e-reader, Sasha?” he
asked, recovering from his hacking. “Nobody’s seen or heard from
the Rosicrucians for over twenty years, and then ten minutes after
helping you out, they show up on my door and try to burn down my
lab! Shit, Sasha, what was really on that e-reader?”
    “You tell me?” I said, defensively. “You said
it was just a copy of Q.”
    “It was,” O’Day agreed, putting his mask back
over his face. “It was...” he mumbled, then removed his mask. “Now,
they’re trying to destroy every digital copy of Dark’s
Last Novel ? They’re going to be pretty busy.”
    “No,” I scratch at my stubbly chin. “I found
it at a murder scene. The Rosicrucians were covering their tracks.
There must have been a way to track the e-reader back to them. Or,
at least, they thought there was. Can you do that?”
    “You can now,” O’Day said. “Before they stole
it, I factory reset the device. Logged it in to my account. The
lowjack will lead you right to them.”
    I laughed. “Good job, O’Day. You’ll make a
good cop, yet.”
    “Thanks,” O’Day said with