“Where did you say you got this from again?” Calvin frowned as the unintelligible streams of data sped across his PADD’s holographic projection display. Calvin’s desk was a mountainous mess of papers, electronic devices and stale mugs of coffee.

Cedar bit the inside of his cheek, “An informant.”

“Okay, what’s their case code?” Calvin asked brightly, “when I file it I’ll need to assign –“

“They’re not official,” Cedar replied quickly, interrupting that undesirable train of thought.

“Oh,” Calvin nodded. It wasn’t the worst lie Cedar could have given, cops were known to have a few informants from the streets that didn’t want anything linking them back to the police.

“And I’d appreciate if it wasn’t logged, for now.” Cedar swallowed awkwardly as Calvin spun slowly round on his swivel chair, his eyebrows raised and a chewed plastic stylus between his lips.

“Yeah?” Calvin frowned, “this going to get me in trouble Tanaka?”

“Maybe,” Cedar admitted truthfully.

“Could have told me that earlier,” Calvin rolled his eyes, “I wouldn’t have used a department PADD, now I have to erase all the memory data.”

“Sorry,” Cedar shrugged, sitting down beside Calvin on an uncomfortable metal stool that looked like it had been confiscated from a bar. “Can you make any sense of what’s on it?”

“Well you were right,” Calvin sighed, “they are bank account numbers, but there are also records of financial transactions, it looks like it might be the proceedings of some sort of auction?”

“How do you figure?” Cedar asked, narrowing his eyes back at the screen that Calvin had now set to ‘privacy mode’, meaning you could only read it if you were sitting straight on to the display.

“Just the layout of the data,” Calvin replied, shaking his head, “I’ve seen it before from illegal auction houses.”

“Could it be illegal AI droid auctions?” Cedar asked hurriedly, an idea forming in his head.

“Oddly specific,” Calvin frowned at him again with an assessing gaze. “But no, I don’t think so, these numbers are way to huge to be purchasing androids, I mean we’re talking more than you or I would earn in a year. Plus, there’s no product code, even unregistered goods would have some sort of makeshift code for the data entry.”

“So what were these people buying?” Cedar asked, his curiosity was welling up.

“I can’t tell yet,” Calvin conceded, “most of the file is encrypted, I’ll need time.”

“Great,” Cedar huffed an unenthusiastic laugh, “more waiting for data retrieval.”

“I’m sorry –“ Calvin began indignantly but Cedar stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“That wasn’t aimed at you Calvin, it just seems to be a theme in my life at the moment. Look, I really appreciate you taking a look at this. Trust me when I say it’s important.”

“Important enough for me to keep both you and Detective Lin in the loop for updates?” Calvin asked, his calculating look already telling Cedar he had assumed the answer.

“Yeah, um,” Cedar cleared his throat, “maybe just me okay?” Cedar felt horrifically guilty at keeping his partner Saorise in the dark, but he couldn’t risk exposing his harbouring of Vaki.

“Right,” Calvin nodded, “I guess I owe you a few favours anyway.”

“Thanks,” Cedar smiled tightly, patting his colleague on the back before heading for the stairs.

“Howdy partner,” Saorise called out as Cedar walked back onto the main operating area of the station. She had a stack of files in her arms and was dumping them on Cedar’s desk. “Got some fun homework for you – lists of unregistered AI sales, or at least what we think could be AI sales. Might glean something useful from them about our as of yet unidentified perp.”

“Yeah, sure,” Cedar nodded tensely, thinking of the purple haired man that was currently holed up in his apartment with the whole station looking for him.

“You good?” Saorise asked unsurely. “Seriously Tanaka, I think you need to go see someone, you’re looking more shit every day.”

“I’m fine,” Cedar dismissed as Saorise walked over and moved her face closer to his.

“What are you doing?” Cedar asked, jerking backwards.

“Sniffing,” Saorise shrugged, “You lacked the usual eau de liquor fragrance today.”

“Fuck off,” Cedar replied but it lacked any bite. He settled down miserably in his chair and began to work his way through the documentation prescribed wild goose chase.

Cedar groaned as he lugged himself up the metal spiral staircase to the apartment gallery. The day at work had been rough and his eyes felt sore and dry from staring at one too many screens. Captain Jones had been hounding their asses all day regarding the investigation and Cedar couldn’t even take solace in working, as he knew it was pointless anyway.

Cedar paused with a frown as he fumbled with his door’s keypad and noticed that he appeared to be standing in some sort of puddle. Sure enough, there was foamy water seeping from out underneath the entrance to his apartment.

“What the fuck?” Cedar shouted as he finally pushed open the door and was greeted by abject chaos. The kitchen sink was overflowing, giant luminous green bubbles of dish soap had clustered together, forming floating islands of menacing foam that were currently meandering around his lounge area.

The hob was on full blast, lit up red rings heating the apartment to blistering levels, wavy thermal clouds warping the surrounding air. The fridge door was wide open, the dodgy back light flickering, obviously an attempt to counter the heat from the hob. A carton of milk had spilled and was dripping a cascade of translucent white down onto the linoleum floor.

For some, inexplicable reason, Vaki was perched up on one of the counter tops, hissing at the unrelenting taps whilst brandishing an apple.

“Oh for crying out loud,” Cedar growled, taking a decisive step forwards before the entire apartment was plunged into darkness and eerie silence, saving for the rhythmic dripping of various fluids.

“And you’ve used up all my Home Credits,” Cedar groaned wearily, stumbling blindly in the dark over to a wall mounted console and slapping his phone against it. Moments later, everything roared back into life, eliciting a fearful shriek from Vaki who scrambled backwards and slipped off the counter top.

“Christ kid, what the hell are you doing?” Cedar barked out, storming over to haul up the pile of flailing limbs.

Vaki looked horrified, his purple hair was stuck up at awkward angles and some of it had clumped together, sticky with various household substances. His face was deathly pale and there was a livid, red scratch across his neck. Vaki’s bright yellow eyes flicked nervously across to the kitchen.

“I – I tried to create nutrition,” Vaki stammered as Cedar stalked over to turn off as many appliances as he could.

Finally, the two of them were left in relative quiet and peace, the carpet sodden and squishy beneath Cedar’s boots.

“You could have burned the entire block down!” Cedar shouted angrily as Vaki flinched backwards. “I thought androids were meant to be smart! How could you be so fucking stupid?”

“Androids are only as smart as their pre-inputted data,” Vaki replied quietly, clearing his throat, “we have much higher processing skills so we can acquire and comprehend new and learned –“

“Shut up,” Cedar snapped, shoving a nearby dish cloth into Vaki’s hands and grabbing one for himself. God only knew how they were going to clear this all up, Cedar would have to fish out all of his spare towels as well to try and mop up some of the deluge.

“What?” Cedar grunted as Vaki’s face went taut with pain as he handled the rough rag. Cedar glanced down and saw that the tips of Vaki’s fingers were red, swollen and blistered. “Jesus, what happened to your hands?”

“I tried to stop the hot rings,” Vaki squirmed on the spot, looking thoroughly miserable as his yellow eyes stared at a spot between Cedar’s knees and the floor.

“The hob? You touched the rings?” Cedar shook his head in disbelief. “Aren’t you a Mercy designation? Why haven’t you healed yourself?”

“I,” Vaki swallowed thickly, “I did not have time.”

“Heavens above,” Cedar muttered, stalking over to a kitchen cupboard and yanking out a small white box with a green cross symbol on the front. “I’ve got burn ointment here, will that work for your bio-skin?”

“I will heal quicker than you would,” Vaki shrugged, “but the ointment might help alleviate some of the discomfort.”

Cedar winced as Vaki held out his trembling hands, there was a particularly gnarly looking blister on his right thumb.”

“I’m really sorry,” Vaki murmured quietly, still not making eye contact.

“Okay,” Cedar replied with a huff, not sure what else he could say. “You need to change as well, your clothes are soaked. Put on some of the stuff that Manya gave you.”

Without the heat of the hob blasting across the room and burning up Cedar’s hard earned Home Credits, the apartment was quite chilly. Manya had warned about not letting Vaki overheat, but standing around in sopping wet clothes couldn’t be sensible either.

Finally, after bandaging up Vaki’s hands and sending him off to dry and change, Cedar was able to mop up most the mess. He noticed with a miserable glance that the food in the fridge had mostly spoiled or been spilled and he was going to need to buy some moisture absorption powder for the carpet so as to avoid mould.

“Right, we’re going to the store,” Cedar announced as Vaki walked back out of the bathroom. “There’s no way I’m leaving you on your own here again today.”

Vaki nodded but looked sheepish. His purple hair was still slightly damp and pushed back from his face. He was wearing sinfully tight black trousers that must have originally belonged to Manya, along with a loose pale grey sweater and black laced boots.

“Here,” Cedar tossed Vaki a black mask and a beanie. “I don’t want anyone recognising you or flagging any recognition software.”

“Are we going back to that place with the birds?” Vaki asked, looking slightly hopeful.

“What? No,” Cedar frowned, “we’re going to the grocery store, the one off Camellia Promenade, it’s only about five minutes walk.”

Cedar sighed as he ushered Vaki out of the door, the squidge of the carpet underneath his own boots still very noticeable. The whole damn place was going to smell of damp for days. Cedar wondered, for about the hundredth time that day, as to whether he was making the biggest mistake of his life.