80
uancy patrol." He cursed again. Maybe she was just going to the mall. But he couldn't go up there himself and make sure, and it wasn't like a robot would be any use in restraining her, she'd just second-law it into letting her go. Useless castrating clanking job-stealing dehumanizing --
She was almost certainly just going to the mall. She was a smart kid, a good kid -- a rotten kid, to be sure, but good-rotten. Chances were she'd be trying on clothes and flirting with boys until lunch and then walking boldly back into class. He ballparked it at an 80 percent probability. If it had been a perp, 80 percent might have been good enough.
But this was his Ada. Dammit. He had 10 minutes until the Social Harmony meeting started, and he was still 15 minutes away from the stationhouse -- and 20 from Ada.
"Tail her," he said. "Just tail her. Keep me up to date on your location at 90-second intervals."
"It is my pleasure to --"
He dropped the phone on the passenger seat and went back to fretting about the Social Harmony meeting.
#
The man from Social Harmony noticed right away that Arturo was checking his phone at 90-second intervals. He was a bald, thin man with a pronounced Adam's apple, beak-nose and shiny round head that combined to give him the profile of something predatory and fast. In his natty checked suit and pink tie, the Social Harmony man was the stuff of nightmares, the kind of eagle-eyed supercop who could spot Arturo's attention flicking for the barest moment every 90 seconds to his phone and then back to the meeting.
"Detective?" he said.
Arturo looked up from his screen, keeping his expression neutral, not acknowledging the mean grins from the other four ranking detectives in the meeting. Silently, he turned his phone face-down on the meeting table.
"Thank you," he said. "Now, the latest stats show a sharp rise in grey-market electronics importing and other tariff-breaking crimes, mostly occurring in open-air market stalls and from sidewa