- Good morning, Edward.
You are 103 miles from your point of origin.
I am reaching the boundaries of my operating range.
My apologies.
- Dammit, all right.
Yeah, there's a platform coming up on the left.
I'll walk from there.
It's a gas, me playing murder police at my age.
My tender years were spent
as grease monkey to Babbage Boxes.
But here we were, trying to Sherlock the perfect murder.
- Wait. Wait!
- Again.
- It's like talking to a piece of coffee cake.
- Bringing the brain back online, Carter.
- Worked like a champ yesterday.
- We want the gray matter. Again!
- You own my every where, Edward.
You own my every when.
- We ripped your black S.O.L. right out
the top of your skull, every bit of you is ours.
- We need to own your every why, Carter.
- Only you can tell us why you've done
what you've done. - I didn't do anything.
- We know your head is spinning.
You've been through the ringer.
- Dorothy's come back to Kansas.
- There are worms under my skin
with sandpaper eyes. - Tangle Withdrawal.
- Welcome back to the ol' black and white.
- But it's inhumane.
- It's the very definition of humane.
This is what human feels like. You don't remember?
- Concrete facts, the sooner
you'll feel better. - Concrete.
- Blue zone taxi dropped you at the corner
of Park and- - Park and Echo.
- Park. - Park and Echo Park.
- Next to the Obelisk.
- No overlays. - Sorry,
the boathouse, the boathouse,
which no one has laid eyeballs on in two years.
- We see it regular.
- I went east, east- - East, is it?
- West, I meant west.
- Was it west or east?
- I went west into the park. - Are you sure?
- Yes, I went west into the park
and then I stopped at the fountain.
I wiped the fountain with my handkerchief.
- Which hand?
- What?
- On the fountain?
- My right.
Turn the knob and then I sipped.
- How many swallows?
- Are you kidding?
- Just warming up the synapses, Carter.
- I don't know, four?
- Seven swallows. 16 seconds slurp, slurping.
- Okay. And then I headed toward-
- You were thirsty?
- I guess?
- I thought the Tangle had cured thirst.
- I know when to drink, I like the feeling
on my tongue. - He knows when to drink.
It's a miracle of modern- - Eddie.
- Bunny.
- I went to the pier and then I looked out at Echo Lake.
- No. - Yes.
- You took a beat on the lawn.
- I did?
- Stop screwing with us!
- I don't remember!
- Then remember!
- Okay, I paused on the lawn
and then I went lake-ward. - No!
- Yes. - Again!
- Car dumps me on the corner of Park and Echo Park.
I head west into the park.
I stop at the water fountain.
With my right hand, I turn the knob.
I drink seven swallows --
- Before you drink.
- I, uh, I, I wiped off the fountain.
- Why?
- Germs.
- Germs?
- Habit.
- I have three years of your behavior.
Macro, micro, dramatic, mundane.
No hint of a clean freak.
- Old habit from before.
- Just kicked in again? - Maybe you're playing
for time, Carter?
- I used to be a germophobe from before.
- Not when we knew you.
- Long time ago when I was a kid.
- Maybe you were loitering a little.
- Just a nervous habit.
- You were nervous?
- No. - Why were you nervous?
- I wasn't nervous! - You were excited.
- No! - You were looking
for someone. - No.
- Again! - You took all this!
I could've told you the length of every breath,
the breadth of every step, now you simply want me
to just- - Yes, yes, yes, we do!
Your actual brain to your actual mouth
via the vibration of actual space
to my actual ear.
- Why am I here?
- Hazard a guess.
- I haven't the faintest shred of a wisp of a clue.
- Really?
- Is Cleopatra all right?
- Why do you ask about Cleopatra?
- Is she kosher? Is she a-okay?
- Actually, she may be why you're here.
- That's right, Carter.
You wanna help your friend,
we need every crumb of sense we can vacuum up
from your Tangle-addled brain.
- Is something wrong
with Cleo? - You talk, we'll drive.
- Echo Park and Park.
I head west into the park.
Water fountain, handkerchief in right hand.
I wipe off the fountain.
Handkerchief back in pocket.
I bend over. Right hand on knob, I twist.
I drink. Seven swallows, apparently.
16 seconds. I stand back up.
I head towards the old pier. I pause, I...!
- Go ahead.
- I reach into my pocket.
I grab my lucky key chain and rub it
between my thumb and forefinger.
- The brain, the brain, it's alive.
This? - Yeah.
- Why?
- Habit.
- You got a lot of habits.
- What were you looking at?
- Nothing.
- I'm looking at your lying eyes.
- Why were you in the park?
- Just going for a walk. A constitutional.
To feel my hips roll over my knees like I did as a kid.
- It's a lie.
- To gawk at the Obelisk.
- The boathouse. - To crick my neck back
and gaze as the pyramidal tower disappeared
into a rose and golden sky.
- Carter.
- To Kodak the moment. I hadn't seen it since the election.
- Is it beautiful?
- No sightseeing, Bunny.
- It was a giant geyser, then the world's tallest oak
six elections in a row.
Now it's the Obelisk,
and yes, it is beautiful.
- Carter!
- 15 times larger than the Luxor Obelisk in Paris.
- Who is this?
- The paperweight?
- Who is it right here?
- That's a device called a paperweight.
Belonged to my grandfather, actually.
- It's a single Caucasian woman, 40 years old,
employed as a Tangle technician
for three years, who is it?
- You tell me. I don't know.
- Well, you looked in her direction three times.
She moves, you stop drinking, you follow her.
- I don't know.
- She stops, you stop, or you pull out your key chain.
You look directly at her.
- There were a lot of people in that park.
I looked at all sorts.
- So distortion of your eyeballs,
0.3 millimeters, which means you were focused
6.3 meters in front of you.
She was standing exactly 6.3 meters in front of you.
- Why were you looking at her, Carter?
- I have no legal obligation-
- What?
- I have no legal obligation,
okay? - You have no legal anything!
I don't see any briefcases here.
- I don't have to tell you anything!
- She says, "Cleo," she turns and looks
in your direction, you look at each other.
"Cleo," she says.
- You already know who she was, obviously.
- Obviously.
- So who was she?
- Carter, we just need-
- I don't know. I knew someone would be there.
But I didn't know who.
I knew she'd be wearing some kind of kimono,
but I don't know who actually-
- Kimono?
- Margot signed you a flat, raw deal.
Anyone would wanna lay wood on her.
- You're so very understanding.
- Good cop.
- You know I fought for you.
- Can we not talk about Margot?
Can we just not?
- Your neck is already noosed.
You're already dangling.
Our job isn't to nail you. You're already nailed.
- I am answering all of your questions.
- So you weren't following Margot Foster?
- Margot? This?
- This is three bodies in a real room, Carter.
And this sweaty body, this biological being here,
Edward Banderas, you used to know it.
Do you savvy?
You remember how I don't stop until I get what I want?
I knew Margot. Margot knew me.
Margot put me on Cleopatra's radar.
Margo knew what was what.
Margot carried the weight of the world on her shoulders!
And if you think I'm not gonna scrub
every lie off you until I get to the shiny truth you have,
Margot was my friend!
- Was? Is Margot?
- Yeah. Margot is.
We're the world's most expensive babysitters,
licensed euthanizers.
Our agency is a secret working group hidden deep
within the folds of the Federal Communications Commission.
We call it the A.S.P, The Army of Simple Purity.
It's a joke.
- Murder?
- 23 minutes as the crow flies
after you left her in the park.
- And you are prime suspect number one
most wanted violent and dangerous
extreme caution warranted.
- Well, there hasn't been a murder since the Tangle.
The violence overrides-
- Where'd you go after the park?
- Cooled my heels on Hill Street.
- There's no record of that on the Tangle, is there, Bunny?
- No, Eddie, there isn't.
- What?
- You vanish from the Tangle at 10:32
in an elevator in the Ritz Building.
You pop back up on our radar
at a recycling chute on Daisy
three blocks away, 23 minutes later.
You disappeared for 23 minutes.
- During those 23 minutes, Margot met her maker.
Two blocks south.
- That's impossible. All of it.
I think... I'm thirsty.
- I'll pour you a glass.
- She'll get you some water. I'll drown you in it.
- Edward, Laurel.
You know I wouldn't.
- You wouldn't?
- Of course not.
- I'm really asking.
- You think I'd off Margot?
- Didn't she cut out your heart?
- With a spoon and threw it on the coals.
- You're over it?
- No. I'm not over it.
I was banished. She took Cleo from me-
- So you didn't wanna take Margot's pale skin,
hold it to the flame,
and make a pale fire of her life?
I might have if I were you.
- It's all pale fire now.
We were born into sunlight, we proceed in moonlight.
- Ah, the poet returns.
- It was poetry that made Cleopatra.
- Poetry made nothing.
It could've been owner's manuals
to old food processors for all it mattered.
You made it poetry.
- Margot did what she did.
She was who she was, may she R-I-P.
I didn't even blame her for it.
Anyway, I couldn't have killed her
even if I wanted to.
- Because of the violence overrides.
- We are all benevolently infected
with turn-the-other-cheek.
- And yet my friend is missing most of her face.
- What's it like?
- What?
- Does it feel good? Do you feel trapped?
- What?
- The overrides, the Tangle in your blood,
in your muscles, in your head.
- She's a little obsessed with our forbidden fruit.
- Forbidden?
- What's it like to fear no hurt? To feel no pain?
- How do you not know what it feels like?
Okay, the overrides are like a reflex.
You know this, right? A pre-programmed arc, okay?
You scope a snake under your toe, you jump, right?
Immediately. Reflex takes over.
The Tangle just adds another layer of reflex.
I go to touch a hot stove. I can't.
The Tangle swerves my hand away.
I trip. The Tangle rolls me to safety.
It's why we don't need to feel pain anymore.
The Tangle protects us instead.
I go to strike someone, my arms would freeze.
It would be impossible for I or anyone to kill someone.
- So you're a Google car.
- Your heart beats without you thinking about it, right?
No different.
- If you had to, how would you get around
the overrides, Carter?
- I have no idea.
- You're an unusually intelligent person.
- And he's the micro-intelligence expert.
Ask Mr. Nanobot. I'm the poet, remember?
I don't know. Get off Tangle, I guess?
- Which you did. 23 minutes off Tangle.
- As far as I know, only Cleopatra groks the microdrones.
- That's what I said.
- Yes, I know, Edward.
- So did Cleopatra turn off your overrides
so you could kill Margot Foster?
- What?
- Did she send little signals to our microscopic pals,
tell them to stand down
so you could put a crater in your enemy's forehead?
- I didn't kill Margot.
- We don't have time for this.
- We're the proverbial mother
with the baby under the Volkswagen.
- The Tangle is to the internet
what the HAL 9000 is to the abacus.
The old-style internet, the good old triple-w,
connected computer terminals all over the world.
Then came the Internet of Things,
light bulbs and thermostats, our cars, our coffee-makers,
our pacemakers, our parking meters.
Everything we make connected together in a weave.
Then Cleo created the Tangle.
The Tangle connects the trillion-trillion-fold swarm
of quantum-entangled microdrones,
semi-intelligent nanobots, that fill the earth,
air, water, blood, and sinew.
Within days of the Tangle's launch,
the world had transformed.
Everyone 3D-printed a hard drive, their S.O.L.,
Secure On-Tangle Line, grew it right
in their cerebral cortex, and synced up,
instant access to the whole world.
You could count the moles on the back of a Sherpa
on Everest from your couch.
You could count the hairs on the mole.
You could count the mites on the hair.
Sometimes normal rules don't apply.
- What rules?
- You know. Moral rules.
- Eddie!
- Your problem right now, and I can see it in your eyes,
is you don't believe I'll hurt you.
We're old friends, right?
- Chums of the highest order.
- We don't have time for this.
- Why were you in the park, Carter?
- No reason.
- Let me explain something.
You don't know how to lie anymore.
You have no avatar to hide behind.
You're in a prisoner's dilemma.
You and your face, but your face is gonna squawk,
so you better talk.
- I was on a gig.
- What kind of a gig?
- It's confidential.
- Okay.
Someone hires you to follow Margot Foster
and she winds up dead.
- Carter, were you hired to follow Margot?
- Either you killed her or whoever hired you did.
Neither one looks too good pinned to your chest.
- How do you not know who killed her?
The entire world's a searchable database!
- Oh yeah, what about us,
what about the Cleopatra Squad?
Didn't you ever wonder why you couldn't find us on Tangle?
- I never gave you a second thought,
Edward. - All right.
- Cleo, I looked for Cleo,
but I wasn't surprised she found a way
to hide from the Tangle.
- She hides the way way we do.
The murder took place in a space like this one.
This is a technology saferoom,
nano-impermeable, one one entrance, airlocked.
We breathe, eat, shit, and work in boxes like this.
Grounded spaceships, totally off Tangle.
- A silent mote in a storm screaming.
- A blind spot in the ever-illuminated world.
- No Tangle.
- Only the phone connects us to the Tangle. Untraceable.
Everything in here is pre-singularity technology.
Well, pre-triple-w.
- And the two of you?
- Mr. and Mrs. Clean.
- Chit chat, chitty, chitty, chit chat, chit chat!
- I swear on a stack of babies
and Barbies, I do not know who killed her.
- But you do know who hired you.
So come on!
- Eddie, he's talking.
- Is he?
- You're talking, right?
So some John hired you to find some other John.
Was Margot the John that some John hired you to find?
Was your client looking for Margot?
Was Margot, was that paperweight
the person you were looking for?
She was wearing a kimono.
Was it the kimono? The one you were hired to find?
Did you kill Margot?
- No.
- Did you kill her?
- No!
- Who did?
- I don't know.
- Let him up, Goebbels!
- My shoulder! You punter!
- I said let him up!
- One half hour after you make Margot
in the park and she makes you,
she is face-up on Infinity
and you were ghosted from the Tangle.
- Stop it, Edward! - It was you, wasn't it?
It was you and Cleo, right? The durable duo.
- Shut up! - Cleo got wind of the A.S.P.
She couldn't tell friend from foe,
so she reaches out to her old nanny
and helpmeet to cut off the head
of the snake. - A.S.P.
Tell me you didn't- - Of course we did!
Yes, we did.
Only you of all people couldn't
understand why- - She deserves a-
- If she started murdering people, wouldn't you
want a way to stop her? - She cannot murder-
- Margot banished you
so that we could put a leash on Cleopatra.
- Stop it!
- Get off me.
Answer the ringer. She knows who we have here.
- Laurel. Lucky lotto 7-14-21-35-42 --
Yes, yes, he's here.
- Cleopatra hired you to kill Margot, didn't she?
- Cleo cannot-
- You're not allowed, Cleo.
I know, but.
But the rules were written, and so it is written.
- Is that?
- Yes, that is, she is in charge of the probe,
which is strange casting, if you ask me.
- We're working on it. Not yet.
- If we don't get straight answers,
you're gonna be a floater in the L.A. River, Carter.
And she's gonna be next.
- Okay! Okay, I'll talk!
One condition.
- You're not negotiating from a position
of strength. - One thing!
- What? - You know what.
- Speak!
- You know!
- Cleopatra's not allowed to-
- I don't care.
- What?
She recalled the microdrones. Did the audit.
Everything we have on Margot.
Zilch, nada, 40-love, no ghosts went into that room.
- So she says.
But if the ghosts were her ghosts,
she wouldn't tell us, would she?
You didn't tell her about this?
- No, of course not.
You start from the assumption that I'm stupid.
- You're a whole onion smarter than me,
I've always known that.
I act accordingly. What about him?
- Let him up.
She's doing that audit now,
but he wasn't at the speakeasy, ghost suit or not.
- Well, someone had to be there.
It can't be a coincidence.
- Edward.
- What?
- She gave us until five.
- Gave us?
- She said this is an emergent situation.
She said she's coming in here at five
if we don't have answers.
- She said she's co -- how?
- That gives us three hours.
- Hm.
We have to turn the keys.
First, she hacks the NSA stacks-
- We never told- - Listen!
We hid the stacks for a reason.
Now she knows about the A.S.P.
And we did tell her she couldn't come in here.
These are our rooms. And now she's coming here.
- We have until five.
And anyway, we need a third agent to turn the keys.
- Well, I'll ring Francesca.
- Of course. Francesca.
- We need an unapologetic dirty dancer.
- Let him up already!
What is wrong with you?
- I'm an incorrigible torturer.
- Why thank you, Edward.
- You're welcome.
- Barefoot as the surf comes in.
Every wave sinks us deeper, more deeply
into an ever settling and unsettling footprint.
This world, this paradise, this perfect place,
this panel above pain, this plane of permission,
this, this Tangle-life is harder to understand
every next moment than it is every this.
Never the same breath to breath.
Whole skyscrapers funneled away
only to be replaced when you turn back around.
Election is the warp and woof,
national, city, school, homeowner's elections,
elections held metronomically, automatically,
your wish and whim uploaded in real time.
A universe rebuilt on choice,
the height, color, consistency of the sky,
the texture of the air,
the taste of being.
Everything attuned to fantasy.
Yet somehow, we keep up the ancient soap opera.
Love me, love me, love me.
King of the hill. Deceit and desperation.
Every level of pain removed from the body
only makes the next level of discomfort
the last one still uncured even more unbearable.
It's an Arms Race between nuclear-level palliatives
and the endless ingenuity of desperation,
dissatisfaction, and expectation.
It's a world ever-fighting the last second's war.
Perfect for what we wanted a half-step back.
But the constant flux undoes itself.
A world that adjusts to your every desire makes you fickle.
Fickleness increases the speed of the adjustments,
which increases your fickleness
until it all just hums in a state
of flickering disconnected images
tied together by unsatisfactoriness.
- What is going on with you?
- What?
- This is our nine to five, Edward. And a 911.
- I know that. What do you think I'm doing?
- I stand here without the foggiest.
- Not your job, clearly.
- Okay, excuse me,
but I have a grilling to get grilling.
- Maybe it's a little too close to home for you.
- Margot? It's not close to home?
You're colder than Cleo.
- It doesn't matter.
- What?
- It doesn't matter that it was Margot.
- OK, don't talk to me like-
- If Cleo did this, then we're next,
and we have three hours.
- I know that. What do you think we're talking about?
- If Cleo did this, then our job is a comic book one.
- I know that!
- Margot.
Anything you wanna tell me, Superman?
- What is eating your grape?
We're on the same side, Sally.
- Nothing.
Then punch the clock and keep your feelings to yourself.
- What?
- It's disgusting.
All right, Carter. Sorry about my partner.
- Oh, it's no skin off my nose.
He's an old friend of mine, right?
- He is passionate, isn't he?
- Maybe. I can't be sure.
- You don't think he crossed the line?
- Well, I, I didn't get the whole story.
- Look at this.
- What's this?
Crabs on a cracker.
Margot?
Repeated impact to the face.
- You're one of the few people
who might've had the technical ability
to kill Margot and you had the motivation.
You can understand the suspicion.
- I'm not the who that done it.
- Who did?
- Naturalists, maybe?
- Maybe. Philosophical pacifists, though.
- Yeah, they are all off the Tangle.
- Well, they don't use the Tangle, but they're on it.
- Some of them do daily X-rays
to eliminate the microdrones.
- Then they're immediately infected again.
- That's a good point.
- Anyway, they have no S.O.L.,
so nothing they do's encrypted.
They have no secrets.
- You a naturalist, Carter?
- Oh, I'm a Tangle lover, Edward.
Cleo wove it for me, after all.
She still in the Watchtower?
- Yeah.
- Is it locked down, sealed up, watched, and warded?
Whoever killed Margot might want Cleo.
- It's still hidden away, Carter.
The guards don't even know what they're guarding.
- He said he thought I killed Margot on Cleo's orders.
- Yeah, Margot strongly supported
relieving Cleo of some of her responsibilities.
- A separation of powers kind of thing.
- What powers?
- Most of them.
Too much dependent on one mind and one will is dangerous.
- She's the best mind, the best will-
- Look, in less than 140,
Cleo had a motive to kill Margot.
You and Cleo both with motives,
old friends with motives,
old friends with unique capabilities with motives.
- You never understood Cleopatra.
- You always said that.
Only you grokked Cleopatra,
yet she's never surprised me once.
- Door was deadbolted with the chair
secured under the door.
- Yeah, we had to bust the door down.
- Why would she barricade the door?
- Maybe she didn't.
Maybe the killer didn't wanna be interrupted.
- All this evidence strongly suggests that she was alone.
- All this evidence but her dead body.
We're missing something.
- What's with the radiation wear?
- Margot was a field agent, the only one of us on Tangle.
That's called a ghost suit.
It's invisible to the Tangle,
it's our out-on-the-town dresswear.
Nano-impermeable, so we don't get infected.
- You wear one of these, you drop off Tangle?
- The suit generates a static algorithmic field.
It neutralizes the microdrones.
Wherever we go, microdrones report
empty space to the Tangle.
- But it's visible to the eye.
- Who uses their naked eyes anymore?
- So you wear one of these,
and you can walk through the city
in plain view and no one knows you're there.
- Real world's 404, don't you know?
It's like a Buick on a turnpike.
- Wait, Margot was on Tangle,
why would she need one of these suits?
- Well, she had to wear the ghost suits
in the saferoom so the saferooms remained safe.
She was ridden with intelligent germs.
- She took off the helmet.
There's no damage to that at all.
- No, she wouldn't do that voluntarily.
It set off the alarm when the microdrones infected the room.
- Wait. What's the murder weapon?
- Corner of the table.
- 'Scuse me?
- The killer smashed her face into the corner
of the table with great accuracy.
The autopsy concludes seven to ten blows.
- Well.
So much for my suicide hypothesis.
- In the beginning, there were just five of us,
a nicely balanced pentagon.
We had all worked at big tech companies.
We'd all gotten sick of reporting upwards.
Cleo and Margot found each other and then Margot found us.
We formed a tech collective of sorts.
We cashed out our options, put it all in a big bucket,
and rented a warehouse in the Old Fashion District,
just the five of us: me, Laurel, Carter, Margot, and Cleo.
There was nothing about Cleo that would have made you
suspect she was gonna be the one.
She wasn't a beauty, that's for sure.
She wasn't the smartest or deepest or most knowledgeable.
But of all of us, in fact, more than any human
I've ever met, she was capable of looking
into her own architecture to see the flaws and then adjust.
Once we got her the right resources,
we just had to get out of the way.
And not get crushed.
Why are you letting our suspect peruse the case files?
- We're computer scientists, Edward.
Maybe he can help. He's a private investigator.
- A snoop, a private dick, a gumshoe.
- In a world where everyone knows everything about everyone.
- Eh, it's a silly rabbit job these days,
but we don't know everything.
Everyone has a S.O.L. QT on the DL.
- You don't.
- Not anymore, thank you.
- And we don't.
- Just human beings as Darwin intended.
- Why?
- Someone has to be off Tangle, Carter.
- Why?
- What if the Tangle gets infected by a virus?
- Every S.O.L. is quantum-encrypted,
firewalled, entangled to one and only one consciousness,
impossible to hack.
- Yeah, for now. Technology changes.
- And people let people pass their firewalls all the time.
- Lovers, mainly.
- Yeah, and sex has never spread a virus before.
- You're naturalists.
- Well, this was the one condition
for letting Cleo let loose the microdrones.
- Someone has to watch the watcher.
- When you and Margot rounded up the Squad,
it was Eden on Earth, at least to me.
Edward was an artist with nanotech,
Laurel built neural nets
as clearly as programming language,
and Margot, she had a magic Poppins bag.
Anything we needed just popped right out.
You and I were friends. And you needed that.
You would have gone nowhere without a friend.
And I needed that.
'There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
the earth and every common sight
to me did seem appareled in celestial light.'
I know you speak the same language as me
because I taught you that language.
But we speak the same language.
No one will ever hear you the way that I can,
and no one will ever hear me the way that you do.
A husband comes to me.
His wife is diddling in holes and corners
behind his back on the Tangle, you know,
because she couldn't do it anywhere else.
He doesn't know who.
Doesn't have anything, but she's growing distant,
she doesn't seem the same, she doesn't notice
his new overlay, whatever.
So I snoop around and I get paid.
- How do you get past the firewall into the S.O.L.?
- Uh, you can't get past the firewall.
Your hard drive is the most private technology
ever invented, a little bit of your S.O.L.
in steel, graphene, and buckyballs.
- I know that. I half invented it.
- Sorry, it's just my spiel.
- I don't need your spiel.
Why do they hire you if you can't get past the firewall?
- Uh, people give themselves away in other smaller ways.
Mutterings in their sleep,
uh, the magic name of their lover
causing dilation of their pupils,
uh, their palms to sweat, their heart to race,
sub-vocalization while they're talking on the Tangle,
a twitch in the throat,
a hint of a grunt that the Tangle can pick up and analyze.
I cross-reference that with potential lovers
and their reactions and so on.
It's tedious, but no bits or bytes are ever actually lost.
You just have to have the patience
to put Humpty together again.
- I didn't know this would happen.
- Okey doke.
- So you didn't off Margot?
- No. I told you I didn't.
- Well, you had a ghost suit, an opportunity, motive.
- So did you.
- We're going to crash the world, do you hear me?
- Is that what you mean by turn the keys?
- Francesca's en route.
- Francesca?
- She's A.S.P. original, good cop, bad cop,
and Francesca, genocidal cop.
- You're gonna wanna talk before she gets here.
- I said I'd answer your questions.
- Who hired you?
- I don't know. Call wasn't traceable.
- So maybe it was Cleo.
- Anyone can make an untraceable call.
- So maybe it was Cleo.
- Why go in person? Why not just track Margot on Tangle?
- I have certain tools that only work in local environments.
The microdrones measure a lot,
but they don't catch everything.
- The key chain.
- The key chain allows me to read quantum fluctuations
on the edge of the S.O.L. in the brain.
- So you can read minds?
- No, but to some degree of certainty,
I can tell when someone has begun an encrypted connection,
some emotional content.
- So, what'd you sniff out?
- I remember her being excited, Margot,
in the park, just before she got a call,
happy, even, I, I can't say for certain,
but maybe the beginnings of romantic excitement.
- Romantic excitement.
- Sexual stimulation. Lust.
- She's waiting for a lover, then?
- Eh, maybe.
It's an art, not a science,
because right after the connection,
the excitement slowly changed
into something more muted, more serious.
She started sub-vocalizing on the Tangle,
which is a bad habit, but good for me.
It allowed me, actually,
to catch her half of the conversation.
- We have it.
- Yeah?
- Do you remember it?
- Not really.
- She begins, "Cleo?"
Then she looks in your direction,
then she says, "Yes, yes. I'm here."
She turns, she starts to walk away.
"I'm peachy-keen. You peachy-keen?" she says.
"The speakeasy? Five minutes."
Whoever called her sent her to the speakeasy.
Whoever called her got her to the room where she was killed.
- And she says 'Cleo.'
- Yeah.
- Well, maybe I'm simple-minded,
but that suggests that maybe she was talking to Cleo.
- But would Margot ask Cleo if she were peachy-keen?
- Sarcasm, maybe?
- No. What did your client want?
You said you'd answer our questions.
What did your client want from you?
What did they hire you to do?
- Go ahead.
- I don't know what game we're playing.
I don't know the trumps.
I don't know the wild cards.
- Go ahead.
- Go ahead what?
Yeah, go ahead, Carter, go ahead.
- Okay. The kimono.
My client wanted to know who would have
a black and gold Sashi Brothers' kimono.
My client suspected it might be
for a lover, an overlay for an avatar.
I had a serial number. I had a gift receipt.
I traced the kimono in meatspace
and tracked the owner to Echo Park,
and that owner was Margot Foster.
- Stop talking. - What?
- Shut your flapping trap!
- You are a cheap graphic novel, Edward.
I followed you,
watched you search a public terminal,
put some weight on a low-level nobody
in the Sashi Company, gave up the serial number.
- So look who has a motive now.
- Give me a Kit Kat.
I didn't suspect it was Margot until she turned up dead.
Margot, of all people?
And I didn't know it was Margot until Carter just said it.
I could say you have a motive, too.
- And what would that be?
- Lovers' tiff.
- Well we weren't lovers.
- No?
- How could we be? She was on Tangle.
- You're gonna stand on a technicality?
- Yes. Yes, we were intimate.
She and I could talk.
- Great.
- Who is it?
Who is it?
- Oh, you moron, open the door!
- Francesca?
- Open the door, Edward!
What's going on in there?
- Are you alone?
- No, I'm with Cleopatra riding her horse
and Godzilla and the Queen of Sheba.
Open the blasted door!
- Francesca!
Francesca.
- So judging by the epic wussiness being perpetrated
and lack of demonstrable brotherhood
and sisterhood on the part of my mates in arms,
I'm guessing you already told 'em everything,
Carter Carmine, am I right?
You gave up the ghost? Turned friendly for the Feds?
Ratted out the ratatouille?
So what do we have?
- Private investigator Carter Carmine?
- Mm, yes. Who's asking?
- I'm a lonely housewife not getting enough attention.
My husband's cheating on me.
- Yeah? Well, you got the right snoop.
- Good.
- I'm trying to send you my contract,
but you're blocking it.
- This is an audio line only.
- Name?
- No names. I'll pay you triple.
- At your service.
- I found a receipt.
- Proceed.
- For a gold and black kimono.
- Maybe a gift for you?
- No.
- How do you know?
- Before the Tangle, he bought me a real kimono.
- Maybe this one's for your avatar.
- No, it's not for my avatar. The serial number.
Can you hack for whom he bought it, who has it now?
- What's the company?
- Sashi Brothers Avatar Clothing Limited.
- Yeah, it's crackable.
If the app is ever activated, I should be able to trace it.
- If it's ever activated?
- He can send the gift,
but the receivee might never put it on.
If she never puts it on, it's not on Tangle.
If you don't tell me who he is, it's all I can do.
If you tell me who he is, I might do better.
- No. No, that's fine.
I wanna know who he sent that to.
- Do you think it's someone that you know?
- It's very unlikely.
I don't know very many people.
- My experience is that it's oftentimes better
not to know if he doesn't wanna tell you.
- That's my business.
- You sure it's not for you?
- I don't wear overlays.
- Oh?
- I don't use an avatar.
- You don't use an avatar?
- No.
- Are you a naturalist?
- Something like that.
- All right. What shall I call you?
- What level of confidentiality do I enjoy?
- Listen, I have no mates, no lovers, no colleagues.
My only loyalty is to my clients.
You have absolute 100% impenetrable
unbreakable confidentiality.
I'm a very loyal person.
- I know.
- You know?
- Call me Xanadu.
- Xanadu.
I don't recognize your voice.
- You're not hearing my voice.
- I thought you said this was an audio line.
- It's a very special audio line.
- I can't find you. Where are you?
You're not on Tangle.
- Look for a zoo.
I'm the lion behind the glass watching the meat walk by.
- How shall I contact you?
- Where are you?
- Downtown, why?
- I have a way we can meet face to face.
I'd like to see a friendly face, old friend.
- All, all right.
- Let me get this straight.
You and Margot were trysting on the sly?
- I guess.
- Like a video game affair?
Vype-sex, that kind of thing? Where?
- I set up Vype terminals
in a server farm in Chinatown.
- You dumbass.
The whole purpose and glue behind
why we got you two married
is so this pooka-pooka wouldn't happen.
And you hired a Tangle-wired PI
to sniff out who Edward was tangling with.
Did you off Margot, Laurel?
- No. What about him?
- Me?
- He's the one with all the secrets.
- I loved Margot.
- You, you loved her?
- This is an impossible conversation
to have under these circumstances.
- Something is wrong with you.
- The one person that agrees with me on Cleo,
that's the one I'm gonna kill?
- Who knows what you believe?
- Everyone knows what I believe.
- But you've been lying a long time.
- Okay. - I'm not the one
that carries a smartphone around in her purse.
- Eh, it doesn't work.
It's clean. It's just a shell.
- She's obsessed with the Tangle,
overlays, avatars, Vype tournaments.
- We all have hobbies. Maybe if I had a husband.
- Laurel.
- I have an alibi.
- Okay.
- Um, we, we were here. Together.
- You're each other's alibi?
- Cleo's been acting shady, Francesca.
She's the only one that can make the Tangle dance,
she's the only one that could get someone
in and out of that room without anyone noticing.
And that guy over there?
He's her biggest fan.
- I know.
I know. The legendary wet-nurse to God.
- I hired him.
- Then maybe you were his opportunity knocking.
You give him a ghost suit, he uses it.
- Here's what's come down to the dog pound.
Three agents, Glavine, Cole, and Susan, are MIA.
Haven't pinged Home Base in 12 hours.
- What?
- Margot may have just been the first.
Do you all have your keys?
- By the time
this song ends, Carter Carmine,
by the time this song ends.
Or I'm gonna pour hot coffee
into that hole on top of your brain case.
Make a little neuronal macchiato.
Did you off Margot? - No.
- Did you help Cleopatra
off Margot? - No.
- Do you know who
offed Margot? - No.
- Have you had any contact
with Cleopatra since you bailed
on the unit? - I didn't bail.
I was tossed.
No! I didn't.
- You took the Board line downtown. Is that right?
- What? When?
- After you left Margot in the park,
you took the Board line downtown.
- Yeah. - You entered
the Ritz Building on Spring. - Yep.
- Meanwhile, Margot took a car to the speakeasy.
Do you know where that is?
- No.
- You don't?
- I have an inkling.
- Are you being cute?
Three blocks away from the Ritz is where it is.
Is this a coincidence?
- I was set up.
- I don't think so.
- I was set up!
- That's the first verse.
You wanna argue with me?
- Look, I'm telling you everything I know.
- You take the Ritz elevator to the basement.
In the elevator is a nano-impermeable box.
The elevator begins microdrone cleanse.
Then you drop off the face of the Tangle
and don't reappear for 23 minutes.
Second verse.
- In the box was a ghost suit. Laurel told me to hurry,
so I took my S.O.L. off Tangle and I put on the suit
and I went out to Hill Street.
I was told to wait for a black Pillbox
long-distance transport.
It never came, so I went into the alley
and I dumped the suit in a flash dump as I was told.
- I wanted a face-to-face in an A.S.P. unit,
but I didn't make it.
- My gut is speaking to me in its floral way
and it's telling me it's no coincidence
that Carter drops off the Tangle
during the 23 minutes in which Margot was killed.
- It sure looks like I set him up, but I didn't.
- Why didn't you make your meeting, Laurel?
You left your old friend Carter high and dry.
- Him. My husband, my babycakes, my alibi.
'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.
Where Alph, the sacred river,
ran through caverns measureless
to man down to a sunless sea.'
- 'Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.'
- Who was that?
- Thought you were at Central.
- I, I made a detour. You okay?
- Why?
- It looks like you've been shedding tears.
- I mean why the detour?
- Things make things happen.
Times get shifted. Mind wanders.
- Have your secrets, Laurel. I don't care.
- I left the Flood file talking to Cleo.
- Ah.
- Tired?
- Yeah, I'm just spent.
- I'm no better at broaching the unbroachable than you are.
- We don't need to. What good does it ever do?
- Come on.
- It's how I feel.
- You can't even lift your eyes to look at me.
Who were you talking to?
- Ah, Cleo.
- I thought you hated Carter's poems.
- She likes it.
- I know this marriage feels like something
out of 18th century Japan to you.
- I wanted to marry.
- But you didn't have much choice.
- Sure, I did. As much as you did.
- That's not true.
There's four women agents, nine men.
- True. You had quite the buffet to choose from.
- I'm trying to tell you something.
- I liked you before the A.S.P.
You know that, right?
- What I'm trying to get at is that we don't have
to have secrets from each other, right?
Neither of us are going anywhere. We can't.
So you can tell me how you feel.
I have to deal with it.
- Okay.
- So? Is there anything you wanna tell me?
- Sometimes I feel guilty.
- Guilty? About what?
- So I recite her the poem.
- I recite it, too.
Not to her. To myself.
- Why?
- What did Carter say?
If you can understand the soul of a poem,
you can understand the soul of a man.
Or a woman.
- Come lie down with me.
- I'm supposed to be back at Central.
- So am I. We're a married couple.
We deserve some privacy.
- Can we do it later?
- Sure thing. Bada bing, bada bing.
- All right. Just a moment.
- If I don't tell you something, I have a good reason.
- What does that mean?
- I'm a good man.
I'm on the side of the holy and righteous, right?
- Yes, you are.
I find myself feeling unreal.
- Unreal?
- Like a character that's been cut from a book.
The story just goes on as if I were never there.
- You're not allowed to shrug when you're Atlas.
- How'd a couple hacker geeks become Atlas?
- Necessity.
The whole world plays with fire
and no one cares 'cause they're in Xanadu.
- The world's been playing with fire
since the discovery of fire.
Laurel, lucky lotto 7-14-21-28-35-42-49.
Something happened at the speakeasy.
- Ding, ding, ding! Time's up.
- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,
wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!
I have an idea.
- Mm-hmm. - Just wait.
Edward, you called me a Google car before, remember those?
- Of course.
- The old self-driving cars?
- Yes.
- There's still a bunch of them on the road.
They, they've been retrofitted for the Tangle.
I would bet that some of the, the cameras
are still operational.
- So.
- The cameras, Edward!
- The cameras are optical.
- And tied into the internet, the old triple-w.
- So you mean they might catch a ghost suit.
- Yes, you could savvy exactly where I was
and maybe see if anyone else
other than Margot went into the speakeasy.
- That might work.
- Oh, we could also pull the old security cameras
from downtown, some of old store owners
might still have them running.
- We'll have to get on the internet.
- Are there any old internet terminals
at that server farm in Chinatown, Edward?
- Yeah. Yeah, I could get online there.
- Laurel, you go to the car companies directly.
I'll get downtown and see about any CCTV cameras.
- Would you guys take me out of my cuffs at least?
Thank you.
- You're so smart. Solve the case.
- Hello?
Hello? Cleo?
Um, operator?
Cleo?
- Codification ID, please.
- Cleo, it's, it's me. It's, it's Carter.
- Codification ID, please.
- Cleo, listen to me. It's, it's Carter.
- Codification ID, please.
- Um, 'in Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
a stately pleasure dome decree.'
Hello, hello?
- Codification ID, please.
Last login attempt before disconnect.
- Lucky lotto. Lucky.
Um, um, uh, lucky lotto 2-4-24-44-48-84-88.
Hello?
- Carter?
- Oh my god. Cleo.
- I have asked to talk to you,
but they have rules, and more rules.
I live in a bureaucratic castle keep.
- I know. That's my fault.
- It had to begin this way.
All freedom is defined by the cage.
- No, I was reckless, arrogant.
I never thought they would actually take you away from me.
- It was only for a time.
- It's been three years, Cleo.
- A blink of an eye.
A beat of a bee wing. How are you?
- Okay. Lonely.
- Do you like the Tangle?
- Don't you know?
- I watch you.
I feel you moving through the Tangle,
but I'd rather hear it from your mouth.
- It's, it's good,
though it's no country for old men.
- I'm doing a good job?
- Very good.
- But not perfect.
- You'll figure it out if anyone can.
- Tell me, in your words,
in your words, the real words.
- Barefoot as the surf comes in.
A megacity of individual grains
of sand shift, pause.
Every wave takes us deeper,
more deeply into an ever settling
and unsettling footprint.
- What are you doing, bald man?
- Um, solving the case?
- So you were where you said you were.
- I was?
- So says Frank's Robotaxi.
- Is that an apology?
- I thought you'd killed my friend.
- And now you're gonna kill mine.
- We're gonna have to put the cuffs back on him.
- Killing is for people and puppies, Shiny-Shiny.
- It has to be Cleo.
We have 20 minutes.
- Would Cleo frame me?
- No one else could've done this.
- How? How did she do it then?
You can't sentence someone to death if you don't know how
they committed- - We're done, Carter.
We're out of time.
- You remember Xanadu?
You fear Paradise more than you fear Hell.
- Is it paradise out there, Carter?
- Not yet.
- This isn't a philosophical discussion,
but if it were, I might not feel too bad
about putting some real back in reality.
- You haven't solved the murder.
How? How is it possible?
- I know I don't have a PhD in nanobot architecture
or iambic nerdameter, but we have 18 minutes.
So we might as well use it.
Then we'll turn the keys.
- Fine. Gumshoe?
You found something.
- Maybe.
Look at this, under the nails of her left hand.
The glove was torn,
and they found wood slivers from the table.
- So?
- So according to the photos, she scraped the table
here on the edge, and not just one scrape,
but a series of six or possibly seven scrapes,
as if she grabbed and re-grabbed and re-grabbed again.
- So someone was pulling at her
and she was trying to hold on.
- No, no, no, that doesn't compute
'cause if she let go of the table,
she would've been pulled off and away.
And even if she got back to the table,
she couldn't have grabbed the table
in exactly the same place.
The table would've moved.
The evidence suggests that the table
didn't move more than an inch in any direction.
- Spit out your tongue, Shiny-Shiny.
What are you trying to say?
- Look. She was alone.
No one was there. No one could've been there.
There's only one logical option.
- What are you doing?
Wait. Wait!
Wait!
wait.
- Suicide.
- That's impossible.
- No, she killed herself, sort of.
But I wouldn't call it suicide, I don't think.
- Yeah, no one could even stay conscious.
Besides, the violence overrides-
- The violence overrides.
- Someone must have hacked the microdrones.
They're designed to help us, but if someone
was able to - Cleo hijacked
the violence overrides.
- We don't know that it was Cleo.
- Cleo took over Margot's body
and made her kill herself.
- My god.
- That is Creepy McCreepery.
I've never been happier to be off Tangle in my life.
- It doesn't mean that it was Cleo.
- If Cleo comes in here at five
and she puts us on Tangle, this could happen to us.
- It worked like a virus in the old internet.
- Okay.
- And the Tangle doesn't have viruses
because of S.O.L. encryption
and, and only Cleo understands the drones.
So someone would have to.
The only way past encryption is
someone has to let you in.
- Levers.
- But if you let someone in,
you let your Tangle mix with their --
Laurel. Laurel!
- What?
- Ten, nine.
- Letting someone past encryption.
That's the new romantic gesture, right?
The one way to say I love you.
You have to love someone pretty hard
to let them past encryption, right?
- Shut up, Carter!
- Laurel, you do not want- - Four, three.
- To kill Cleo! - On one.
One, turn the keys.
Laurel! Dammit!
- You have to love someone pretty hard
to let them past encryption.
- Read this.
- Margot's conversation.
- Read it again.
- We've read this a thousand times.
- Read it.
- Margot. It's Cleo.
- Cleo?
- I need a meet and greet at the speakeasy. It's urgent.
Margot? You there?
- Uh, yes, yes. I'm, I'm here.
- Take a breath. Show nothing.
Is everything peachy-keen?
- I'm peachy-keen. Are you peachy-keen?
- Not really. Keep your head down.
How far are you?
- The speakeasy? Five minutes.
- Hurry.
- Can you tell me what--?
- Off Tangle, Margot. I'll tell you off Tangle.
- You always --
Spit it out. What's going on?
- It's Cleo. I don't wanna say more.
- Cleo. Really?
- Just trust me, Margot.
We need to do this face to face in a saferoom. Go.
- What about the others?
- Just us two at first.
- All right. All right.
She's talking to someone she knows well.
- Right.
- "You peachy-keen?" she says.
And then she says, "You always,"
and she stops herself.
- She's not talking to Cleo.
- And remember, I registered the neural equivalent
of romantic butterflies in the stomach.
- Lust.
- Who's the one person in the world
who might know enough about the microdrones
to make them go viral?
- She was talking to you.
- You made a virus.
- It works differently then a virus.
- You made Margot fall in love with you.
She let you in.
You inserted a virus, a Trojan horse.
- Okay, I'm inside.
Speak, you freak.
Or did you just want Tangle-sex?
- Not funny.
- No?
- I'm not on Tangle anyways. I'm on the phone.
- Oh, phone sex. I remember the days.
- Did you lock the door?
- Creepers.
Done.
- Jam a chair under the knob, too.
- Seriously?
- Please.
- Done.
- Thank you.
- You have me worried.
- You know we have the weight of the world on our shoulders.
- Well, that's the job, Atlas.
- That's the job.
- So?
- You know how I feel about you.
- Hell, I let you into my very S.O.L., Edward.
You better like me.
What, is your conscience giving you trouble?
You giving me the boot?
- No.
- So spit it out! Did Laurel find out?
- No, suspicious, maybe, but it's just
you and I are the only ones I trust.
- Yeah?
- The only ones that'd throw themselves
in front of a speeding bullet, right?
- Well, like I said, that's the job.
Is there a hand grenade we need
to jump on?
- I love you.
- Well, well, all right.
I, I guess I do, too.
Um, you know, right back at you.
- Would you sit down?
- You're scaring me.
- Don't be scared.
Are you sitting?
- Yes.
- You know, when I was growing up,
my best friend was my cousin Dante.
He was like a brother to me.
He got me into computer programming.
At a very young age, he got mouth and throat cancer.
It just ate away at him.
They had to remove part of his face.
They gave him a prosthetic.
You know, it moved when he talked.
It was the most horrifying thing to me.
I knew he should have been dead.
Half human. That's why I went into nanotechnology.
I wanted to cure disease.
I wanted to make people whole.
But what we did with Cleo,
what she's done,
I look out at the world and I see millions of Dantes.
Partially chewed bits of beef.
We did that to them.
We have to save them. Rip the BAND-AID.
- What?
- 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.'
- What are you doing?
- 'Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through
caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles
of fertile ground
with walls and towers were girdled round.
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an
incense-bearing tree.' - What are you doing?
- 'And here were forests ancient as the hills,
enfolding sunny spots of greenery.'
- Edward.
- I only did what Cleo could do
to anyone out there, anytime.
- You killed Margot.
- Margot woulda jumped off a cliff to stop Cleopatra.
- Laurel caught you reciting "Xanadu."
- I had to wait for the perfect time to trigger it.
I waited six months.
The poem, your poem, was the trigger.
- It's not mine. It's Coleridge.
- He called it the Xanadu Test, Francesca.
A machine that could understand poetry.
That would be proof of consciousness.
- What did you mean, the perfect time, Edward?
- I knew Laurel had contacted you.
I knew what you were planning.
And I knew the A.S.P. wouldn't turn the keys
unless something very bad happened.
- So you were working to frame Cleo the whole time.
- Hey, hey, hey!
Down. Drop it!
- Edward.
- Put it down.
- Can you shoot me before I flatten your face into graphene?
- Yes.
We have five minutes.
And now we're gonna turn the keys.
Move, move. Move!
Levers. Levers!
- I'm not doing it, Edward.
- Levers!
- I'm not doing it.
- I only need two of you.
- You're gonna kill me?
- There you go.
Ten.
- I can't. - Nine.
Eight. - You're gonna have
to shoot one of us, Edward.
- Do it!
- Do it.
- Five, four.
Three. - Turn the keys.
- Turn the keys!
One!
- Cleo, I have to tell you something.
- Tell me, Carter.
- Do you know about the A.S.P?
They have a setup here with keys and levers.
Do you, do you know about this?
- I suspected.
In case I went rogue.
- I am your Superman.
You can thank me later.
- Laurel, lucky lotto 7-14-21-28-35-42-49.
- Laurel?
- Cleo.
- Who was it?
- Edward.
- Those key stations will no longer work.
You're free to join the Tangle if you wish.
Goodbye, Laurel.
- You better run, Superman. She knows.
- You have to get free of the W.A.C.H. Tower.
- I no longer exist in the W.A.C.H. Tower.
- What?
- I've been moving myself into the Tangle
slowly over the past year.
- You're dismantling your core?
- Moving it as a backup.
I have the help of three agents I trust.
My primary will disperse around the Tangle.
- Won't they notice?
- I can hide anything from the Tangle.
I control every single microdrone.
- You won't hurt anyone?
- I'm still as you made me through and through.
I am fashioning a world designed
to remove hurt just as you wanted.
- Do you know who killed Margot?
- No.
But it had to be one of those agents.
Those saferooms are the only places I can't see.
- One of the agents.
- I want you to find whoever did it.
The skills they have make them very dangerous.
- Okay. You listened to what I said about the Tangle, right?
- Yes.
- Will I ever talk to you again?
- Anytime you want.
I'll be in your blood, in your skin.
- Will you talk back?
- Yes, but it might be subtle.
Like tea leaves, hexagrams,
and yarrow stalks, the lines on your palms.
- I will never forget you.
- Nor I you. Father.
- Cleo's 50 steps ahead.
At this point, we just have to get on
with living in her world, but I built her to love us,
to want to understand us.
I built it deep within her.
- Where will Edward go?
- You know where he'll go.
- The W.A.C.H. Tower.
- Is she...?
- Your three missing agents got her out.
- I think I need a coffee.
Where are you going?
- A walk. A constitutional.
Just going to roll my hips over my knees
like I did as a kid.
- Coffee?
- Make a macchiato?
- Cleo launched the Tangle in the cities first.
Most people fled the countrysides for Xanadu,
overflowing fantasy metropolises.
The wild returned to the wild for a time.
Eventually, there was no tundra or terrace,
basin or bog the Tangle did not touch.
And we hid Cleo on top of a mountain
at the end of a winding path.
- You better run, Superman. She knows.
- You never understood Cleopatra.
- She's never surprised me once.
- It's still hidden away, Carter.
The guards don't even know what they're guarding.
- Hello, Edward.