My partner on the force once said something offhand that had never quite managed to leave my mind. It was not a comment intended for my ears, nor anyone's; it was a muttered thing, clearly meant as an aside. He had been sitting at his desk, looking over the case files that the force had been working on at the time, and one of them had caught his eye, apparently. He was a good five years older than me, and at the time, I was much younger and much more na•ve about the nature of man. Still, the words had always stuck with me. He had said, "I wish people did these things for hate again."

       I always had wondered how a man was brought to think that, especially a cop. Our work was never the best; after all, we were employees of the Tasnican state in a place where the state had been superseded in too many ways by the corporation. Longman Island was entirely an artificial creation; it was a series of landfills and metal superstructure that created a twenty mile long, thirteen mile wide island off of the western coast of the country. Originally, it allowed for the kind of cybernetic research forbidden in Guardia to be done, offshore and with well-paid test subject who surrendered their right to be human to, of all things, advance the cause of humankind. It grew over three years into a full city, thriving on technologies not yet fully integrated with the rest of the country and on the corporation that had created this city. It was created, owned, and wholly subsidized by Forge Mechanicals; all public services were essentially privately owned by Forge and subcontracted out.

       It was a corporate executive's dream and a politician's nightmare. The police department, the fire department, mass transportation, education, and nearly every facet of life were based around the corporation. This loss of control, this blatant challenge to a Republic desperately trying to prove that its sovereignty was not being undermined by the very people it existed to serve, protect, and ultimately dominate, was not something the Senate took lightly. That was why the Longman Island National Police Department had been created.

       I had never understood John Baker, my partner, or why he had said such a thing, until one day. This, then, is part of his story. It is a glimpse into what could make a man sworn to uphold the law say such a seemingly terrible and callous thing. This is the day that I learned what he meant.

       It had started out like any normal day on the job. The usual crimes that slipped past the local, corporate police were filtering in; the case files on political murders, the saboteurs, and the sorts of things that the government absolutely, positively made its business under every circumstance. Baker and I were getting this flood of information in our squad car, through our personal headjacks. One of the self-professed triumphs of Forge was to make a cybernetic implant, put right behind the ear, which let people connect to the Omninet and each other whenever they want.

       Baker always drove on the job; somehow, the man was a multitasking god who took in the reports being fed into his head, while he kept a constant streaming of tango music (at least, so he claimed, and I've no reason to think he is lying) on one end, and managed to drive while doing this. Rainere bless cybernetics, I guess. At any rate, we were alerted to a semi-truck moving down the highway at speeds exceeding a hundred and fifteen miles per hour. At the time, I had figured it was probably some sort of freak out by one of the AI's piloting the things. It was a military truck, responsible for shipping Grand Army ammunition and whatnot off the island and to the spaceports on the mainland. The artificial intelligences on the things went wacky every so often.

       I remember it clearly, when that perception changed entirely. Baker was driving us onto the on-ramp, a little too fast as always. I had tried to voice some complaint. "Jack, you dumbass, slow down. We're gonna-"

       That was when we saw it. A massive, twenty-six wheel truck came tearing by so fast that the wind tried to throw us into the guard railing nearby. Baker screamed - it was one of those involuntary, wordless shouts that come from that terrible mixture of pure, primal fear and a closer brush with death than we would like. Thankfully, he had enhanced reflexes that kept us on the shoulder. A few squad cars came rushing by. Baker steadily accelerated us and threw us behind it.

       "What the hell is going on?" I asked.

       "No clue," Baker replied with gritted teeth. The truck was clearly visible ahead, rushing past the occasional motorist that we hadn't managed to get out of the way. "They said the AI's name is Tiffany. She's gone off her rocker; she just keeps saying, 'I wanna go home.' I picked that up off of Forge's radio network." We weren't supposed to access that, of course; Baker had a way of conveniently ignoring regulation. "She's totally off course, too."

       "Any fatalities?" I quickly replied. Houses and cars were skirting by us, to and fro; there were side roads, intersections underneath us, and the works. It was an eerie feeling, but one hard to truly grasp. There was still a city around us, while this maniac was ripping through it.

       "Six injuries," Baker replied smoothly; he had kept calm, if steel-eyed. How he managed to drive so calmly, I will never know. However, what he said attracted my immediate attention. "They're about to blow Tiffany's tires with caltrops. Hang on."

       I blinked and turned my head to look at him. That was a mistake; as he changed   lanes at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, it threw me forward with a yelp and a new case of whiplash. When I looked up, Tiffany had flown over the caltrops. Her tires were blown, tearing off and exploding in bursts of air and rubber. I had expected the machine to stop, then. After all, robots were rational; it wasn't safe to drive then. Unfortunately, I was entirely wrong. Sparks flew up as the metal wheels met the road, and the trailer on the truck swung backward.

       Rob Burnsen and Leon Gurgenheimer were in the car that Tiffany's trailer hit. The front flattened immediately, crushing inward and then rising to meet the cab of the vehicle as the trailer swung it into our path. Both men, good cops and good fathers, were dead in a moment. There was no time to mourn, nor time to be shocked. What had once been my friends and my comrades were turned into a rolling ball of steel and flame that was coming directly at us. As I said, thank Rainere that Baker had enhanced reflexes; we moved sharply out of the way, as the remains of their car hit the concrete barrier behind us. It rolled upward, flying into the air, and then slammed into the ground before it continued away from us.

       I looked back ahead. "What the fuck!" I shouted. "She's getting off!"

       Baker grunted in affirmation. The semi was pulling off an exit ramp, shooting sparks off of it. By now, we were the only car still directly on its tail; Bursen and Gurgenheimer had thrown the rest of us off. Baker shot off right after the truck, as she threw herself onto a service road. The cars on it honked their horns, even as our sirens wailed. There was no time to warn them. Tiffany's cab collided with two, throwing them aside as her far greater massive plowed through a red light.

       "We're following," Baker snarled as he ran through it as well.

       The mad path that she laid for us cut along the service road for another several miles. The civilians, thank Rainere, had figured out that they needed to move the hell away from us; that left us a mostly clear path. I spent the time screaming into the radio built into my head, naming the streets I could remember and our position as best I could, to block the roads off. However, both Baker and I had our eyes shoot wide open as a voice spoke into our heads.

       It was a stunning moment. I remember how he looked towards me, with a stare. It was one of the few times I saw him truly surprised. The voice was that of a little girl's, a lot like my own. She just said, "I wanna go home. Let me go home. Mommy and Daddy are worried about me."

       After giving us this message, Tiffany banked sharply around a curb and into oncoming traffic as she entered a residential neighborhood. I stared in horror, as a city bus was overturned by the blow and knocked aside. The entire front half was a mangled mess. My hand gripped the armrest of the car, as we and Tiffany simultaneously decelerated rather suddenly. It still was not enough, as we began plowing through the neighborhood streets.

       "We have to stop and help them," I said to Baker, as I looked over my shoulder. "There must be thirty people in-"

       He would hear none of it. "We have to stop her, Norm."

       Baker then floored it. I screamed as he flew up a curb, briefly going airborne, and slammed into some poor bastard's lawn. We ripped through his flower bed, too, sending a spray of purple petals in the air behind us, mixed with quite a bit of black soil. Baker then brought us back down, now only going about forty - and faster than the truck - and brought us in front of that semi. As I looked at it in the rear view mirror, I realized what a monstrosity it looked like; it had no windshield, instead appearing to simply be a flat panel on the front. A long, chrome bumper and a grill were the only normal features. The rest was composed of red sensor eyes and various scanners, scattered here and there on blisters and bulges on it. The top, where the windshield would have been, just had a simple hatch. It looked not unlike some sort of demon, or something from a movie. Why those Forge bastards made something so ghastly, I'll never know.

       "It's turning. It may try to ram us," Baker said. He was too calm, especially as we both knew there was neither a curve nor intersection ahead. That could only mean a sideswipe, and that would likely mean instant death. Yet, it never came. To our surprise, it simply banked sharply and braked; the truck slammed up onto the grass of a lawn and came to a stop. Baker quickly did the same, slamming on his brakes and bringing us to a stop not far away.

       He had shouted to move after he already opened the door. The both of us ran from the car, drawing our sidearms, and stopped in front of that truck cab like it was a normal one. It was as though there was a driver to step out of it. We pointed our guns at it, anyways. I don't know about Baker, but it sure as hell made me feel better.

       Tiffany made another announcement, this time by loudspeaker. "Mommy!" she said, her eight year-old voice booming. "I'm home!"

       Me and Baker looked at each other, and then back at the cab. The hatch blew, sending a wave of steam out of it. As it faded, I got a good look at what was inside. It was a metal coffin, built around the neck and head of a girl. She had a pale, white face, with blue lips. She could have only been eight. On her head was a massive helmet; a terrible thing, with wires and cables poking out of the helmet. And yet, she smiled.

       "Mommy, you see?" she said, her lips moving all too slowly, as her voice boomed from the truck's loudspeaker. "I'm not dead. I'm not-"

       Baker fired one round at her. A mixture of blood and cooling fluid splattered everywhere, as that helmet shattered and her head slumped to the side. His hands shook, and his mouth was wide open. I could see that look in his eyes; he felt an anger that I still find hard to put into words. That day, I felt the same. My body tried to force me to vomit; I bit the bile back. Tiffany wasn't granted such a simple luxury, after all.

       The coroners' reports confirmed what we already knew. Tiffany Lang was a girl who died eight months ago; her body, as is required by law in Longman Island, was donated to science. There, she was revived and converted - while still legally dead - into a driving artificial intelligence, using her memories of the rail stations where her father worked to allow her to drive with ease over the port. Forge Mechanicals claimed it was a lie, of course; that they would never do something so inhuman. It was a rogue researcher, and nothing more.

       And still, I could not bring myself to accept that. It was a sickness prevalent in society; even if the mind rejected it, that it infested the body was all too apparent. It was something I was unwilling to so easily allow myself to believe. Had technology really robbed us of all that was sacred?

       Baker thought it did.