Sleuth

by Aiji Ducatillon

      Spike sat on the beach shielding her eyes from the sun, and thought of Tennyson. She gulped the last of her drink and read the label: "Please dispose of thoughtfully.” Thoughtfully, she dropped the can at her feet and thoughtfully she pressed it into the soft sand with her prehensile toes. She had always been like that – obsessively reading text. If this were Second Life, she wondered, how long would it be before the can was automatically returned to her inventory? She could picture the blue axis line as she lowered it into the sim.
      Confirming the beach was empty she pulled the laptop from her shoulder bag, scanned for a hotspot and logged in as Camellia. The name suited her.  Chameleon; always blended in. Yeah, right; with the amount of metal in her face the only place she could hide was in plain sight. The other program activated her HUD and confirmed the money had been transferred from Estonia to a Cayman Islands holding account; always the same amount, always just under the US$10K for reportable transactions. And they thought that by converting to Lindens the money would disappear off the financial landscape. She smiled to herself. How they howled when the gambling was closed down in SL! Now the launderers were looking elsewhere for a myriad micro-transactions to do their bidding. It was usually the Caymans or Martinique, sometimes Cambodia.
      This mob was good though, spreading the transactions throughout the day to avoid a blip, and they used bots – lots of them – to make small donations at a million tip-jars dotted all over SL. But there were gaps still in her knowledge of them. Was this for drugs, weapons or something even more sinister? She pulled out a chunky cell phone and called the Agency. 

      The basement bar in the Akihabara District was dark and smoky. In the corner a local band played