“Increase the distance seventy eight millimeters,” ordered Twilight.

“Okay,” said Forth. She changed her position.

“No, still no good. Angle it out at sixty four degrees.”

“Also okay.” Forth shifted again, changing the angle of the narrow antennae that she held wrapped in her hooves. By this point, her body was contorted strangely and awkwardly. To Elrod, it looked painful, but Forth seemed to experience no discomfort.

“Eh,” said Twilight, grimacing. “It’s not good but it’s the best we’ll get. Hold it there.”

“That is what I am currently doing. I can continue to do that.”

The three of them were sitting in a black van. It belonged to Twilight, and was the cheap electric sort that was designed to fold down into a half-yard cube when not in use but that would crumple like paper in any sort of collision. As with most automobiles, the windows were completely blacked out. The only light came from a dim lamp installed in the ceiling.

Twilight and Elrod were sitting in the front. Neither of them were in the driver or passenger’s seat, because this type of vehicle had neither. In order to save space, it- -like most things- -was meant to be piloted using a virtual interface or by manual mental control, as Twilight did. Forth was sitting in the back of the van, holding several pieces of an antenna that were linked to a device that was in tern linked to three of the silver segmented cables that attached to Twilight’s neck.

“Right,” said Twilight. “This is going to take me a second.” She leaned back in her chair before reaching forward with one hoof and tapping the interface for vehicle’s built-in radio. A tinny and raspy noise came out, and Twilight dialed in a radio station. Strange old music came through, followed by an announcer stating the frequency and call number.

“PLR?” said Elrod, looking mildly amused. “You actually listen to that stuff?”

“Hell yeah. It’s great. Have you ever listened to the Pam and Stoshball show?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, yeah. You’re probably too young to remember it.”

Twilight sighed and leaned back and extended her hoof. Without being told, Elrod handed her the implant. Twilight picked it up and looked at it.

“Huh,” she said. “Strange.”

“What’s strange?”

“I don’t recognize the maker, and it’s not marked. It’s not a normal component though. Really high quality. A lot of extra stages and parts that I don’t recognize.”

“Then what is it?”

“Like I said. A neural interface. Just a weird one. Couldn’t hope to test it, though.”

“Why not?”

Twilight looked at Elrod as if it were obvious. “Well, if you want to donate a brain to imbed it in, be my guest.”

“No thank you.”

“Eh, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. It’s messed up bad. This is just a piece. But it will work for this.”

Twilight reached on the ground behind her and picked up a small device that was tethered to the machine in the rear by several nanofiberoptic cables. It was roughly the size and shape of a wide flashlight, but one end was made of dark-colored metal and consisted of a series of convoluted tubes while the other consisted of a glass cylinder. Twilight opened the glass cylinder with her teeth, being careful not to spill the liquid inside, and then dropped the implant inside. She closed the device and pressed the glass part downward into the metal part, and then shook it.

“Right,” she said, setting the device down. “Let’s see what we have…” She stared forward, as if she could see something that Elrod could not. “Here we go. Transcription pattern associated with neurons. That will work.”

“What are you doing?”

“A genetic scan. Hold on…and there. We have the sequence.”

“So we can find out who it belonged to.”

“We could. The problem is that this city has over two billion people, and the world has a whole lot more. We could search all of them, but…”

“It will take time.”

“Ha. No. It would take less than a second. But Aetna-Cross would probably notice if we started scanning through the whole database. And we’re not exactly using their servers legally.” Twilight sighed. “But I guess it has to be done.”

“Can I see the data?”

“What? Sure. Here.” Twilight passed Elrod an operator mask. It felt oddly heavy in his hands, but he put it on.

The mask was black in color, with a pair of luminescent angular lines that ran vertically down both sides. When he put it on, though, he found that it appeared transparent. In fact, the formerly dark van suddenly looked well lit.

“Oh wow,” he said, looking around. He looked at Twilight, and then at Forth. As he did, he noticed that a number of small luminescent annotations seemed to surround Forth’s body.

“What the- -OW!”

He cried out as Twilight slapped him. “Were you just peeking at her metadata without asking?” she demanded, sounding disgusted.

“I- -well- -no- -but- -”

“You might as well just go back there and pick up her tail and see what she has underneath, you pervert!”

“I do not have genitals,” said Forth. “As such I would not mind. I have nothing to see.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Twilight.

“But I can’t see any around you,” said Elrod.

“Because I keep it suppressed,” said Twilight. She held out her hoof toward him. “Here,” she spat.

Information suddenly appeared in front of Elrod. It closely resembled a hologram, except far more solid and realistic. It was an interface for the device that Twilight had been using before, which was apparently a portable sequencer.

“Right,” said Elrod. He poked at the interface, and it reacted to his touch. He quickly scrolled through the sequence before flicking through the settings and modifying it to a karyotype reconstruction based on conserved chromosomal sequences.

“Wait,” said Twilight, seeming surprised at his ease of using the program. “What are you doing?”

“Look at this,” he said, showing her the karyotype. “Do you see it? Something is wrong.”

“What?”

“Look at the number of chromosomes. A normal human has a minimum of fifty but as high as seventy four depending on modification, source, and pedigree. This sample only has forty six.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. “Oh crap,” she whispered.

“There are no artificial chromosomes. Which means…” Elrod quickly passed both hands over the interface, tapping across several key chromosomes and expanding them to show individual gene locations. He quickly scanned through, looking at the genes present and rapidly opening individual sequences to rapidly scan through them.

“As I suspected,” he said. “No duplications, removals, and only a few transgenic additions. Most importantly, though, look.” He pointed. “No brand marks. Whoever this DNA belonged to was not born in a production house. They were born from a living mother.”

“Fuuuuuck me!” cried Twilight, throwing herself back in her seat.

“I’d rather not,” said Elrod.

“Don’t joke about that,” warned Forth.

“A natural-born! A fucking NATURAL-BORN!” swore Twilight. She put her hooves to her face. “Of course it would be a nater. Of course! Because that’s my luck, isn’t it? GodDAMN IT!”

“I don’t understand what the problem is.”

Twilight turned sharply to Elrod. “You don’t? Well let me explain it to you. The only people who can afford to have real birth rather than getting custom-made or even generic-produced children are the ultra-wealthy. And you just handed me a goddamn BRAIN. IMPLANT. Meaning that some spoiled ass of a rich kid got his brain splattered in some Celestia-forsaken lower district dump, and now I just stepped in this shit-case right up to fucking purple thighs! GODDAMN IT!”

“But it does limit the search. A natural-born person with no genetic modification is extremely rare. There are probably no more than a thousand.”

“And they’re all members of the top five levels, no doubt. Taking shits all day long on the rest of us…” Twilight sighed. “Of course. Fine. I’ll search it.”

Part of the interface changed, and a second window appeared near the first. It represented the search by passing images representing individual genomes by at an incredibly high speed.

“How the hell did you know all that, though?” asked Twilight after starting the search. “You didn’t have any references. You did that all manually.”

“I used to be a geneticist,” said Elrod. “Before I came here.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “You were a geneticist? Really? And now you’re living in L6 pulling scrap circuits out of dumpsters?”

Elrod looked forward toward the black front window of the van. “You’re a technomancer who can barely pay her office rent working as a private investigator. I think in that sense we are in the same boat.”

“I do not like boats,” said Forth from the back. “I do not trust them.”

“I have a match,” said Twilight. “Here.”

An image appeared next to the genetic interface. To Elrod’s surprise, it showed a pale and somewhat gaunt girl with black, greasy hair.

“Jennifer…no last name listed?” Twilight’s brow furrowed. “There’s almost no data on her.”

“There is an address, though.”

“I see it. Seven four point six on Feildpoint Drive on…Level C? What the hell?”

At that moment there was a tapping on Elrod’s window.

“Don’t open that!” cried Twilight.

It was too late. Elrod had reached up and tapped the window. The interference hologram that made it appear black faded and vanished. Elrod found himself staring into the hooded and stern face of a white unicorn stallion. Behind him not twenty meters away were the steps to the local Aetna-Cross Enforcement precinct, and he was wearing their colors.

He looked inside, and his eyes locked on Twilights. Twilight rolled her eyes.

“Shining Armor Hexel,” she groaned.

“Twilight Sparkle Morgana,” he replied.

Elrod looked at Twilight. “Your first name is Morgana?”

“Hexel!” called Forth from the rear. “Hello Hexel!”

“Hello, Blossomforth,” sighed Hexel. “Please put down the antennas.”

“I will do that!”

Hexel turned to Twilight, and Twilight faced forward, not wanting to meet his eyes.

“Is there a problem, lieutenant?” she asked.

“Don’t give me that shit, Morgana,” he hissed, nearly pushing his head through the window. His blue eyes flared with anger, but Elrod had to stop himself from laughing when he realized that the only way Hexel could actually reach the van’s window was by standing on his hind legs and pressing his hooves against the door. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing. No, wait, of course you do. That’s the problem. Do you have any idea how illegal it is? Did you hear about the new executive order? Theft of Corporate resources is now considered treason against the Empire!”

“I’m on a case.”

“No shit. Of course you are. You’re always on a case, unless you’re smoking yourself to death or sticking your cables in some hooker’s neck!”

Twilight’s eyes narrowed, but she otherwise kept her composure. “Whatever you say, lieutenant. But I’ve got a job to do.”

“Really? Some man thinks his husband’s cheating on him again and wants pictures? Or does a mob boss want you to track down where his snitch is hiding?”

“A murder,” said Twilight. “There’s been a murder.”

Hexel laughed, but there was no humor in it. “A murder? A murder! Goddamn it Morgana, you’re a PI! You don’t DO murders! That isn’t your job! It’s ours!”

“It’s not anyone in your care network,” scoffed Twilight. “Don’t get your panties tied up. We’re not competing with Aetna-Cross. Just doing a job they were too good to try.”

“Well you know what, that’s not even the problem. Go ahead and get yourself killed, it would save me a lot of migraines. The problem is you coming up here- -right to the front of our building- -and bypassing all security measures to run your stupid little extraneous search!”

“Then why don’t you have your IT guys make a firewall that isn’t crap-shit? Because if I can hack you, who knows who else can.”

“No one else is dumb enough to try!” Hexel groaned and put his armored hoof on his horn. “Tell me, Morgana. Is there a reason I shouldn’t arrest you right now?”

“Because I don’t know how well the Department would react if they knew that the girlfriend you spend every night screwing is an Applebloom.”

Hexel’s jaw clenched slightly. “They don’t care what I do on my own time,” he said.

“Really? Well I think they might care if they knew you were dirty.”

“I’m not dirty.”

“I have several records of you turning a blind eye to certain saboteurs who look suspiciously like agents from the Geico vassal. And you’ve been buying that little Applebloom an awful lot of very expensive jewelry lately…”

Hexel pulled his head back from the window and looked around nervously, as though someone might have heard. When he saw no one in earshot, he leaned through the window. “So you’re finally going to call that information into play, are you? Go ahead. By the time internal affairs gets to me, I’ll already have a drone sent out with orders to hand me your severed head on a silver plate. You jeopardize my career, and I’ll jeopardize your life. Simple as that.”

Twilight looked at him, feigning deep sadness and shock. “You would do that to your own sister?”

“Since when do you believe in the Canon, Morgana?”

“I don’t. But it’s fine. We’re done here. We’ll be on our way, and I’ll go an solve a murder. You can go back to pushing around papers and then go home to your filly.”

Hexel sighed. “You’re a bitch. That’s why she left you. You know that, right?”

“Believe me,” said Twilight, staring the electrical engine in the vehicle. “I know.”

Hexel watched Morgana drive off, making sure that they were actually leaving. Somehow, he had a headache. As a member of Aetna-Cross, he had been modified to be immune to pain. For some reason, though, his head still hurt every time he had to deal with Twilight Sparkle Morgana. If he had been in possession of an organic stomach, he would have no doubt had an ulcer by now.

Once he was sure they were gone, he returned to the precinct. It took him several minutes to get back to the comfort of the windowless suite of offices in his department division, and he lit himself a cigarette as he entered the office. When he opened the door, a narrow-frame Rarity unit in a very well fitted uniform nearly identical to his own was waiting for him, standing beside his desk.

“Detective O’Doole,” he said, closing his door. “Did you get anything?”

“Detective Lynnette, if you don’t mind. O’Doole simply sounds uncouth. And yes. I did.”

Hexel climbed into his chair and set his cigarette on an already full ash tray that sat on top of his desk. “Show me.”

Images appeared in front of him. They were not holograms, but rather direct communications between him and the detective. Her artificial eyes glowed with light, and Hexel could see the complex code passing just beneath the lenses.

“She ran a genetic scan,” said the Rarity. “With a very unusual set of parameters.”

“Unusual? How so?”

“She was searching for natural-born humans with the minimum number of chromosomes. This was the result.”

A photograph appeared in the data that Hexel was reviewing. He stared at it and the associated data.

“Level C. A pauper. Not relevant.”

“No, not directly. But she is part of the pattern. The disappearances, I mean.”

Hexel groaned and picked his cigarette back up in his teeth. “Fuck,” he said. “If it’s gotten so bad that Morgana is starting to get into it, we’ve been slacking.”

“We do not have the resources to investigate more deeply,” said Lynnette. “The company forbids us from using resources to investigate those outside the care-network.”

“Which is more than two thirds of them.”

“I do hate to be a bother, but the request for more funding?”

“Commander Nikolosov denied it. You know how humans are.”

“It is not proper to speak ill of the commander.”

“He knows my feelings on the matter. Fuck.” He leaned back in his chair. “Morgana is going to screw the whole thing, like she always does. We’re already spread as thin as we can be, what we do have is going to go to shit as soon as she starts digging. The whole thing is just too fragile right now.”

“Lieutenant,” said the detective. “There is something else.”

Hexel sat up. “What else can there be?”

“A second search. She performed two.”

“Two? How?”

“The first one was a carrier wave. In fact, judging by the way it was performed, she could easily have performed it much more quietly. I think she meant it to be seen. The queries were overlaid over a much more covert search. I only found it by chance. If her search criteria had been any larger, I would surely have missed it.”

“What was it? Another genetic matching scan?”

“No. Facial recognition.”

An image appeared, one that had quite clearly been taken from a pony eye. It showed a strangely hairless man with brown, scaly skin.

“Ugh,” said Hexel, wincing. “That’s a face that only a mother could love.” He looked up at detective Lynnette. “Who is he?”

The detective gave him a cold smile, and he knew that she had found something interesting but not at all good. Several million images flashed by in an instant before one locked itself into the frame next to the strange bald human.

Hexel leaned forward. The new picture showed what he at first believed to be a different man entirely. The image showed a young man with an arrogant and conceited smile. His skin was clear and perfect, and he had both a thin moustache and longish hair that was slicked back and greased. From the look of it, his hair would have been plenty greasy even without whatever oil he had put into it.

It was almost impossible to believe, but these two pictures matched almost identically in terms of basic facial structure.

“Ugh,” repeated Hexel. “Somehow this is even worse. Who is this guy?” he leaned in, reading the data. “Bronislav Miguel Spitzer VIII,” he read. “Horrible name…natural born, minimum chromosomes, disappeared…” He scanned through the rest of the data, not especially interested until his eyes caught one particular word. When they did, they widened. “Monsanto,” he whispered. Quickly, he looked through the rest and confirmed his fears. “By the grace of Twinkleshine Prime,” he said to himself. He closed out all the windows and looked up at Lynnette.

“Lieutenant?”

“Listen very carefully. Nothing we just talked about leaves this room. Absolutely nothing! You’ve got that?”

“I do,” she said slowly.

“This is bad. Really, really bad. But we can handle it. Okay. Get me every file on this case. All of them. Make sure I have the only copies. I’m pulling everyone off this case.”

“Lieutenant, is that something Nikolosov will allow?”

“He’ll be fine with it if it saves money. And it won’t matter because we’ll make sure he doesn’t notice.”

“We?”

“Yes. This is your case now.”

“Lieutenant Shining Armor,” said Lynnette, slowly, “while I will gladly take on this responsibility, I need to first understand why you are so concerned.”

“Look over his file again.”

Lynnette did so almost instantly. When she did, she let out a small gasp. “Oh my. The only son of Monsanto’s high-chairman. Natural born, minimum chromosomes, no cybernetics…and missing.” She looked up at her boss. “A pure human. One of the last, I think. And you think Morgana has information regarding this?”

“She would not have searched if she didn’t, and she wouldn’t have hid it if she wanted us to know. Find that man, this Spitzer. Top priority. Don’t let Morgana know that we know.” He leaned forward. “Maybe he’s just some entitled asshole on vacation. Hopefully he is. But if something happens to him in Aetna-Cross territory…or if he pulls something…I assume you understand the significance of this?”

Detective Lynnette bowed. “Yes, sir.” She paused. “But I think she already knows…”