"I thought I got rid of that subroutine," Creek said.

"You got rid of the subroutine that requires me to inform the appropriate authorities," said the agent. "The warning subroutine is still in place. Would you like to reset the default mode to not tell you when you are breaking the law?"

"Yes, please," said Creek. "Anyway, I think I'm covered."

"Yes, sir," the agent said.

Creek downloaded the purchase orders for the last year, and had his agent cross reference the purchase orders with owners of fabricators. They all checked out: Every powder order came from a registered fabricator owner.

"Crap," said Creek, and tapped his teeth again. The missing fabricator had been out in the world for a number of years; it could be that whomever was using it loaded up on fabricating powder years before. But if they'd been using the fabricator all that time the/d still need to reload the powder. Creek just didn't know how often one of these fabricators needed to be resupplied. Hmmm.

"Agent," Creek said. "Is there a pattern to when fabricator owners purchase their materials powder?"

"They buy it when they require more," the agent said.

"Right," Creek said. Intelligent agents, even a bright one like the one Creek made, are not terribly good at deductive leaps. "I'm asking whether there is a general repeating cycle for purchases. If most fabricators are used for the same tasks on a repeated basis, they might run out of powder and need to be restocked on a fairly regular cycle."

"Let me think," the agent said and spent few milliseconds processing the request. It then spent a couple hundred milliseconds waiting before responding. This was part of the psychoergonomics of intelligent agents; programmers discovered that without a slight pause before an agent gave an answer, people felt the agent was being a pushy showoff. "There is typically a rough pattern to purchases," the agent said. "Although the period of the cycle is specific to the individual fabricator and not to all the fabricators as a class."

"Are there any fabricators which show irregular purchasing cycles, or purchases being made outside of its cycle?" Creek asked.

"There are six," the agent said.

"Show me the fabrication production logs for those six," Creek said. The agent popped six windows; Creek glanced at them for a second before realizing he couldn't make heads or tails of them. "Agent, tell me if for these six logs, there is a corresponding rise in production to reflect the additional purchases," Creek said.

"There is for five of the six," the agent said. "The sixth shows no increase in production."

"Go back into the GE database and pull the purchasing orders for that fabricator for the last six years," Creek said. "Then pull the production logs for the fabricator for the same period of time. Tell me if there's a difference between the amount ordered and the amount produced."

"There is a difference of about fifteen powder orders over six years," the agent said.

"Give me a name," Creek said.

The name was Bert Roth, a chubby car restorer in Alexandria who specialized in late combustion and early fuel cell-era models. Demand for that era of cars was spotty at best these days, so Roth augmented his income in mostly harmless ways, including ordering fabricating powder for a certain client and selling it to him at a 200% markup. Selling the fabricating powder wasn't technically illegal, and Roths client never used so much of it that it aroused anyone's interest before Creek It was a nice set-up for everyone involved.

For these reasons, Roth was naturally reluctant to give up the name of his client when Creek came to visit him early the next morning. Creek first assured him that the client would never know Roth had given up the name and then secondly suggested to Roth that his client was tangled in some bad shit and that Roth, in selling him the powder, might be held accountable by the authorities.

Creek held back his third piece of persuasion, which was a security camera capture of Roth banging his secretary, who was not his wife. Creek suspected Roth didn't know it existed, where it might be stored on his computer, or that his network connection was like a wide-open screen door. It was heavy weaponry; best not to haul it out unless needed.

It wasn't. Roth did some internal calculus, decided he could live without the occasional cash infusion, and coughed up his client: Samuel "Fixer" Young.

Creek thanked him, and after a moment's reflection, scribbled down the directory path of the incriminating security camera capture. As he slid the information over to Roth, he also suggested gently that it might be time to update his network

Fixer's address was directly across from the Benning Road Metro stop; Creek headed toward the Blue Line, swiped his Metro card, and got on the train.

Creek started his trip in Virginia on a Metro train car filled with humans and one nonhuman, a Teha middlesex in its customary blue sash. But after traveling through the heart of DC, the Metro Blue Line then travels through nonhuman neighborhoods, most created at the time during the Earths probationary CC membership when nonhumans were strictly confined to the city limits of Washington DC, Geneva, and Hong Kong. Even now, most nonhumans lived in major urban areas, in neighborhoods with others of their own kind. In many ways, nonhuman aliens recapitulated the classic immigrant experience.

The Benning Road stop was in a neighborhood populated primary by Paqils, a race of mammaloids with a carnivorous genetic past, a highly gregarious but hierarchical social system and sunny, manic natures. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Paqil neighborhood was known universally as "Dogstown." In the early days, this was of course meant as a slur, but the Paqils embraced the name, and not coincidentally became huge dog fanciers.

This affection was returned by the Paqils' pets. It's a basic matter of dog psychology that dogs see their owners merely as strange-looking pack leaders; having Paqils as owners got rid of the "strange-looking" part. Dogs were so thoroughly integrated into the Dogstown community that it was the only place in Washington DC where dogs were permitted in every place of business and allowed to walk around without a leash. Humans and other species members who took their dogs into Dogstown weren't required to take them off the leash, but they got some very nasty looks if they didn't.

By the time Creek reached the Benning Road stop there was only one other human in the train; the rest of the car was filled with Paqils, Nidu, and other races! As Creek got off the train he glanced back at the other human; she sat nonchalantly engrossed in her paper while aliens jabbered around her in their native tongues. If her great-great-grandmother were on the train, she would have thought she was on commuter train heading toward the fifth circle of Hell. This woman didn't even look up. The human capacity for being jaded was a remarkable thing.

The sign at the address Creek was given read "Fixer's Electronics and Repair," and hung above a modest storefront shop. Through the window, Creek saw a small man who matched the picture he had on his communicator for Fixer, standing behind a counter and discussing something with a Paqil. On the store floor a Labrador and an Akita loafed extravagantly. Creek went through the door; the Akita lifted up its head, looked at Creek, and barked once, loudly.

"I see him, Chuckie," Fixer said. "Back to sleep." The Akita, on command, rolled back over on his side and mellowed out.

"Nice doorbell," Creek said.

"The best," Fixer said. "Be with you in a minute."

"No rush," Creek said. The man went back to his conversation; Creek looked over the shop's sale floor, which was populated primarily by repaired entertainment monitors awaiting pickup and a few second-hand electronics on sale.