Pin-lee first noticed him because he wasn't there.
She did data analysis as a hobby - okay, it was a slightly unusual hobby, but she loved the feeling of a mass of data slowly cohering into useful information, even though it would drive her up the wall if she did it full-time. Besides, a professional data analyst needed the kind of augments that she knew would just augment her tendency to hyperfocus on an interesting problem, and she'd never come out of the feed, and she didn't have the personality to manage that.
So she stuck with setting up the analyses she needed for her professional research, and playing with data on the side. Which is why she was spending an evening going through lists of people who'd personally attended the meetings and hearings they'd been having about what people were starting to call the Construct Problem.
Facial recognition could identify the attendees, and then it was a matter of looking for other patterns to find out who might be willing, and useful, if they were invited to get more involved. Of course, there were professionals for that, too; Dr. Mensah had hired back a lot of her campaign staff to work on it, just as a start.
But there was the general campaign for greater protections for constructs and bots, and then there was SecBot. Their SecBot. There were still things it had let them see that it didn't feel right to share outside the closed circle of the nine of them who'd been there. (Pin-Lee still couldn't call it Murderbot, even in her own head. They'd argued about that a lot in the private feed they still kept up; but finally they'd mostly agreed that even if that was the name it had chosen for itself, it wasn't a name it had chosen to share with them. SecBot it was.)
So Pin-Lee was poring over the lists of names and faces and numbers, just on the off-chance that its face would turn up, or maybe at least a recognizable signature of its hacks of security systems.
She hadn't found any sign. Chances were it had headed in another direction as soon as it could, and all the news going over the feeds about Mensah's efforts to help it were probably just sending it further into hiding.
All the same, there was something about the data of the attendees that bothered her, and she kept coming back to it night after night. It was the numbers - the hearing rooms had a physical count of total heat signatures in the room, and so did the facial recognition lists, and they never matched; there was always at least one more number on the heat count than on the facial recognition list, even factoring in the service animals and the no-id-possible faces.
That wasn't that odd - both systems had a certain tendency toward false positives and negatives, and anyway, there were people other than SecBot who hacked the systems on a routine basis, or used facial recognition countermeasures. Still, most of those didn't bother being very subtle; if you bothered to take a close look at the data, you could always tell something was off. Whatever this was, it was subtle.
But both systems had a recorded standard proportion of false positives and negatives, and these numbers were just enough off to not look natural. Then, just to verify, she ran the numbers on a few similar but non-construct related hearings in the same room (the survey team all had highest-level clearance; they wouldn't have been allowed on Survey with Mensah if they didn't), and those came out a match to the standard numbers.
There was somebody attending the construct-related legal hearings who had human-standard body heat but didn't register at all on the facial recognition, not even as a partial match.
So then, of course, she had to go through the video footage herself, pulling out faces and matching them to the ones the software had ID'd. And there the mystery person was, in the footage but not the facial recognition list: slight build, unremarkable hair, distinctive nose, weirdly pale skin - they must have been from one of those backwater colonies with a very limited initial gene pool - what looked like a basic data-port augment in the one shot that caught the back of their neck, non-distinctive masc-coded semi-casual clothing. There was nothing about them that would make their features fail to read as human, though - maybe it was a weird glitch, or the original list she'd had was slightly corrupted.
She sent it to Gurathin and asked him to double-check.
The next day, he showed up on her doorstep with a frown. Whatever he had to say, he didn't want it going over the feed.
"It's coded into the facial recognition algorithm itself," he told her.
"A glitch in the coding?"
"A very deliberate subroutine," he said, "that tells it that this specific set of facial features - and none other - get categorized as furniture, and discards the information. I'd never have found it if I didn't know exactly what I was looking for."
"That's pretty sophisticated."
"It's not just a recent hack, either - I checked, and it's in earlier versions of the software, back tens of thousands of cycles. Might have been in the original code package."
"Great." She looked at the still image of him that was on the feed. "So it's definitely worth looking into, but all we have is a still of the face, and we can't use facial recognition software on it."
Gurathin shook his head. "I tried going back to the previous-generation software; nobody with any budget has used it in a decade, I can't imagine anyone would bother going back to it in a current hack - but it's got the same lacuna coded in. But I tried a familial-level search on public data, just in case the parents or siblings weren't as careful, and this is what I found."
He pulled up a set of four faces, all low-quality and blurry. She could see a vague familial resemblance, mostly in the eyes and the shape of the face, although none of them had skin quite that pale, or a nose quite that obvious. "Cousins?" she asked.
"These are all from previous Survey missions' logs," he said. "As far as I can tell, they're SecBots, the only footage we have of known SecBots other than ours with helmets off or damaged. They read as something like 5% phenotype match, to our mystery face and each other."
"He's another rogue SecBot?"
"That's my best guess right now. I also ran a quick search on the public nets for just a general image match, not facial specifically. There are some things where a total null search result would get flagged, so it might have been worth it to interfere with facial recognition but not general matching. I didn't think it would be likely, but I got one result." He threw it up on the interface.
It was definitely a match, a fairly clear headshot of the mystery man from the hearings. Then she read over the rest and frowned. "This can't be real, Gurathin!"
It was a personals ad, one of those feeds where you put in your picture and some information and what kind of relationship you were looking for, and an anonymized contact was set up so interested people could reply. This one had the name filled in as "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours", pronouns he/him, and most of the other fields blank, except for hobbies ("Archiving and murder") and age ("I stopped counting at 5000 Areals".)
"What's an Areal, anyway?" she added.
"It's a time measurement, based on the rotation period of a planet in Sol system. Hasn't been used anywhere in a very long time, as far as I can tell. It's about 700 cycles."
"...So this is definitely fake. Why would somebody who'd gone to that much trouble to be undetectable set up something like this anyway?"
"The picture matches," he said. "My best guess is it's deliberate - maybe he wants to make sure certain people can find him if they need to. So he keeps himself out of all the official databases, and sets this up."
"We're going to have to answer it, aren't we," Pin-Lee said.
"I don't think I can get any farther on just the feeds," he said. "If we want to keep following this thread, we're going to have to. And if it is another SecBot--" He trailed off. Gurathin had taken longer to warm up to SecBot than the rest of them had, probably because they were too much alike - and not because of his augments, either - but he wanted it safe as much as the rest of them, when it came down to the wire.
"I'll set up a date," she said, and sighed. It wasn't something they could bring anyone else in on, just in case it was another rogue SecBot. And it wasn't something she could ask any of the rest of them to do. Definitely not Gurathin; she thought SecBot was actually more likely to go on a date with a stranger than Gurathin was.
"Only if I'm listening in on the feed, and we call Security the minute something goes wrong," he said.
****
The bar wasn't bad, Methos thought. Something smoky was playing over speakers, all the staff were human, and they served reasonably good beer - Methos had come into the universe around the same time as beer and civilization, and the two had gone together ever since.
The woman who slid into the booth across from him was a surprise, though. "You're not what I expected," he told her, and then looked her up and down with just enough lechery to pass, if this really was a date. He didn't think it was a date. They'd been remarkably cagey about setting the whole thing up, and he'd only agreed because he was at a dead-end. He'd been expecting a Company rep, or maybe another Immortal who was chasing the same lure he was - there weren't many of them out here in the Rim these days, but they crossed paths too often for coincidence.
Of course, unlikely odds came up fairly often if you gave it ten thousand years or so.
It could just be a date, and an extremely unlikely coincidence.
"Sorry," the woman said. "I'm exclusively attracted to the femme end of the spectrum."
Methos shrugged. "I could go for a spectral shift. Might be fun." He'd gone high femme a few times; in some cultures it was a foolproof way to switch IDs, although any extensive bodysculpting was still off the cards, even if he'd wanted it. The same thing that meant augments took three days of work, and an Immortal-experienced surgeon, and still needed resetting every five years or after a quickening. Damned if he was going to do without the extra feed access in this day and age, though.
She frowned at him. "You can't possibly actually be looking for a date," she said flatly.
"I never overlook an opportunity," he protested pro forma. "You're Dr. Pin-Lee. one of the survivors of the GrayCris incident."
"Yes," she agreed. "That's public knowledge."
"One of the people who covered up the existence, and escape, of a rogue SecBot."
'It wasn't rogue," she said. "It was free. And the fact that's public knowledge is evidence we weren't very good at covering it up," she added ruefully. "But we're doing what we can."
"Why?" he asked.
"Why help it? Because it is a person," she said. "And it needed help."
The problem was, he was pretty sure that was the only reason. He'd researched all of the GrayCris survivors, and they all seemed to be exactly what they claimed to be. Even Mensah, who as a politician ought to have had at least a few skeletons hiding in closets, but politics in the Preservation Alliance seemed to be almost as disgustingly wholesome as everything else here was.
"Do you just help every person who needs it?" he asked.
"Believe it or not, it doesn't come up very often," Pin-Lee said. "But I like to think that if I could help somebody, I would. Why are you interested in the work we're doing? I've seen you at every hearing so far."
So that was why they'd contacted him. That must have taken some devoted data-combing. Or somebody had finally cleaned up some of the safeguards he'd put in the early facial-recognition AIs in the 21st century.
And he'd hit a dead end, and they had access - or if not access, then at least a veneer of legitimacy. So a little bit of truth couldn't hurt much.
"I'm here because I saw your SecBot's face in a newsfeed," he said, "and it looks a lot like a very old friend of mine, a friend who went missing many years ago. Enough that there's a good chance they share significant genetic makeup. And I know for a fact that my friend wouldn't have consented for their children to be made slaves. So I want to find out how that happened. And I think maybe we can help each other."
Pin-Lee looked at him with the distant expression of a non-augmented person listening to a feed from an earpiece. "Maybe we can," she said.