Lucky tried to follow Needle's trail out of the building, but it was too old, too mixed and overlaid by other scents. Scott called Felix at the hospital.
    "Yes?" came the rumbling answer.
    "Good afternoon. Was there anything you'd found about Poughkeepsie that wasn't in the files?"
    "No, it should all be there," the Sphinx assured him. "I'm fairly good about documenting myself."
    "Just wanted to make sure the latest copies were there."
    "It should be there if you can salvage the computer."
    "I'll work on that. Thank you." He went to K. Robeson and found the hard drive from the machine in question, headed over to base to join the others.
    They gathered around the table in the conference room. Dawn had arrived in the meantime. Lucky decided to call in some reinforcements.
    "Trent Aster, yeah?" he answered.
    "This is Lucky Charm of the Revolution."
    "Hi, how's it going?"
    "Um, it's better than it was, but..." She hesitated.
    "You're not going to tell me you need me to fly out there, are you?" he asked, reading her unerringly.
    "Well.... I don't know yet."
    "Shit," he muttered. "Shit, I hate this. All right. I gotta book a flight."
    "I'll let you—What?" she interrupted herself.
    "I got clumsy," he explained, sounding more than a little disgusted with himself. "Vampyre clipped me, my right wing's broken."
    "Oh. We don't want to inconvenience you, it's just, Needle's missing." Her worry showed in her voice.
    "If she hasn't turned up at the end of twenty-four hours after the last time you saw her, give me a call. I'll book a flight," he told her decisively.
    "Thanks Trent."
    "Yeah. Bye."
    She passed on news of his injury while Scott examined the computer's drive.
    "Do you have any leads on where they might have taken her?" Reilly asked.
    "I'm trying to rescue the computer now," Scott replied.
    "What's your thought?" Lucky asked.
    "Poughkeepsie," the robot replied, tapping away with a series of fingerlike extensions.
    "Poughkeepsie?" Reilly sounded bemused.
    "Yup." He continued working.
    "What, a Shriner's convention grabbed her?"
    "She has an address in her head that she's supposed to report to at the end of this, it's in Poughkeepsie," Lucky explained.
    "Ah. Well, if I had a base somewhere, I'd put it in Poughkeepsie." Reilly rolled his eyes.
    "Is it possible that they just triggered her mechanism and she wandered there herself?" Lucky wondered. "I mean, people saw her leave under her own power."
    "Maybe," Scott shrugged.
    "And Javelin's synthetic memory that she was injected with...." she continued speculating.
    "If we're going to trust Daedalus, he said he removed all those sorts of preconditions," Reilly reminded her. "But if Javelin reactivated the trigger, he's the guy who—?"
    "He's the guy who had the synthetic memory injections, he worked for the people who created the synthetic memories."
    "Has," Scott corrected her grimly. "He's got a couple hundred worth of himself at the moment."
    "Missed some fun times, didn't I," Reilly murmured.
    "He doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, so you'll probably get to meet him, too."
    "Oh joy."
    "Don't piss him off," Lucky suggested.
    "I'll keep that in mind."
    "Watch out for people with scrunchy faces," Scott added.
    "Scrunchy faces?" He returned the conversation to track. "That's a possibility. There might not have been anyone who grabbed her, she might have just gone back."
    "All right, so what's in this Poughkeepsie file?" Lucky asked.
    "Hold on, let me see if I can get this thing on line," Scott replied.
    Everything that had been decrypted from Gordon's computer was still there. The rest of it was encrypted, and he didn't have any hope of getting to it just then. Nothing discussed Poughkeepsie specifically, although he still had his notes on what they had deduced through other means—the original blueprints, which were no doubt tragically out of date, for instance. The place was still tied into the power grid, the payments untraceable. There were phone lines even though supposedly no one was using the building for anything. The complex was supposed to have several underground levels including a parking garage; it would be easy enough to hide just about anything in it.
    "Let's list our options for how to get in there," Lucky suggested.
    "She either returned of her own free will or was captured by the people who built her," Reilly started. "The place to which she was brought was this location in Poughkeepsie."
    "She never told any one of us about it."
    "Okay. So there's no reason for them to assume that she knows about it, or that we would know about it."
    "Correct," Scott agreed.
    "Okay, that's a plus." He sighed and pushed Newton off the table. "How much armament could they conceivably have there? These are the same people responsible for the armor the Blood Board was in and the guns that they were carrying?"
    "And the chemically enhanced warrior jerks," Lucky added.
    "How tough are the chemically enhanced warrior jerks?"
    "It took me a while to take two of them out."
    "Not me," Phoenix boasted, spinning his mirrors.
    "Heck, for all we know they might even be behind the giant spiderbot," Scott said.
    "Okay."
    "They armed that doorknob, the one that you said..." Lucky ticked off.
    "Oh, the one that blew up the office." Scott clarified.
    "Found it," Reilly affirmed, looking through Winters' file.
    "They shot at us when we jumped out of the building," Phoenix put in.
    Reilly gave him a look. "Those were the police. So they could have a sufficiently large amount of armament there, and we wouldn't know about it," he concluded.
    "All things considered, given the amount of underground space they have there, they could have a small army," Scott agreed. "The building is isolated, is listed as abandoned but has full power sources."
    "I think one of our best bets is to shut down their power," Lucky suggested.
    "M. L'automaton, could you bring up something on the machine for me?" Albert requested. "Bring up the synthetic memory information I was working on, and run the translation program so the others can read it." He did so. "I think we are fairly safe in one thing," he said, scanning his own text. "They cannot simply reprogram her, she is too well made. As we already learned from the situation when Javelin sprayed her, any additional synthetic memory would merely induce a seizure. They could kill her that way, but they can't just reinject her with a new level. That means one of two things: either is she is already dead, or we have time."
    "Could they have given her something short-term?" Scott asked.
    "To alter her memory for a brief period? No. Any sort of synthetic memory added into her already-convoluted brain chemistry would result in the same sort of seizures we saw previously."
    "So they did want her dead?" Lucky asked.
    "We don't know that," Scott replied.
    "If they wanted her dead, she'd be dead," Albert stated flatly.
    "Well then why did Javelin spray her?"
    "Javelin sprayed me as well," he pointed out. "And almost reached Detective Winters. He was not aiming for any of us in particular. She's always been part of their project, though she's apparently gone rogue."
    "Yeah, from the stuff that we got in that briefing from Trent, there's apparently power factions playing here," Reilly spoke up. "One group wanted her to try and destroy the other group, and one group wanted control of her, and whatever the hell else is going on. They might just want to try and find out who's dicking with them."
    "Or they might have decided she's learned enough," Scott suggested.
    "I doubt it," Lucky shook her head. "They had a very set timetable, it seemed. Thing is, wouldn't the rogue group know that she was in Poughkeepsie?"
    "The rogue group certainly seems to be operating behind the scenes so far," Reilly commented.
    "But they know that we know about the World Crime League," Scott stated. "Because everything didn't go completely blooie until we started explaining everything."
    "I'm not so sure they would not want her back now," Albert suggested thoughtfully. "Apparently the rest of the programming, all the other ones were subtle, clandestine, at least the dead woman was."
    "Can we find her sisters?" Lucky asked.
    "Do you have that information in the file, M. L'automaton?"
    "It's in here somewhere, it hasn't been decrypted yet. Somewhere in the U.S. there's another eight women whose names start with S and B."
    "And that look exactly like her," she added.
    "There isn't a national database of photos."
    "They're all in the northeast."
    "Who says?"
    "She did."
    "But they might have called her in because she's gotten a sufficient amount of experience?" Reilly said, leaning forward a little.
    "I think they're worried that we know," she countered.
    "Entirely possible. All right, I think that we only have one course of action: find out more information. Who's going to go in?"
    "To Poughkeepsie?" Phoenix asked.
    "You think you could find it in your heart to break your way into a hyper-guarded World Crime League base and find out what's going on?"
    "Hell yeah!"
    "Do you think you could do it without setting off an alarm?"
    "I don't think he should go," Lucky shook her head.
    "Aw, c'mon!" Talon protested.
    "Mr. Knock on the Front Door When I Tell You to Be Quiet?"
    "I was being polite."
    Frustrated glances all around. Lucky called Chandler.
    "Yeah?"
    "Do you think we might be able to take another trip through the Twilight?"
    Pause. "Why?"
    "Needle's probably back in Poughkeepsie, and we can't figure out how to get past their defenses without tripping some alarms. I don't know if Scott's vapor would set off some sort of temperature sensor or if they would be on the lookout for something like a grey fog, or—we don't know what we're up against," she summed.
    "Not like we have a trained ninja," Scott pointed out. "Let him try."
    She hesitated. "All right. Never mind," she told Chandler. "I just want to let you know that I think you're capable of this," she stressed to Phoenix, "but please stay focused, and non-impulsive about it."
    "You didn't see me in Japan."
    "No, I didn't."
    "I like, meditated and shit."
    "He did, I saw him," Dawn supported.
    "I would love for you to go through with this," Lucky averred.
    "Well, I'm not doing it for you," he retorted, then changed his mind. "Well, I guess I am doing it for you." Another reconsideration. "No, I'm doing it for Needle."
    "Good. Do it for Needle."
    "Go team!"

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