The new office was absurd. It was all glass and minimalist art, thirty floors above the city—a perfect reflection of Julian Vance's dazzling ego. I sat at a clean steel desk, the Analyst corner, feeling the transfer memo still working like a virus in my system. I was trapped, but at least the view was expansive.
Julian didn't waste time. He was fully in "work machine" mode.
"Our first assignment," he announced, turning from the panoramic window with a thick file, "is the Vanished Masterpiece."
The details were immediately refreshing. The victim here wasn't a person; it was an object: a priceless Renaissance painting, recently sold for billions at auction. Weeks later, the buyer discovered they had a perfect forgery. The real one was gone.
No blood, no motive tangled in love or revenge. Just pure, clean theft.
A slow smile, one that never touched my lips, spread across my mental landscape. A system problem based on perfect illusion. This was far more elegant than a murder. A system that could deceive three independent authentication firms wasn't sloppy; it was ruthlessly efficient.
"The police are looking in the gallery, searching for fingerprints," Julian noted, leaning against the window. "But the failure wasn't physical; it was procedural."
He explained the core puzzle: the switch was facilitated by the Phantom Bidder—a digital entity that drove up the price, won the auction, and vanished without leaving a legal or financial trace. No traceable bank accounts, no shell corporations, nothing a normal investigator could follow.
My curiosity was fully engaged. I pulled the auction house's entire network log onto my screen. The raw data was a beautiful, overwhelming noise.
"Three authentication firms failed, Mr. Vance," I murmured, my focus already deep in the network code. "That means the switch happened before the final, real authentication, or the forgery itself was introduced into the system as the correct data from the start."
Julian watched me, a flicker of appreciation in his cool eyes. "Precisely. The Phantom Bidder is the ghost that moved the painting. I need its digital blueprint. I need the code that created this entity, and I need the exact moment its trace ends."
I ignored the financial history and focused on the network traffic. Money leaves messy traces. Code leaves perfect footprints. I started calculating the speed of the Phantom Bidder's connection, comparing it to the server location. I could almost hear the quiet, satisfied click of the logic falling into place.
This wasn't a search for a criminal; it was a search for a flaw in a billion-dollar digital defense system. The object's value was irrelevant; the elegance of the theft was everything.
"I will find the Phantom's source server," I stated, pulling up a map of global fiber-optic traffic. "And I will determine the precise timing of the switch to the second."
"Good," Julian replied. "While you handle the digital purity, I will handle the human impurity.
The auction house, the authenticators, the angry, desperate clients—they are all protecting secrets. I will use my influence to break the silence. You find the code; I'll break the walls around it."
The professional collaboration was set. He would use charm and law; I would use logic and electricity. The game of finding the perfect system failure was on.
The Phantom Bidder was a beautiful problem. It didn't exist, but it left behind a perfect trail of digital crumbs. While Julian was on the phone, setting up high-level meetings, I was already deep in the auction house's server logs.
I ignored the bidding data. That was just noise. I focused only on the communication packets—the tiny bursts of data that showed where the Phantom's signal came from. I tracked the IP address, not to a single computer, but to a network of masked servers, designed to look like a random global trading hub.
This level of anonymity requires extreme effort, and that effort leaves a signature.
I isolated the Phantom's packets and calculated the delay time—the tiny fraction of a second it took for the bid to register. The delay was deliberately set too long for a local buyer but too short for a truly international one.
This calculation gave me the source location: a small, private server farm located within a three-mile radius of the auction house itself. The "ghost" wasn't traveling the world; it was a carefully constructed fiction living right across the street.
The next step was the switch. The audit showed the moment the physical painting was handed off to the security team for transit. I cross-referenced this time with the network traffic volume at the auction house.
The result was a chilling alignment: The moment the real painting was moved, the Phantom Bidder's traffic volume spiked—not with a bid, but with a massive, targeted data request.
I leaned back, a genuine, private satisfaction settling over me. The logic was clean. The Phantom Bidder wasn't just bidding; it was using the brief, high-traffic moment of the final bid to flood the security system with noise, creating a one-minute window during the handover.
The request wasn't for data; it was a procedural distraction.
I pulled up the address of the localized server farm.
The digital work was complete.
Julian was off the phone, adjusting his tie.
"I have the location of the Phantom Bidder's source server," I stated. "It is a private farm three miles north of the auction house. They used a spike in data traffic to create a distraction window for the physical switch."
He didn't ask how. He simply looked at the coordinates I projected onto his screen, his cool eyes calculating the legal angle.
"A local server farm," Julian murmured. "This was a highly organized, local effort with an exit strategy." He gave me a sharp, cold smile. "Good work, Elysia. That evidence is useless without the weight of the court. I'm going to get the subpoena and search warrant now. You prepare the technical paperwork."
He moved immediately, leveraging his contacts to file the documents. My code had provided the proof; Julian would now provide the authority.
The subpoena landed like a clean instrument. Julian moved with the inevitability of a practiced strategist: call made, warrant issued, teams in position. We drove out to the server farm with officers in tow. The warehouse was exactly where my packets had told me—anonymous from the street, tidy inside, racks humming in an orderly chorus.
They found the script where I had predicted it, nested in an anonymity matrix intended to mimic global routing. They found the manifested crates and, tucked behind a false partition, the original canvas wrapped in acid‑free cloth as if it had been waiting politely for discovery. Seeing it in the crate was anticlimactic in a satisfying way—the variable resolved and the proof sitting, mute and undeniable, in front of us.
Back in the DA's chambers the next week, Julian prepared for court with the same economy he'd shown all along. I assembled my technical addendum: timelines, packet delay calculations, the map to the local farm. He folded those facts into a narrative that a judge would understand: not just code, but choreography—how digital noise created a window; how a local rack made a global phantom; how an object could be traded like data.
The courtroom smelled of leather and paper and the kind of impatience that comes before decisions. I watched everything as I always did—judge's posture, counsel's micro‑gestures, jurors' skin tone shifts, the plaintiff's clenched fingers. Julian spoke with controlled ease. He anchored the technical details in human terms, then placed my charted timings on the judge's desk as if setting a metronome. Each witness he questioned collapsed his certainty under polite pressure: the security liaison fumbled a recollection; an authenticator admitted reliance on procedural timing; the auction house manager could not explain the local spike.
I logged the small effects: how Julian softened his voice when he needed sympathy from the jury; how he leaned just enough to make the judge feel consulted, not accused. He never shouted; he suggested, and suggestion carries weight in a room wired to obey authority.
By mid‑afternoon, the pattern was undeniable. The judge read the counts, the jury conferred, and the verdict landed with the dry thud of a gavel: the auction house and the local operators were liable; restitution was ordered; criminal referrals were filed. Julian allowed himself a fraction of a smile—satisfaction, not triumph. I let my own approval be a quiet internal annotation.
Outside the courthouse, the air was late and cool. Julian offered me a lift. I accepted for the efficiency of it—public transport would be slower, and I had files to finalize. He took the wheel, hands sure on the steering wheel, the car a close, efficient capsule of leather and soft light.
We drove without music at first. The city smeared into lines of sodium and glass. After a compartmentalized hour of legal logistics, Julian's voice softened into something almost conversational. "You were precise in there. Watching you make sense of the chaos…it's almost unfair," he said.
"Precision is useful," I said. "It reduces rework."
He laughed, a low sound, and for a moment the car felt smaller. He angled his body a degree toward me, the movement casual but deliberate. "You make it look effortless," he said. "Do you ever do anything that isn't calculated?"
I considered that as if it were a problem set. "Only when the expected utility is negative," I replied. "That rarely happens."
He let the silence sit between us like a question. Then, with the practiced malice of someone who enjoys teasing systems as much as people, he reached for the center console and, with theatrical sluggishness, let his fingertips hover near mine as he adjusted the climate dial. The gesture was small, measured—three centimeters of air between us—and entirely intentional.
We rode that closeness out. He said things that were small provocations and bigger invitations: little observations about how I read a room, how my attention gathered stray variables like a net. He suggested inefficient scenarios—bad wine, ridiculous trivia, a dinner with no slides and no prepared notes.
I cataloged every line, every micro‑smile. I did not flinch. Instead, I let a smirk occupy the corner of my mouth, which was as much admission as I permit myself.
He pushed farther, not crude but confident. "If I ask you to accept a detour—one intentionally inefficient—what's the probability you'd say yes?"
I did the math in my head for a fraction of a second, turning time and social cost into an answer. "Thirty‑seven percent, given curiosity and the quality of your company," I said. The number was both true and a test.
Julian's grin widened. "Better odds than I expected." He let his hand drop so that, this time, his fingers actually brushed mine as he reached for the gearshift—no more than a touch, but contact enough to register. It was casual, as if he'd merely misplaced an elbow. My skin registered the input and the rest of me logged it with clinical interest.
We drove in companionable tension until the front of our building loomed. "Drop me near the DA," I said. "I have reports to finish."
He obliged, pulling smoothly into the garage. When I opened the door, he said, "Tonight was efficient." His eyes were bright in the low light. "Tomorrow—be intentionally inefficient with me. One evening. No charts."
The offer was half dare, half invitation. I calculated again: time lost versus utility gained. An unexpected variable tickled its way toward positive.
"Temporarily acceptable," I said, letting the smirk be permission.
He chuckled softly, then leaned forward and said, in a tone softer than the rest of the evening, "No elbowing during trivia."
"No elbowing," I agreed.
I stepped out. "Thank you," I said, brief as ever.
Inside the lobby, a figure shifted at the café counter. Detective Keir stood there, jacket collar up against the evening air, a cup in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He watched me approach, eyebrows lifted in that way that suggested curiosity wrapped in cautious amusement.
"Coffee?" he called, stepping forward with the cup extended. "And I grabbed something — pastry sweet, your pick."
I studied the cup as I might study an unfamiliar data source, then accepted it. "Efficient," I said.
He grinned. "There's a catch."
I raised a brow; his grin widened. "Only if you tell me your name."
A small, performative pause—a measure of privacy traded for a hot caffeine variable. I regarded him for a heartbeat, amused by how he'd tried to barter the trivial for intimacy.
"Elysia," I said, the name a neutral fact, offered without ceremony.
"Elysia," he repeated, tasting the syllables. "Pleasure. Analyst."
He handed me a paper bag. Inside was a pastry, steam still rising—sweet . "You like spicy?" he asked.
"Occasionally," I replied, folding the cup into my hands.
Keir took a sip of his own coffee, then looked at me with an angle of mischief. "You've been spending a lot of time with Julian Vance," he said bluntly. "Are you…dating him?"
I considered the map of social variables he'd activated by asking, the consequences of acknowledging what was still…undetermined. I kept my voice even. "There's a professional overlap," I said. "At this point, our affinity is instrumental."
He shrugged, not entirely convinced. "Instrumental's a start," he said, smiling as if that explained everything he needed to know.
I accepted the pastry and the coffee, the warmth a small, sensible pleasure. The case was closed; the painting was home. Julian had opened a small, calculated breach in my routine, and someone else—Keir—had noted it, catalogued it, and tried to label it. For now, I left it unlabeled, an unsolved variable with promising potential.
The night folded around the lobby in tidy darkness, and I walked back to my desk with coffee in hand, the city lights a grid outside the glass. The problem set had been solved. The other problems—the ones that began with human unpredictability—were only just starting to compute.