Rat Runners by Oisin McGann

Georgian, waffle-shaped fronts. She was surprised to see Punkin standing at a bus stop about fifty meters down the street. Manikin wondered how long it had taken for him to realize she’d stolen his wallet. Bunny was leaning against a litter bin a few meters away, staring at her phone and trying too hard to look casual.
    Both Punkin and Bunny were wearing new piercings in their eyebrows. Manikin suspected the ball on each of those rings had a tiny video camera inside. It was Move-Easy’s favorite way of keeping tabs on his own people, though he didn’t normally bug his rat-runners. It looked like Punkin and Bunny were working for Easy now, but he was keeping them on a short leash.
    There were also two men within sight that Manikin identified as being too attentively inattentive to what was going on around them, and both had face piercings. Move-Easy was clearly keeping a close eye on the lab.
    Manikin walked past all of them without any sign that she had noticed them, and walked up to the front door of the tall, yellow-brick building. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted another figure—quite different from the others. It was dressed in a long gray coat, and was wearing a helmet she knew was equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance technology. The upright, dehumanized shape of the Safe-Guard stood on the corner of the street, taking it all in. Manikin felt small cool beads of sweat at her hairline, felt her pulse quicken slightly. Her disguise was geared to play on human nature, not to beat the technological tests of WatchWorld. If the asexual figure decided to stop her and question her, it wouldn’t need to check her identity card, which was a high-quality fake.
    The Safe-Guard would be able to examine the contents of her pockets, see the fillings in her teeth and discover that her glasses did not have prescription lenses. Even with her colored contacts in, it might still be able to scan her irises; it could record and analyze her voice and look for identifiable signs of old injuries in her skeleton. And all simply by standing in front of her. She turned her attention back to the door of the building, checked the screen of her console, and pressed the second button in a column of buttons, buzzing the apartment directly below Brundle’s lab. A tetchy woman’s voice answered, and Manikin went to work:
    “Is that Mrs. Caper? Mrs. Caper, I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Matty Bennell. I’m an Environmental Health Officer. I’m speaking to all of the residents in your building in connection with the death of Doctor Watson Brundle. I wonder if I might have a word? It’s very important and I’ll only take a few minutes of your time.”
    Three minutes later, she was being ushered into an apartment on the fifth floor. Mrs. Caper was a weaselly woman with black eyes that suggested she knew she was a bit dim, that it was a source of constant frustration to her, but that she didn’t know what to do about it. Her hands were held poised perpetually in front her, as if she were drying her red nail varnish, or about to dip her hands in a sink. Looking at those inquisitive eyes, Manikin knew Mrs. Caper would use every minute of their time together to try and bleed her visitor of gossip on Brundle’s death. That was fine—gossips were a rich source of local information.
    “I knew something waren’t right up there,” Mrs. Caper said, almost before Manikin was in the door. “I mind me own business, but that Brundle character was an odd sort.”
    “Is that right?” Manikin raised her eyebrows. “How so?”
    She was ushered into a living room that looked to have been furnished entirely from a budget flat-pack catalog. She sat down on a stained fabric-covered sofa, facing her host, who perched on the edge of a recliner.
    “Comin’ an’ goin’ at all hours, he was,” Mrs. Caper said. “Only there was less of that over the last few months, since that kid moved in. The lad did some of his running around for