I felt a vague pang of guilt as I thought of the AI thrashing like a man in an acid vat as its systems dissolved around it, consciousness shrivelling down a tunnel of closing perspectives into nothing. The feeling passed rapidly. We'd chosen Jack It Up for a variety of reasons: it was in a roofed-over area that meant there would be no satellite coverage to dispute the lies we'd planted in the mall surveillance system, it operated in a criminal environment so that no one would have a problem believing an illicit virus had somehow got loose inside it, but most of all it ran a series of software options so distasteful that it was unlikely the police would ever bother to investigate the wreckage of the murdered machine more than cursorily. Under its heading on Ortega's list, there were at least a dozen copycat sex crimes which the Organic Damage department had traced to software packages available from Jack It Up. I could imagine the curl of Ortega's lip as she read the software listings, the studied indifference with which she would handle the case.