Pleasure, Online.

Sorry for such length!

Pleasure, Online.

Morning evolves from the night above "The City". Cops rush in to Sharp’s cheap looking, dusty apartment, "Inspector Holmes" on their tails. They caught Sharp from… well, sleeping late from his morning shift at the “Happy Breakfast/Meal/Lunch and Dinner” –restaurant. Sharp’s confused and asks, which horrible crime did he do to deserve such an awakening from his beautiful, beautiful sleep. Inspector Holmes, not in the mood for jokes, tells him to put his pants on and come along. Among the cops, a young detective-wannabe Ana Cortez, to which Sharp creates a love-hate -relasionship (slowly during the piece).

On the way, Holmes tells Sharp what’s going on: During the previous night, a patrol went to check a noisy apartment after a complain by an old grandma. In there, they found a young college-girl, killed in a horrible way. Sharp’s still confused of his role in this, wondering if he’s gone insane and started sleep-walking and to hunt young girls.

They arrive to the apartment and the picture comes clearer now; the girl’s death was streamed online through a webcam and she was also in video-chat with someone else. Now, only an empty, dimly lit room is revealed at the other end of the line. They want Sharp to find out where that line ends. Simple task for our “Pong/Super-Mario”, as some cops, irritated by this geeks presence, call him.

They arrive to the address that Sharp discovered and find only an empty container with only a table, laptop and a small lamp in it. Sharp is kicked off by the investigators who believe they can solve it by them selves. So he returns to his daily life.. but something in the scene bothers him, something of the set-up reminded him of pass and he needs to discover more.

He sneakes on to a computer and begins journey through cyber-space. Finally, he finds something odd; girls IP from some meta-information of an online-snuf-film site. But who was the person at the other end of the line? Then, he finds a video and the other participant, a darkened face, manipulated voice, commanding the masked "on-site-excecutors" of the girl. He's shocked and he needs to provide his intel to the cops, no matter how illegal it is for him to use computer.

But a younger cop, a sneaky bastard, turns him down and tells him to piss off and to stop wasting their time and to let this be the last time he uses computers with out authorization or he'll send him to jail for the rest of his miserable life to be a jailbait for men with much more respect around the arms.

Of course, certain, that there's something more to this case, Sharp can't leave his own investigations and he continues to research and discovers, that this may not be a one-time case, but there seems to be quite a history with this sort of "snuffing". And then a name from the past pops-up from the events; "Nacros X". He's been the big organizer for the safety of their little "hack n' slash youg girls and stream it to the perverts all across the galaxy -network" and there seems to be plenty of $ involved. And apparently, this time Nacros X couldn't resist to watch via his private connection while giving his commands of horror to the puppets, for better (HD) quality of course.

More victims are found.

As he knows he can't go straight to the younger detectives, he hacks to the police network and digs up "Holmes's" home addres and goes straight to him, personally. "Holmes" is furious for him to show up to his home and threatens to kill him if he ever does something like that again. But he does give value for Sharp's investigations and together they continue forward and younger detective just has to suck his pride.

Sharp dives back in to the world of bits. He discovers, that the snuff-ring is huge and many people in it are powerful (incl. politicians etc.). On the side, he's more interest in the role and whereabouts of Nacros X. They start the online hunt and find a site searching for girls for webcam-porn and Nacos X's "fingerprints" all over the site. They recruit Cortez to act as a bait and the trap is set.

The night of the webcam-porn arrives and Cortez, under an "ghost-alias", begins the pre-show chat with whom other, but Nacros X and they set up the streams etc. Room next to her, Sharp begins hunting him down and yet Nacros is well covered, he finds him. They track his IP to a raillway station's wlan, cops head on. Sharp is left behind to keep an eye on Nacros, while the masked-killers arrive to Cortez. Suddenly, Nacros finds out that he's been tracked and pulls the plug, before that he orders his men to kill the bitch. Sharp notifies cops and rushes to Cortez's room to "save her". Of course, against two big, hell-of-a-big guys, Sharp is like a goldfish against a great-white shark. But; Cortez ain't no sissy; she kicks the hell out of the guys and wraps them up before more cops arrive to arrest them.

At the same time, Holmes reaches the raillway station with his troops, but all they find is an empty container with nothing but a "HA-HA!" message, written to the screen of the abandoned/formatted computer with a lipstick (wat? a woman?).

The police admit that they've found a new villain, one to be taken seriously. And much thanks to Sharp's help and he's knowledge of the past's hacker-circles. Holmes says, that perhaps one day, they could use Sharp again. Sharp goes home, late evening, rain and other perfect things for a man who's lost his life and realises he can only gain recognition by doing the very same that got him into trouble first place; hacking. While the late night news tell of huge porn-scandal across the country, he picks up an old laptop he's hided from the eyes of the parole-officers. He logs in through an old, abandoned russian satellite and begins a hunt. A hunt that might be endless. And this is personal.

End of Episode.