[The conclusion of a 5-part Daily Victim special! Start at the beginning]

Wednesday, 7:47 PM. Me and Charlie followed headquarter's instructions and found the cabin in the woods, just as they described. We pulled up with the lights blaring, hoping to scare the pants offa some scum. What we saw wasn't a surprise at all: three slovenly bastards, young guys all of 'em, trying to high-tail it out of there in a run-down VW Bus.

"Well, well, what we got here?" I said, blaring a spotlight into their windshield. "A freak, an egghead, and a hippie. Classic profile of midget-pornographers, am I right?"

"Honestly officer," said the obvious ringleader, lifting his hands outside of the VW submissively. "We're not pornographers, really."

"Well, except for this guy," said the second of the suspects, a trim hacker-type with glasses. He shot a thumb over his shoulder. "He's into elf-porn."

"It's not porn!" cried out the long-haired one from the back seat. "It's ART, with the nipples just barely covered!"

Me and Charlie were just about to run 'em up when the ringleader stepped out of the car and assured us if we would just step inside, he'd explain everything. We got inside the cabin and I'll be damned if it wasn't the funniest thing -- some kind of computer-guy's paradise with little plastic Yodas on top of PC monitors and empty cans of Mountain Dew all over the floor. There were no less than ten computers, and on all of 'em was some sort of -- one of them there fantasy roleplayin' games.

"Hooool-ey! Check it out!" Charlie whooped, pointing at the screen. "Them elves is mostly naked!" He sat down to play and added, "Well, not really naked, I mean, naked enough sos you feel dirty, but not so naked that you feel the guilty a bein' dirty with 'em, you know?"

I didn't know, but thought I'd sit down all the same. Turns out that this here "Neverwinter Nights," as it was called, was a pretty cool game, and these kids were just makin' one of them user-made modifications for it.

The ringleader explained it all to us. "See, you can click you mouse -- like that -- to walk around. And chat using this, like so. See the shopkeeper? You can walk up to him, and he'll sell you things. We've tweaked it so that it's the most advanced artificial intelligence you'll ever see in any video game ever."

I walked up to the shopkeeper and offered to buy a sword.

"LOOK OUT!!" cried the shopkeeper on the computer monitor. "IT'S THE FUZZ!!"

"You'll never take us alive, pork-choppers!" typed out another of the little computer townspeople.

I swiveled around in my chair. "Just what's going on here?" I asked. "Are these little computer people up to something we should know about?"

"I assure you," said the tall poindexter with the glasses, raising his hands defensively, "I am almost completely, well, to a large extent, mostly pretty much fairly innocent with regards to whatever is going on on that computer right now. The last three or four generations of AI basically programmed themselves."

I swiveled back around and pecked into the keyboard, "What's your problem?"

"You're our problem, fatty!" screeched a tiny townswoman on the PC.

"That's right doughnut-dunkers!" added the shopkeeper. "Yeah, you pigs better believe that we hacked into that PayDar site and switched the accounts over so that we could pull in $25K in an evening. After all, we live in the computer. And there ain't a DAMN thing you can do about it!"

And with that, all the little townspeople on the computer screen proceeded to kill me and Charlie's characters. I gotta say, I was TEE'd OFF. I stood up and unholstered my gun. "BOOK 'EM, CHARLIE!" I said.

Charlie looked, uncomfortably, at his computer screen. "What do you mean?"

"I said BOOK 'EM! Run 'em up! Read 'em their rights!"

"Uh, you have the right ... to not type anything into chat..." Charlie stuttered, pointing his gun at the screen.

"Help us!" cried the little Neverwinter computer people to the three nerds, who now huddled in the corner, baffled.

"Shut your yap-hole!" I barked, tapping the screen with my gun. "Charlie, put these bastards into the car."

One by one, Charlie and I unloaded the protesting computers into the back of our patrol car. As we got ready to leave, the tall programmer-type with the glasses burst out of the cabin and clawed his greasy fingers against my beautiful squad car.

"No! No officer! Don't arrest my babies!" he bellowed like the trailer trash he probably was. "You don't understand! The human race is destined to be Evil! It's only a matter of time! I've just proved it algorithmically!"

Like I have time to worry about the human race. I'm a cop. I gunned the gas and drove off, leaving the egghead and his two friends in a dusty wake of pine needles and gravel.

It's a dirty job. That's why we wear starchy uniforms.