The Preserve

by Ariel S. Winter

  “Dunrich,” Mathews called. The younger officer was squatting near the body, examining who knows what. “Radio for the ambulance.”

  Dunrich put his hands on his thighs and pushed himself up. He tore his eyes away with reluctance, going over to the cruiser and reaching in for the radio.

  As Laughton approached the deliveryman, the young man’s shoulders went up, and he turned just a few degrees, a defensive pose.

  “Evening,” Laughton said. “Barry?”

  The young man sucked on his vape and nodded.

  “You want to tell me what happened?”

  Despite the body language, the man’s face was relatively neutral. “Not much to tell, boss. I didn’t see the guy until the kid said, ‘Shit. Oh my god.’ ”

  flash of nose wrinkle, slight upper lip raise—disgust at the memory

  “How didn’t you see the guy before then? Body’s pretty obvious.”

  Barry shook his head. “Look, I got out of the cab and walked around the front of the truck, so the truck was blocking my view. I wasn’t looking all around or anything.”

  “What about in the side mirror when you were backing up the truck.”

  “Man, then I’m looking at the edge of the truck and the loading dock. I’m not taking in the whole scene.”

  People can often miss things that are right in front of them. Their minds are somewhere else, and they’re moving without even seeing their surroundings. You could walk right past your brother in a crowd and never even see him. Still, Laughton didn’t love it. The body was pretty obvious.

  “Do you know the guy?” Laughton said. “Look familiar?”

  micro-expression—sadness—lying?

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so, or you know?”

  “No,” Barry said, shaking his head. “I don’t know him.”

  Laughton waited a beat, giving Barry a chance to add something, to change his answer. But instead, the deliveryman covered his expression by taking another drag of his vape.

  “Where do you live?” Laughton said.

  “Charleston.”

  “And you deliver anywhere else?”

  “The whole preserve. Beaufort, Georgetown. This is my last stop.”

  “Can I see inside the truck?”

  Barry nodded. “Sure.” He led Laughton around the front of the truck, up the stairs to the loading dock, and pulled the back of the truck open. It was empty, and cold from the refrigeration unit. Laughton’s footsteps echoed as he walked in. There were a few leaves of lettuce crushed into the floor of the truck. A hand truck was bungeed to the wood slats along the inside left wall. Laughton stepped back onto the loading dock, and he noticed that the body wasn’t visible from there. Barry wouldn’t have seen it while unloading the truck.

  “You’re heading back to Charleston now?”

  Barry nodded. “Yeah.”

  That micro-expression bothered the chief. People generally didn’t show sadness over the death of a stranger, but it could have just as easily been sadness that he couldn’t help. But if he had been involved in the murder, Laughton would have expected fear or anger. “All right,” Laughton said. “We might need to contact you again. Can we get your info?”

  Barry took his phone out of his back pocket, and Laughton tapped his phone against it. There was the confirming buzz of receipt. Then Barry grabbed the canvas strap hanging from the truck’s back door and pulled the door shut with a clang.

  Laughton hopped down from the loading dock, joining Mathews as Barry locked up the back of the truck.

  “Carl was living over in Crofton,” Mathews said. “Whole town to himself, except Sam something-or-other. I think they were living together.”

  “Shit,” Laughton said. He closed his eyes and sighed. “We better go talk to him in case he decides it’s time for a road trip.” He opened his eyes and tried to calculate if he needed to let his counterparts in the other inhabited towns of the preserve know the situation. There was nothing the chiefs of police in Beaufort and Georgetown could do. Chris Ontero, the police commissioner in Charleston, was technically not his superior, but as the head of the police in the preserve’s one large city, the commissioner was the face of preserve law enforcement. He would have to talk to the press when this went wide.

  “You sure you’re okay, Chief?”

  “No,” Laughton said. “Just give me a moment.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called the Charleston Police Department. As it rang he said to Mathews, “Come on. You’ve got driver’s seat.” He headed for his truck while Mathews told his partner to wait for the ambulance. The delivery truck pulled away from the building, Barry leaning back in his seat in the cab.

  The CPD system shuffled the chief around until he got a voice mail recording. He didn’t want to leave the news on the phone—he didn’t know if a secretary answered the commissioner’s voice mail—so he just left a message asking the commissioner to call him. He stepped up into the passenger seat, texting his wife with one hand, the auto-suggest anticipating each word, allowing him to just tap: “I’ll be home late.” Either it was something he texted often enough for the phone’s memory to fill in the blanks or it was such a common thing to say—thousands of people always late, always apologizing—that it was in the phone’s programming. He dropped his phone in the cup holder, and let his head fall back on the headrest and closed his eyes. If only the pain would stop.

  Mathews jumped into the driver’s seat, pushing the power button before he’d even gotten the door closed. “Battery’s a little low, boss.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Laughton said without opening his eyes. His phone buzzed twice. It was probably his wife responding to his text. He didn’t bother to get the phone out to check.

  Then something in his head clicked on. Timing, he thought. He put down the window, and called, “Dunrich.”

  Dunrich looked up from his phone, and then jogged over to the truck. “Boss?” he said.

  “Find out how often they take the garbage out,” the chief said. “Give us some idea of how long the body might have been sitting here.”

  “Okay.”

  “And ask the other employees about strangers.”

  “Right.”

  Laughton raised the window. He should have thought of the timing question when he was interviewing Larry and Ryan. This didn’t bode well, if his mind was this fuzzy. What else had he forgotten to ask?

  “Ready?” Mathews said.

  The chief nodded.

  Mathews punched “Crofton” into the GPS, and the truck managed a U-turn, the whole cab bouncing as they went through a pothole. The junior officer, mercifully, didn’t say anything.

  It was just falling dusk as they made their way through Crofton. The front lawns of all the houses had gone to hay, about knee-high, and there wasn’t a single electric light on anywhere. Even the streetlights were dark. The robots must have figured, Why waste the bulbs?, and took them with them. Otherwise, it was hard to know the town was deserted. The houses had been inhabited recently enough that they’d yet to show signs of ruin. A United States flag hung from a flagpole in front of one home. Solar panels remained on many roofs, harder to take away than lightbulbs. Porch furniture waited loyally for sitters that would never come. Laughton could never decide if the robots had afforded humans so much land to humor the pro-orgos, who thought consolidating humans would encourage a population boom that’d require space to grow into, or if the machines just wanted a wide cushion zone.

  The two policemen didn’t know where Smythe had been living, so they meandered up and down the backstreets, Mathews driving manually. He turned on the headlights, then about twenty minutes later, the brights. The lights turned the hay a yellow white, and the black shadows of the houses rising from the wild lawns made Laughton think of old pictures he’d seen of elephants on the savannah, although he didn’t know how big elephants had really been and couldn’t imagine an animal that large.

  The chief’s headache had
receded just enough to be nagging instead of debilitating. He kept rubbing his face to stay awake. When he saw the glow of artificial lights one street over, he exhaled in relief. “There,” he said.

  Mathews looked, and then gunned the engine, pulling around the corner on screeching tires.

  “Jesus, Mathews,” Laughton said.

  “Sorry.”

  The house was a plain, bloated, two-story box, probably a hundred years old, from a time when size was more important than style. The light escaping from the open windows showed rows of solar panels covering the front lawn and the lawns of both neighbors. Thick wires hung from the roof where there must have been another array. The solar panels explained how Smythe and Sam could afford the extravagant show of light, but that many solar panels weren’t just being used for nighttime illumination. Something was happening in the house.

  “Looks like Sam hasn’t gone anywhere,” Mathews said.

  “Looks it.”

  “How do you want to do this?”

  The chief opened his door. “We’re just going to have a conversation,” he said, stepping down from the truck. Mathews got out on the other side, and they slammed the doors. No need to worry about alerting the man. They were about to knock.

  As the men made their way down the narrow path, a backlit silhouette appeared in one of the front windows, peering out to see who had arrived. It moved quickly away from the window at the sight of them. They opened the storm door, and Laughton banged on the front door with the side of his closed fist. Mathews turned on his body camera. The chief still liked to take notes with a stylus and oversize phone. “Look,” Mathews said, a smile in his voice. Laughton looked and saw the calm, slow pulses of fireflies hovering among the solar panels.

  The door swung open. The chief squinted against the sudden brightness, which stabbed him in the right eye. A rail-thin man in his early thirties stood looking at them. He wore glasses with no bottom rims, and had his hair in a ponytail, stray wisps floating around his head. A tattoo graced the inside of his forearm, something in fancy calligraphy that the chief couldn’t read.

  “Yes?” the man said, his tone an attempt at being calm but ruined by a note of defensiveness.

  Mathews was in uniform. Laughton took his badge folder from his rear pocket, and flipped it open for the man to see. “This is Officer Mathews. I’m Chief Laughton. May we come in?”

  The man hesitated, seeming on the verge of asking a question, but then stepped back and said, “Sure, okay.”

  The policemen stepped by him into a small but cavernous entryway, the ceiling extending up to the second story. A carpeted room to the left was filled with industrial metal shelving laden with row after row of chunky, gamer-level computer towers, each with a small green LED eye assuring it was on. It was hot inside, despite the open windows. The combined noise of the computers’ cooling fans sounded like rushing water.

  “That’s a lot of hardware,” Mathews said, turning his body so the camera was sure to pick it up.

  “Yeah,” the man said with a nervous, embarrassed laugh.

  “What’s your name, sir?” Chief Laughton said, getting out his phone and opening a new note.

  “Sam McCardy,” he said. “Samuel.”

  “And you live here with Carl Smythe.”

  “We’re business partners.”

  “What’s your business?” Mathews said.

  McCardy looked like he could punch himself. “Computers,” he said.

  Mathews snuffed in amusement.

  “When was the last time you saw Mr. Smythe?” Laughton asked.

  “I don’t know,” McCardy said. “Lunchtime? Right before lunch.”

  “What time was that?”

  The man’s brow screwed up in serious contemplation. He shook his head. “Eleven.” He shrugged. “I really don’t know. Did something happen with Carl?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Laughton said, “he’s dead.”

  McCardy went white, his whole body slumping, his breathing grew shallow, and his mouth screwed up, the look of a man who was refusing to allow himself to cry. He tested out his voice, and it came out cracked. “How?” Just the one word.

  screwed-up lips, lower eyelids narrowed—grief

  “Mr. McCardy. Could we come in, maybe sit down?” Chief Laughton said. The grief seemed genuine, but there was a flash of fear in the brow. Not uncommon given the situation, but suppressed faster than Laughton would have expected.

  “Yeah,” McCardy said, nodding, looking at the ground, looking at nothing. “Sure. Yeah.” He stepped back, and then turned, leading them through a small passage into a combined kitchen–living room space. Here there was more industrial shelving surrounding two large folding tables in the center of the room, each with three flat-panel monitors, multiple VR headsets, keyboards, enormous speakers on stands, and what looked like large soundboards with rows of tiny dials. The shelving was not given over entirely to computers, though. There was a retro-gaming rig with some antique consoles going back to the twentieth century. Chief Laughton recognized a few consoles from his father’s collection with a pang of nostalgia. Confusingly, there were two racks stuffed with books—real, antique, paper books—more than Laughton had ever seen outside of a museum. More than he’d ever seen inside a museum.

  But of course, the thing that drew his eye was bins filled with different-colored memory sticks, the kind that was used for sims. Each bin was marked with masking tape on which code names were written: Dikdik, Mollies, Starburst, The Bat. Chief Laughton still did not understand why sims remained a physical medium. The programming—human or robot—the manufacture of memory sticks, the distribution, the porting, the whole physical supply chain necessary for human drugs seemed like a reckless danger for something that could be handled in code remotely. He understood that sims were written in such a way that they deleted both from the memory stick and from the robot’s short-term memory as the program ran so that no copy of the program was retained, making it onetime use. That, of course, was necessary if it was going to be a salable commodity, but also, it seemed, was preferable to robots, because it meant that the experience could not be repeated, especially since a well-written sim filled in elements taken from the external environment and the robot’s memory, making each experience of the sim unique. But none of those things seemed to make physical memory sticks essential, based on his human understanding of the experience.

  Sometimes Laughton wondered if the whole illegal-sims operation took the shape it did to purposely ape historical human drug trafficking, if the construct of the illegal behaviors around the act of sims use was an intrinsic part of a robot’s enjoyment of the experience.

  They all looked at the setup for a moment in silence, as though even McCardy needed to take it in.

  Laughton stepped into the room, and Mathews said to McCardy, “You want to sit down?”

  McCardy nodded, and in a daze went to one of the desk chairs in the center of the room. “What the hell happened?” he said.

  “We’re trying to figure that out,” Mathews said.

  “I mean, what the hell happened?” McCardy said again.

  “What do you mean?” Mathews said.

  Chief Laughton watched McCardy’s face, and said, “He was murdered.”

  eyes closed, lips tightened—pain

  “No,” McCardy said, shaking his head. “No, no, no, no.”

  “Is there someone who would have wanted to hurt him?” Mathews said.

  “No. Wait. Of course. Look at this shit.” He looked back and forth at the policemen. “It’s all legal,” he hurried to say, not fooling anyone, “of course, all legal. But you know. Sims…”

  Laughton walked over to the rack of books and pulled one off the shelf at random. Blended Worlds. He pulled a few more out. The Hidden Triangle. The Twenty-Year Death. He’d never heard of any of them. The things seemed one step away from dust.

  “Did you know that Mr. Smythe was a cyborg?” Mathews said.

  “Yeah. Of cours
e. What does that matter? You think it was because he was a cyborg?”

  “It’s possible. Are you a cyborg?”

  McCardy jerked back like he’d tasted something unexpectedly bad. “What? No. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They’re humans first. They have the same rights to be on the preserve, and everything.”

  “No one’s saying anything against cyborgs,” Chief Laughton said, putting the books back on the shelf. “Where’d you get all of these books?”

  “What does it fucking matter?” The shock over his friend’s death had turned to anger, eyebrows lowered, pulled together.

  “I’ve just never seen so many books. Why do you have them?”

  “Metals like human-written sims because of the messed-up shit we can think up that they can’t. Old books give us a lot of stuff to use. Those are all crap books that no one thought were worth digitizing, so metals have never seen them.”

  “Who’s your distributor?” Mathews said.

  McCardy turned back to the officer, caught off balance between the two men. He hesitated.

  “Look, we don’t care about your sims,” Laughton said. “We’re not here to bust anyone on sims. That’s a metals problem, not a preserve problem as far as I’m concerned. But we need to find who killed your friend. And we need the names of anyone who might be able to help.”

  McCardy’s shoulders slumped. “Something Jones. Carl handled all of that, and he just always said Jones. Crap, what am I going to do now?”

  Laughton met Mathews’s eyes. The officer gave a slight shake of the head; he didn’t know the name Jones either.

  “Was he in town to meet Jones?”

  “No, he’d just gone for groceries.”

  “And you stayed here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were here all day? Didn’t go to town too?”

  “I haven’t left the house.” He said it matter-of-factly, without the insistence of someone trying to establish an alibi. He didn’t even seem to consider that was what was being asked.