The Shadow Fixer

by Matthew S. Cox

  Kirsten struggled to hold on. Making herself solid shifted things from psionic strength to physical strength, giving the taller woman a mild advantage. “You’re not stuck. I can help you figure out how to change your appearance. And what did you mean it won’t stop? What won’t stop?”

  “Argh!” shouted the ghost. She surged forward, her wet arms slipping through Kirsten’s grasp until she gripped the collar of her uniform top.

  Dorian grabbed the spirit’s arms, preventing her from ripping the stretchy fabric. Frustrated, the ghost screamed in anger. He wrenched her away from Kirsten, swept her leg, and pinned the spirit to the floor as if taking down a living suspect.

  “Make it stop!” shrieked the spirit.

  “Make what stop?” Kirsten flailed.

  The ghost dove down into the floor.

  Dorian went after her.

  Kirsten rubbed her forehead.

  Alina approached, her expression hopeful. “What just happened?”

  “Most of the floors above this place are apartments. Pretty sure the ghost of a woman who died upstairs is trying to find something to wear. Looks like she died in the bath, so she thinks she’s stuck permanently naked. A spirit’s latent self-image is mutable. She doesn’t realize she can change it if she wants to.”

  “Right…” Alina chuckled. “I’ll pretend I understood you. Did you get rid of her?”

  “Sort of. She ran away. My partner—also a ghost—is chasing her.”

  “Is it gonna stop?”

  Kirsten shrugged. “Hard to say. She’ll probably continue pestering people until she figures out how to make herself look different. If we’re lucky, Dorian will convince her to leave people alone since she can’t actually wear any clothing she steals.”

  “Wow.” Alina exhaled. “So, that’s it? Just letting her go?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. We don’t have a way to drag ghosts off to jail.”

  Alina blinked, then cracked up laughing. “Okay, yeah. Guess it’s pretty dumb to think you’d be able to do anything more than chase one out of here, huh?”

  “Not dumb.” Kirsten put on her best Division 0 public relations smile. “Most citizens don’t understand the nature of the paranormal. It’s perfectly understandable to be confused and frightened. The spirit here can’t seriously injure anyone and isn’t trying to be malicious. Death is hard to process, especially for the person who died. She’s embarrassed and freaking out, not a serious threat to anyone.”

  “Right…” Alina whistled. “Should I call it in again if she comes back?”

  “Yep. She’s pretty disoriented and upset. If not for her having the ability to exert force on physical objects, I’d say she died pretty recently.”

  Dorian glided up out of the floor. “Lost her. She took the shortcut back to her remains. Didn’t say much. Just kept yelling ‘make it stop’ repeatedly.”

  Hopefully, she doesn’t come back here. Kirsten exhaled. “Drat.”

  “Hmm?” asked Alina.

  “She ran off. I’ll be out of your way in a minute, just need to collect a few statements.” Kirsten opened her armband terminal. “This won’t take long.”

  4

  Suspicious Thermal Anomaly

  Kirsten emerged from Bixton’s to a minor traffic snarl around her patrol craft.

  Since she’d blocked one lane, drivers risked oncoming traffic to get around the patrol craft. A woman wearing a skirt suit probably more expensive than the tiny ground car she drove argued with a Division 1 cop two storefronts away to the right over it ‘not being a big deal’ to use the sidewalk to avoid an obstruction. Two advert bots floated by them, one showing lawyer ads to the woman, the other displaying headache medicine to the cop.

  Hundreds of pedestrians flowed past the argument, lost to the obliviousness of augmented reality or simply ignoring them. A queue of at least nine cars stacked up behind the patrol craft, waiting for a chance to use the oncoming lane.

  Head bowed, Kirsten hurried to the driver’s side and got in. The drivers of the ground cars stuck in line most likely gave her dirty looks, but she didn’t make eye contact with any of them. Whatever courage her guilty body language might have given someone to make a comment about her blocking the road failed to overcome the cloud of fear surrounding the all-black car and all-black uniform. Most citizens mistook black for Division 9. While true, they used black patrol craft, theirs didn’t have bar lights or markings—and they had no official uniform. Much like people’s fear of Division 0, their opinion of Nine was overblown. Contrary to rumor, one of their operatives couldn’t randomly kill people free of legal problems. Granted, if they could present the least bit of justification, it didn’t take much.

  Only a ghost ripping clothes. Safe behind the armored windows where no one outside could see her, Kirsten watched the sidewalk driver continue arguing with the cop. Sensing where she looked, the patrol craft’s electronics directed the audio pickup onto the conversation, making it as clear as if she stood right next to them. The woman argued since the police blocked off the road, it gave people permission to go around, even if they had to use the sidewalk to do it.

  She gripped the sticks and pulled the patrol craft upward. The driver behind her accelerated hard, nearly sideswiping a merging car going in the same direction who’d attempted to go around in the oncoming lane.

  “You seem far more upset than normal for a haunt like that.” Dorian leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Is Lily still bothering you?”

  “Nah. Just thinking about idiot drivers. The woman over there could’ve hurt or killed a pedestrian. For what? A prank ghost? This spirit wouldn’t have hurt anyone.”

  Dorian chuckled. “Only their dignity. What idiots do isn’t your fault. You aren’t less of a cop because you sometimes deal with issues like this.”

  “I know, but is it worth blocking a street over?”

  “Div 1 routinely blocks traffic to get their morning coffee.”

  She sighed. “I’m not Div 1. And I wouldn’t inconvenience hundreds of people to save myself a bit of a walk for breakfast. Why don’t their captains yell at them? Or for ignoring traffic rules when they’re not responding to an incident?”

  “Being able to park like a jackass is a small perk of the job to keep them from burning out and quitting.”

  “It’s not right.”

  Dorian smiled, eyes still closed. “It’s not in the books, but you can bet their captains have bigger issues to yell about. Don’t turn into one of those lieutenants who runs around ‘issuing demerits’ for every tiny thing.”

  “Not what I’m saying.” She pulled up into the hover traffic lane at 500 feet and set the auto-drive for the PAC. “That woman in the microcar could’ve run someone over because a ghost yanked on people’s clothes. Not even close to a legit emergency.”

  “We could cite the spirit for public nuisance.”

  She huffed. Dorian laughing made her angrier, but not at him. True, she had no way to know what kind of situation they’d been sent into and she much preferred to encounter a dress-tearing spirit than a ‘Lily’ where multiple people died.

  I shouldn’t be this upset over an idiot cutting onto the sidewalk. Kirsten looked down at her stomach. Crap. It must be hormone time.

  “1815-0I4, please acknowledge,” said a young voice.

  “Go ahead, Dispatch.” Kirsten shifted her gaze from her angry ovaries to the middle of the console.

  The head and shoulders of a thirteen-ish boy appeared.

  I always get the baby cadets. Do they think my calls are cute or something? Light stuff for the new class to play dispatcher?

  “Lieutenant?” asked the boy. “We have a report of suspicious thermal activity at the Lyris Corporation building in Sector 882.”

  This sounds fairly tame. “Cold spots?”

  The teen blinked in surprise. “Wow, you can read minds over comm?”

  Kirsten grinned. “Nah. The only reason you’d be contacting me about thermal anomalies is cold spots. M
ost people think they indicate the presence of ghosts.”

  “It usually does.” Dorian opened his eyes. “Hmm. Lyris. Sounds familiar, but nothing stands out. Guess they’re only mildly shady.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Kirsten. “Send the Nav pin. On the way.”

  “Roger, lieutenant.” The boy smiled, reached off camera, and disappeared.

  Seconds later, a waypoint marker appeared on the Navcon terminal.

  Since they already headed south toward the PAC, the car didn’t make any course corrections yet. To reach the Lyris Corporation building, she had to fly farther south. She pulled up the company’s GlobeNet presence, skimming the basic information. The company manufactured dolls, they formerly made synthetics (it had become illegal to produce fully sentient synths), various types of bots, and consumer-grade cyberware. The company also had a subsidiary involved in chemical production, mostly medical tank gel and hydroponic growth media.

  “Hmm. Someone had a bad reaction to a Lyris-made cybernetic implant and went back to haunt them?”

  “More likely a spirit would blame the cyberdoc who implanted it.” Dorian poked a finger into another small screen, opening the incident report.

  The complaint originated from Seth Rivera, listed as a ‘security manager’ for Lyris. It contained little useful information beyond their systems picking up inexplicable cold spots bearing a striking resemblance to a human form.

  “No mention of the ghost actually doing anything. Could be a walk-by.” Kirsten shrugged. “Love the easy ones.”

  “Agreed.”

  * * *

  Kirsten took manual control of the patrol craft a little under a mile from the Lyris building.

  The company occupied the entirety of a 112-story high-rise shaped like a shiny dark metal version of the Washington Monument. She thought of it since Evan had been talking about it over breakfast recently as it came up in history class. When they built the plates over East City, the government used the idea of moving the entire monument up to the new surface as a big public relations-slash-patriotism fundraiser.

  She followed glowing yellow drive assistant lines on the screen to a parking garage entry door at the fiftieth-story level. Dozens of advert bots swarmed around, flashing all manner of glowing, colorful displays. A few delivery bots—recognizable due to their faster, straight-line flight paths—whizzed by, going into the building.

  An information box popped up on the windshield screen. For an instant, it displayed a ‘no Lyris ID detected, please proceed to visitor parking’ message, but changed to a message welcoming the police with directions to emergency parking area near the door—or ‘follow the yellow line to visitor parking if this isn’t an emergency’.

  I’m technically on a call, but no one’s in danger.

  The yellow line guided her to a ramp up one level, then over to a cluster of parking spaces reasonably close to a group of elevator doors on a square section of wall at the center of the fifty-first floor. ‘Emergency’ parking would have spared her a sixty-foot walk. She hopped out and started toward the elevators.

  A thirtyish man in a dark blue jumpsuit emerged from one pair of sliding doors and raised a hand in greeting. She recognized Seth Rivera from the ID photo linked to the inbound contact to Division 0 requesting assistance. His jumpsuit shoulders bore Lyris Corporation logos, as did the buckle of his utility belt. His belt held a medium-sized handgun in a holster, likely a Class 3 or 4, as well as a stunrod and some utility compartments.

  Some Division 1 officers had such a strong dislike for private police they couldn’t help but turn every interaction argumentative. Kirsten didn’t mind them much, except for a mild distrust of the concept. People who ‘enforced the law’ at the behest of a corporation could easily end up doing the bidding of their company against the interest of the public. It smelled too much like the ACC for her liking. In the Allied Corporate Council, which had taken over most of Europe, profit ruled. Their entire police system operated mostly to safeguard company interests while making money on the side. Citizens who didn’t pay monthly policing fees were left to deal with crime on their own. Worse, she’d heard some stories about innocent people ending up in prison for defending themselves against a criminal who had paid their policing fees.

  The UCF was far from perfect. Some even called it a military police state. However, it felt like the government mostly tried to do the right thing, even if often seemed misguided.

  “Officer?” asked Seth as she approached.

  “Lieutenant Wren, Division 0.” She offered a hand. “You called about a cold spot?”

  Seth shook hands. “Oh, sorry, lieutenant. I’m kinda surprised they gave me the okay to involve you guys at all here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you know… start talking about cold spots and everyone thinks ghosts. Who takes ‘ghosts’ seriously?” Seth chuckled.

  Kirsten fake laughed. “Yeah… I get that a lot.”

  “I think the executives are concerned it might have been a psionic spy.” Seth entered the elevator and held the door for her. “I couldn’t find anything in our systems indicating a person entered the building and made it into the conference room, so before I go nuts doing diagnostics on a thousand sensors, figured I’d jump straight to the most illogical explanation and eliminate it first.”

  “You don’t think a ghost was here?” Kirsten raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m not sure one way or the other.” Seth poked the button for the ninety-eighth floor. “As far as I’m concerned, ghosts are probably real. I’ve seen stuff on the security cameras in this place for years, and no one can explain any of it.”

  Bands of white light slid down the walls of the elevator cab, offering a visual indication of going upward past each story.

  “This building is haunted?” Kirsten reached out with her Astral Sense, hunting for any trace of a paranormal presence, but only picked up Dorian, who stood right next to her. “I’m not sensing any spirits nearby, but the place is pretty big.”

  “Everywhere in West City is haunted,” said Dorian. “We built a city on the ruins of an old world, leaving everything down there as it was. Even corpses in some places.”

  Kirsten fidgeted. As far as she knew, the universe didn’t care at all about ‘proper burials,’ but many ghosts did—especially from 300 years ago, before society considered religious belief to be a mental illness. If a dead person truly thought they needed a specific ritual performed during their burial, they could stick around as a ghost like someone who’d been murdered and demanded revenge. Most of the spirits she’d encountered in the Beneath died centuries ago and haunted their old homes or death sites because their remains had been left wherever they dropped. The government of the time didn’t think it worth the money to ‘clean up’ areas they intended to bury under city plates and forget existed. In a way, they’d made the entire Beneath into a tomb.

  Seth smiled. “If you’re not in a hurry to be anywhere, I’ve got a whole bunch of saved video clips. Chairs moving, doors moving, cleaning bots behaving in weird ways. Even have some audio of people talking in empty hallways.”

  “Anything violent happen here? Scratches, attacks?” asked Kirsten.

  “Nah. All the activity our cameras picked up occurs in empty rooms or hallways. The ghosts here are pretty shy. The weird stuff always stops when security goes there to check on it. Seemed weird for one to stand around in a room with sixteen people.”

  Kirsten glanced over—and up—at him. “What happened?”

  “You’re probably going to be mad for us calling you over such a non-event.” Seth offered an innocent smile. “We picked up a human shaped cold spot in the room during an executive meeting. It didn’t do anything more than stand there the whole time, dissipating once the meeting ended. Management is on edge about it due to the confidential nature of the meeting.”

  “Mind showing me the video?”

  “Sure. We don’t record sound in those rooms since they’re used for highly conf
idential discussions, but no problem showing you the thermal.”

  “Makes sense they’re worried about a person eavesdropping if the meetings are sensitive.” Dorian gazed around. “Not feeling any other spirits in the area. You think a ghost might’ve been actually spying?”

  “Umm. Probably not. I mean, why? They don’t need money. If a spirit did invade the conference room, they were probably lost or simply curious.”

  “Huh?” Seth glanced at her.

  “Talking to my partner.” She nodded toward Dorian. “He’s a spirit.”

  “Whoa. There’s a ghost in here with us now?”

  Dorian waved a hand past Seth’s eyes, getting no reaction. “He’s as psionic as a doorknob.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait. I’ve seen actual doorknobs more psionic than this guy.”

  Kirsten stifled a chuckle.

  The elevator doors opened.

  “Cool. Gotta be helpful having a ghost along to help find other ghosts.” Seth waved for her to follow and fast-walked out into a sleek silver-and-grey corridor.

  Fist-sized orb bots glided back and forth above head level, set to some mysterious task. A mirror-finished disc-bot roamed about cleaning the highly polished floor. Surprisingly, most of the workers in sight wore relatively casual attire, not the usual expensive, fashion-conscious stuff usual for big corporation towers.

  “Dorian’s a lifesaver. Literally.” Kirsten grinned up at him.

  “Cool,” said Seth. “So, umm, does everyone end up as a ghost? How long do they hang around?”

  “Everyone has the potential to be a ghost. Circumstances of death and what’s on a person’s mind at the time of death makes the difference. If you want to hang out as a ghost, you’re going to. People who get hung up on some unresolved thing can also get stuck here when they want to move on. Could be justice for their murder or something as weird as not getting a promised slice of pie.”

  “Wow. Pie? Seriously?” Seth chuckled.

  “Honest. This one poor guy sat around the hospital waiting for the pie he’d been looking forward to all week.” Kirsten gave a sad sigh.