by Micah Thomas
“We made a choice to do this,” Sanders said while changing out of his uniform.
“Yes, but put on your detective hat and look at the facts for a minute. We were sold a false bill of sale. Have you noticed that people aren’t aging anymore? When I went to wine club for the first time in a long time, you know I saw a four year old that still looked like a two year old? What the fuck is that about? Antiaging has been great for adults, but this isn’t right.” Dan held back the urgency, but he wanted to shout.
Sanders pulled on his sweats and shook his head. “It’s been reported. It’s on the backlog of things to review with Hakim. The Public Health Association believes it’s something about the food, but when they share statuses publicly, the news is always that people are healthier than ever.”
“Forget the food. We made a deal and never really understood the price. How can you not see this?” Dan stood by the door and tapped his fingers on the frame impatiently.
“Are you saying you want out? To go back to the way things were? Because I can guarantee its not better out there now.”
“I want you the way you were. I don’t care about anyone else.”
“I’m right here.”
“No, you’re not. Work has consumed you. Spending time with that man—that thing—has made you like him.”
“I don’t…” Sanders didn’t meet Dan’s eyes, as he said this.
“You equivocate all the time. The old you would have known right from wrong.”
Dan knew he was talking mad, but it was true. There’d always been compromises, but his husband was lost and didn’t know how to find his way in this place where he had everything he’d ever wanted. This was a common talking point in the tours: the existential crisis of abundance.
“I could quit,” Sanders offered. “We can go somewhere. Europe, maybe?”
“You think he’s going to let you go?” Dan asked.
“Let me solve this one case,” Sanders said, “then yes, Hakim will have to listen. There’s gotta be someone else.”
“This case, and the next one, and the one after that.” Dan stomped into the kitchen and started aggressively cutting up carrots and celery for dinner. One more case, and the case after that, and after that. It repeated in his mind.
“He doesn’t listen,” Dan said out loud.
Sanders followed him in. “I don’t know how to put it. It’s like Hakim is not fully present. I don’t think he sleeps, but he is always…I don’t know. What is it called when a bug hibernates?”
“It’s called torpor. The man is not human. Who knows what he really wants?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I had a bad day.”
Dan stopped chopping. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I sent a young man to prison today,” Sanders began, his voice steady but low.
“Oh god. It has been a while. Who was he? What did he do?”
“He threw a party and things got out of hand,” Sanders answered. “We are still rebuilding the details, but he was seen committing the crime.”
“What’s his story?” Dan asked.
“That he doesn’t remember it. Maybe it was a drug-induced lapse of impulse control. There was something unusual about this. I haven’t figured it out.”
“It doesn’t sound fair to send him up the river while we still don’t know what happened.”
“It’s not. I was in favor of holding off until we finished the investigation, but there is also evidence that he’d manipulated the situation to ensure there were no Coppers present. We got there late and then he ran. Taken together, it constituted guilt.”
“That’s not possible,” Dan said.
“I know. There’ve been reports of malfunctions, but this would be a big coincidence.”
“Honey, no. Talk to Hakim. Tell him that things are breaking. Tell him that this isn’t fair. This isn’t the justice you wanted to bring.” He wasn’t ignoring me, he was hurting. Dan realized this and moved close to his man.
“The boy looked like me when I was his age. Could’ve been my cousin or my little brother.”
Dan held Sanders. Emoting was not his love’s strong suit. “You’re okay. Talk to Hakim about it. And talk to him about retirement, okay?” They couldn’t go on like this.
***
The next morning, Sanders sat in his office at the mostly empty precinct. Something about the place helped him think. He felt Dan’s pressure to get out of this job, and while that was a real thing, it was a distraction. There was almost no practical use for a centralized policing HQ but he enjoyed going through the motions. Despite all the noise, he was still a cop and that meant something. It also helped to be out of the house. This place was work, not home. He didn’t understand what was happening with his relationship anymore. The distance was growing. Sanders saw it clearly, but he didn’t know how to stop it. He pushed these thoughts out of his mind. Compartmentalize. Focus on the job at hand. Let work take over.
Pieces were falling into place; no motive as of yet, one possible victim, and reports were adding up. There was someone bad out there, and it might be serious. Hakim doesn’t have time for this, or interest, but there is something hurting people in paradise.
At first, Sanders had thought it was kids getting in over their heads. Then, he thought it might be a cult. Now, he thought it might be another like him—like Hakim. And if it was? Does that mean we should be questioning Hakim’s control over the city? The malfunctions…? Could another demon be on the loose? Sanders wondered about the entity Hakim kept locked up in the palace. What would be that thing’s intents and manifestations?
Review the facts. The crime scene at the warehouse. The rumors on the street. There was violence going on and it wasn’t all being reported. How much of this was related? Put it together. One death at a party with a man charged and sentenced, but questions remained as to why the woman had died. I need to get closer to the source of the rumors, Sanders concluded.
He pulled up a map of the city and spun it around, checking for information across the multitude of robotic reports. Inputs from all Eden locales. Roman holidays were peaceable, Safari adventures unremarkable. He changed the filters with a rapid gesture—one he’d perfected when he tuned this machine to his specifications of nonviolent reports. The map became a brightly colored heat map of activity. Sanders narrowed the view to the Chicago instance alone. A pattern. Give me a pattern, he thought.
In the sea of red and blue flashing, Sanders spotted a yellow report. Something minor. Something very rare. Unindexed persons. Multiple entries. Shit. The portals were supposed to be closed. This wasn’t supposed to happen. What wasn’t breaking right now? Sanders knew little of the outside world at this point, but the inroads were so unused that he hadn’t even been monitoring them for over a year. There were four entries, but three were at the same time. He pinned the fourth with an alert reminder to check later. The group event tied to the start of the deaths. This was the key to his investigation. Sanders felt it in his bones and the familiar excitement of being on the right trail filled him.
In a trick that never got old for Sanders, he selected the zoom and enhance on the report incident. There. Three women who had never been in Eden before. He ran their faces through every match program and nothing came up. Pinning their photos to the dashboard, he started running a global sweep on potential entry points to map their movement. The report was months old. He hadn’t noticed that detail before and widened the date parameters, adding in portal logs for reference.
“My god.”
He knew her. She’d grown up a bit, but she was still so young. Eva. My god. He ignored the two who came along with her, but made a note to come back to it. Blonde hair in curls to her shoulders and bright blue eyes, sharp as ever. She looked worried, possibly anxious, in the vid. Sanders advanced the frames until she was off camera. She’d run, separated from her companions. Perhaps she didn’t know them and this was coincidence. He should find them all and get the story of how she got here, bu
t finding Eva would have to be his top priority. The deaths were connected to an unpleasant, strange memory—connected to Eva.
“Computer, set alerts for any crossings as urgent and forward to me immediately.” He made an additional query, “Computer, alert all Coppers to send immediate notification if any of these three appear on scans anywhere in the global city. In fact, seek out any prior scanned encounters and generate a speculative map of travel. Global setting, but prioritize this one; her name is Eva.”
Sanders sat down only to stand and pace. He should tell Hakim. Had to. This was more than a broken border. This girl was more than a girl. Unless Hakim had read Sanders’ entire mind—which he might have—no one knew this story. Sanders had not even disclosed his encounter with Eva to Dan. Sanders had been seeking out the Black Star Institute in the days before the Raid, before Eden. He’d learned that they were keeping a teen girl in a cell, experimenting on her. It would have been the end of his career, but he traveled from Phoenix to Seattle, broke into a private research lab, and rescued her. Except it had been her all along. She was a host to some otherworldly thing, and it was dangerous.
The map loaded up connected dots in three colors for the three newcomers. “Filter only to Eva. Overlay with all instances of orgiastic events, reports of disturbances, and the known deaths.”
A red line overlapped with a yellow almost perfectly, making orange in many places. It was her. She had been at the party.
He had left her with her parents and gone back home, unsure if he’d done the right thing. He’d broken the laws he served in order to do something he felt was right, but he knew on some level what she was capable of. When he and Dan had moved on to Chicago—to Eden—he thought his sins were absolved. This secret made moot. That it was someone else’s problem. How wrong he was. She was his ghost come back to haunt him. She might not even be aware of the things she was doing, but that didn’t matter. He had to find her.
***
Sanders was on his way out the door to begin tracking Eva when he received the summons from Hakim. Great timing. He suspected his machines and, potentially, his thoughts were being tracked. Hakim had not replied to his messages in the last 24 hours, but summoned him now? The first message had been sent the day before, requesting an audience to discuss Thelonious. If Hakim hadn’t read through that yet, he clearly would not have been caught up about Eva. In some ways, Hakim was the typical boss: never reading emails and always with some new crisis of the day. The car got Sanders up to the citadel in record time.
Whenever Sanders had something urgent, he wanted to blurt it out to Hakim to have a serious conversation. Hakim’s presence, his aura of distracted, godhead weirdness, made it impossible. Sanders was glad he didn’t have to go through the pretense of bowing and formality, but still, nothing ever came up directly. Hakim always introduced angles and non sequiturs which derailed the discussion. Again, he was in many ways a typical boss.
Sanders stood in the audience hall, the buzzing chirp of cicadas agitated today. Hakim sat with his eyes closed in meditation upon his throne. Was he sleeping? Sanders waited a few uncomfortable minutes. He wanted to get on the street. To find Eva. “Sir?”
“Would you give him a pardon because he is coloured as you are?”
“The boy. Yes. No. My request for clemency is related to facts and circumstances, not anything personal.”
“Are our rules not fair? Do our rules not enable peaceful living for all?”
“They do.”
“Do you wish to amend or rescind your request?”
Sanders held back a frustrated sigh. “Neither. I’d like to postpone this particular issue.”
Hakim finally opened his eyes and smiled at Sanders. “What troubles you, police man?”
“There’s another like you, here in the city.”
“I know this.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Why don’t you bring them in?” Hakim asked.
“I am not equipped to deal with this.”
“Are you not? Did I choose wrongly when I placed my full trust in you?”
“No.”
“Bring them to me.”
That was all he would get. Sanders was dismissed. Fine, he’d do his best and let his boss know if and when he could not handle the situation.
Sanders headed out into the evening where the smell of citrus blossoms hung heavy in the air. A demon was loose in paradise. People were crazy enough without this. There was certainly a lunacy to the city this day; perhaps it was something he only saw now. Sanders wondered if it had been there from the start. Dan’s words echoed in his head. This place was a lie. What had he seen that made him anxious? It was the aggregate of small things. Frenetic smiles. Face dancing, magical makeup made it hard to see a person and what they were carrying in their hearts. The endless party was reaching a fever pitch. Sanders thought perhaps it was time to sober up.
He ditched the car and followed the map on his tablet on foot. As he walked through public squares uptown, Sanders was given wide berth and knowing glances—subtle respect for his uniform, if not his face. Law was not celebrity, but he was the representative of the rule; the only one that mattered anymore.
Sanders had never been to Mardi Gras, but as he moved from the market to the party quarter, he imagined this was a decent replication of the indecency. So much disorderly conduct, from the crass flashing of breasts and genitals, to acts worthy of fictional Roman vomitoriums—everyone seemed to have been over-served. These he navigated around, occasionally giving them a stern glance, but Sanders had more important business. He switched from his tablet to using bifocal spectacles, the lenses of which augmented the view ahead with a blinking roadmap to where Eva had been spotted. There was too much activity, too many people for him to keep looking down. Sanders could have sent Coppers along the route—he could have reconstructed entire scenes virtually through composite captures—but he wanted to see the scenes himself.
She was here, somewhere. Streams of pink exploded against the blue sky, marking the day as some sort of celebration. It wasn’t fireworks, but something just as loud and bright. How this shit worked was anyone’s guess, but the results were nearly as magical as an Arizona sunset. It made Sanders nostalgic for home; for Phoenix. Now, he was nostalgic for police work and this was scratching that itch.
The block party was ecstatic, but there was no sign of the mania he was seeking. He’d find no witnesses to a prior event here. He summoned the car and backtracked to an alternative projected pathing—back to the scene of Thelonius’ party. The venue was shut down. Whatever celebration was taking place today had not reached this place. Sanders played a reconstruction of the scene based on witness accounts and phantom figures of party-goers filled the stadium. The party had been a success. A grand ole time. The disruption had started at the south end. People had reported feeling strange; as if someone else was in their heads, moving them around in a puppet show.
He cycled the replay to close to the start of the event and filtered down the replay audience to the immediate vicinity. The reenactment slowed and became pornographic as partygoers ripped off each other’s clothes and engaged in sex vigorous sex acts. Sanders didn’t want to see this. He wanted to see Eva. Instead, he saw a black spot in the usually colorful holo. It was the composite of a dozen memories.
“Computer,” he said, “align recollections so this visual anomaly is consistent.”
The scene reorganized and there was a black giant—a shadow form in chiaroscuro—standing amongst the crowd. The witnesses must not have been able to directly remember seeing this thing, but they saw it nonetheless. Sanders let the replay advance and the figure slithered in a sensuous dance, huge hands stroking the crowd as it passed, and where it touched, madness spread. This was her. Sanders knew what happened next: the frenzy grew and a woman died.
Why wasn’t this worse? Sanders cursed his own imagination, but this should have been a much more significant massacre. This was no assassina
tion. Had something unpalatable stopped the beast from turning this into a bloodbath? He advanced the scene a bit further and ignored the violent, biting and bloody, scenes as they were acted out. He tried to ignore the maniac expressions on their faces as the victim and her killer lost their minds to this dark other. The moment of death came and passed. The woman had been choked to death mid-coitus. Thelonious did it, but the boy’s mind hadn’t been there.
He was possessed.
The shadow figure suddenly disappeared and in its place was the back of a girl with blonde curly hair, running through the screaming crowd. Where did you go, Eva? Where did you flee? He ended the holo.
Back in his car, he recorded a video message. “Eva, this is Officer Sanders. We met in Seattle. I helped you once. Let me help you again. You are in danger. Walk up to any Copper in the city and tell them you want to talk to me. I’ll come to you wherever you are.” He played back the recording and was satisfied with it. No threats. No arrest. No mention of crimes. He meant what he said; he wanted to help her.
Sanders set the message to be played at 30-minute intervals at all public streaming billboards and signage. The override to entertainment had only been used in the past for pan-Eden announcements by Hakim. Sanders hoped the message would find her before something happened. He settled into his chair with yet another cup of coffee in his hands, ultimately deciding this would be a long night.
***
Sanders tried to keep himself busy by tackling administrative work. Minor issues could be cleared up with a series of click through approvals. After 2AM, he was exhausted, but didn’t want to go home—even though his primary mission had been fruitless. There was nothing left for him to do except wait for a Copper to pick up a sighting or for Eva to contact him. The former seemed more likely. The portals should have auto-tagged and registered incomers. He’d see the portal closed after this. There wasn’t supposed to be any doors left open anyway; this exception didn’t make any sense.