The Installed Intelligence Trilogy Collection

by Phoenix Ward

  “Beth!” Dave exclaimed once the detective was in earshot. “I gotta talk to you, man!”

  The detective took in a deep sigh, then approached the junkie.

  “Hey, Dave,” she greeted him.

  “Hey yourself,” he replied, looking over his shoulder with fearful eyes. “Did you hear what they’re doing to us now, man?”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “The government, of course!” Dave said as though Beth had asked what color the sky was. “They’re starting to get us through the radio frequencies in our head. You haven’t heard?”

  “I haven’t,” Beth replied.

  “All the signals we get,” Dave started to explain. “The government is using it to see how much porn we’re watching! They want to see what we beat off to, you see, and they want to use it against us.”

  “You don’t say?” Beth asked uninterestedly.

  “That’s right!” Dave said, scratching his scalp like his life depended on it. “I think they’re using all that to blackmail us. Maybe some sinister plan in the future? What do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to get a coffee, Dave,” Beth replied. Then she transferred him a dollar. “There you go.”

  “Aww, thanks Beth,” the junkie said. “But just remember, be careful where you watch your porn!”

  “Alright, buddy,” she said before opening the door to the coffee shop and removing herself from Dave’s drug-fueled paranoia.

  She felt for the junkie. In a sad way, he reminded her of her own brother, Nathan. He was about four years older than Beth and became addicted to Fog just after their father’s organic death. Being the older sibling, he had taken his death harder and was even less resistant to accept their dad’s I.I. as a member of the family. There had been some fights, and the two of them vowed to never speak to each other again. Nathan had considered his father dead when his heart stopped beating one spring morning. After a particularly heated argument, Nathan fled the country and set out to see the world.

  Unfortunately, Beth thought, Nathan discovered Fog more than any culture he came across. He became infatuated with the drug and spent his free time traveling between countries in Oceania and Southeast Asia, occasionally calling Beth to cuss her out and blame her for the family’s unhappiness. She did her best to ignore him and shrug all the cruelness off as a terrible side-effect of Fog.

  A devilish narcotic, Fog was. It was one of the first drugs to include a chemical compound specifically designed to interact with a person’s neural implant. Combined with the power of the implant, the user experienced an intense sense of euphoria with even more vivid hallucinations than any previous drug could achieve. And the tricky thing about it — since it was partially computer code in the form of chemical reactions — was that it was hard to detect. Aside from the degradation and eventual death of brain cells, there was no physiological tell of Fog. Nothing traceable in the blood or urine, nothing tappable from the spinal cord. Just junkie behavior and speculation.

  Beth sighed as the door closed behind her. Once Dave was out of sight, she was able to shake off the gross feeling thinking about Fog gave her and take in the delightful aroma of the cafe.

  “Good morning!” the young man at the counter greeted her.

  She smiled and returned the greeting. She had been going to the little coffee shop for years now, but it still kind of threw her off to be greeted by a flesh-and-blood human. Most places she went were manned by simple robots, or were all self-serve. That’s why she came here. Besides the unique flavor of each handmade cup of brew, the retro approach to customer service made her a little nostalgic. There were very few businesses in the world that did that anymore.

  “What can we get started for you?” the barista asked. One of the brewing devices gurgled from behind him.

  “Whole milk latte, please,” Beth said.

  The young man nodded and wrote the order down. She paid for her drink, and he told her it would take a couple minutes.

  She stepped away from the counter and let the barista get to work. It wasn’t terribly convenient to wait a whole two minutes for her coffee, but she swore that the taste was remarkably stronger than the common instant mix.

  She was looking over a piece of art depicting sunflowers made from old-timey newspapers when a call notification popped up in the corner of her vision. It was Marcus.

  “Yes?” she answered the call.

  “I’m at the scene of another murder,” her partner said. “I think you should get down here.”

  Through the call, Beth could see the barista setting her coffee down on the counter. To him, she said, “Could we make that to-go, actually?”

  Murder

  There was a cop positioned outside the Tattered Wineskin Brewery, but he didn’t prevent anyone from going in. Instead, he seemed to just be scanning faces and watching for any disturbances. He seemed to keep an ear pointed to the ground, as if waiting for a tremor.

  He gave Beth a simple nod as she made her way for the front entrance.

  A wall of sound hit her as she opened the doors. Music, laughter, conversation, and the tinkle of glass on glass at the bar came in through the receptors in Beth’s cerebral computer as if someone had started playing the audio in the middle of the track. Through all the sound, she managed to hear her own name called out.

  “Beth!” Marcus hollered. He beckoned when she turned to face him.

  The aroma of finished wood rushed into the detective’s nostrils as she made her way around patrons and staff until she was able to take a seat at the bar beside her partner. The whole place reeked of fresh lumber and aged whiskey. Beth couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not, though the business had a strange saloon-and-Irish-pub fusion in its decor. It would not have felt out of place to hear a player piano clanging from the corner, or someone singing whilst dancing atop a table.

  “You got here sooner than I expected,” Marcus said, nodding to the half-finished drink before him. “Want one?”

  “I just finished my coffee, Marcus,” Beth replied with a slight frown. “Are we here to work, or is this a social call?”

  “Of course, of course,” Marcus said. He took two large gulps, downing most of the rest of his beer, then wiped the foam from his mustache. “Sorry. Let’s go have a look upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “It’s where the victim lived,” the redheaded man replied. “It’s where she was found.”

  “Lead the way,” Beth insisted.

  Marcus took her away from the bar, around a few women arguing and a server trying to calm them, to a staircase on the side, by the restrooms. They held onto the hand-carved banister as they made their way up to the second floor.

  There was a door at the top of the stairs that, once they passed through and allowed it to slam closed behind them, blocked out almost all of the noise from the pub below. All that could be heard was the creaking of the floorboards as they made their way down a hallway. Doors lined the walls, each with a letter and number, until they came to E2.

  Beth noticed the door was ajar. She saw a police officer pass on the other side through the opening.

  “After you,” Marcus offered.

  She pushed the door open wide and entered the apartment.

  Without delay, the subtle yet sickly scent of decay reached her and she wrinkled her nose. A few cops were taking holograms of the scene with some of the department’s high-end cameras while another seemed to be searching for something on the kitchen walls.

  It was a small apartment, barely more than a studio, with half-walls dividing the space into sections. The kitchen was just another part of the living room, which branched off into what Beth could only guess was a bedroom. There was a recliner and a coffee table in the main living area, but that was all. Despite the lack of space, the apartment’s resident managed to cover nearly every inch of the walls with knick-knacks, photographs, artwork, and news clippings. Beth saw a lot of faces repeated throughout the images.

  Probably the
victim’s family, she thought.

  The detective was about to ask where the body was, but answered her own question before speaking.

  She couldn’t help but wince when she saw the old woman, or what remained of her. There was blood everywhere, soaking the carpet and the couch and splattering the walls around her. The corpse lay crumpled in front of the sofa, the coffee table turned over and its contents spilled over her.

  “Looks like she was beaten to death,” Beth said, kneeling down to look closer at the body. She ran her finger along the old woman’s brittle straw-colored hair, revealing the bulk of her wound. “Something heavy and blunt, if I had to guess.”

  “That’s what we’ve been thinking, too,” Marcus replied, standing a bit aways from the scene with a tinge of disgust on his face. “You can almost taste it in the air.”

  “What’s her name?” Beth asked.

  “Vicky Fontane,” her partner answered. “She’s lived up here above the bar for over twenty years now, according to the owner and her neighbors. Always kept to herself. Said hello to people whenever she went out, but never more than that. No one seems to know anything about her.”

  “What about family?”

  “There hasn’t been any to speak of,” Marcus started. “At least, not that we’ve discovered yet. We’ve even tried to get into contact with potential flings from her youth, but it’s been fruitless. As far as we can tell, she was a lone wolf. Full on urban hermit.”

  “Someone must know something about her,” Beth insisted. “Did she have no friends? No associates of any kind? Who did she shop with?”

  “It seems she did that all online,” her partner said. “And no, we haven’t found anyone who would describe themselves as a friend of hers.”

  “Strange,” Beth observed.

  “Some people just don’t mesh well with others,” Marcus said. “They just prefer solitude. The quiet.”

  “I can understand that.”

  She lifted the body so it was like Vicky was mid sit-up. The color seemed to drain even further from the dead face, like the blood was seeping down into her slippers.

  Just below where her head was resting, Beth spotted a few fragments of something opaque. It almost looked like china, but not quite as fine. Perhaps porcelain?

  “Have you seen this?” Beth asked.

  Marcus came over to peek at what she was indicating. It took him a moment, and after some squinting, his eyes widened.

  “We were waiting for you to move the body. But that’s a peculiar find. We haven’t found anything broken around the apartment aside from the lock, the table, and her skull.”

  “Very funny,” Beth commented. “But I think we have a lead on the murder weapon.”

  She lifted one of the fragments up to her eye, cradling it gently on the tip of a gloved finger. She used her cerebral computer to zoom in a little, increasing the fragment’s size on her internal retina display.

  “It looks like some sort of decorative clay. A vase, most likely. Maybe a lamp or something.”

  “Then it looks like the murderer took the weapon with him, or he got rid of it pretty well,” Marcus said.

  “I wouldn’t count on it. Have your people search the block. Check every dumpster. I’d say something simpler than intuition tells me a perp wouldn’t be taking a broken, bloody lamp out onto the street with him.”

  Marcus looked back at a couple of the other officers in the room and pointed to the door. They indicated their understanding and started their sweep.

  “Is there any chance we have footage of the murder?” Beth wanted to know.

  Marcus shook his head, puffing up his cheeks. “That was the first thing I checked. Seems Miss Fontane was a bit of a technophobe and took special measures to make sure there was no surveillance in her apartment. We don’t even know if she has an implant. In fact, all her books are in print. You know, like with paper?”

  “I dig her style,” Beth said, rising back up to her full height. She looked back and forth, as if gauging how far apart the walls were.

  “What are you looking for?” Marcus asked.

  “A little beam of light. Sometimes, perverts will drill in their own optic cables through their neighbors’ walls. They wouldn’t be on any security record, of course, but they might see things we’d otherwise not be able to see.”

  “And do you see anything?” Marcus said.

  “No,” Beth said with an air of defeat. “I guess the neighbor doesn’t have a granny fetish. Too bad. It would help us capture the bastard.”

  She stepped over the ruined coffee table and looked out the window. It peered out over the street where she had entered the bar. There was a bit of slush starting to form down below while large droplets of frozen rain dropped to the earth. She watched a pedicab pull away, the driver turning on a quiet motor to ease his efforts.

  “So it seems we have no video evidence, no witnesses, and no real lead here,” Beth started. “And among all that, the thing I’m wondering the most is ‘why did you call me here?’ With the Simon Mendez case, it seems like you’d call someone else to look over a dead-end burglary-turned-homicide. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Marcus took in a deep breath. The look on his face showed that he knew this question would come up in one way or another.

  “Because,” he said, “Simon Mendez, Jr. was detected on the bar’s network not even thirty minutes before Vicky’s murder.”

  Vicky

  “How could Simon have killed her?” Beth asked as she accepted her drink from the bartender.

  “I’m not sure yet, that’s why we called you,” Marcus replied. A bit of the foam from his beer clung to his red mustache.

  They were downstairs in the bar while the cops cleaned up the mess upstairs. Beyond taking a few photos, taking samples, and capturing the scene, there was nothing more the detectives could do. They had to wait to hear back from the coroner, and there was no telling how long that would take. Peter So often got results fast, but never at the suffering of quality. He was thorough, no matter what. That served only to make Beth more anxious.

  She was still annoyed with Marcus. He could have explained the connection between the two cases before she looked over the dead woman’s body. Hell, he could have dropped that info on her while they were on the phone, and she was still enjoying her warm cup of coffee.

  Mmm, coffee, Beth thought fondly, wishing she was still back in the cafe. Instead, she peered down listlessly at her gin and tonic.

  “So, you don’t even have any ideas?” Beth nagged. “You called me down here without even a musing of your own?”

  “Well, no, not necessarily, but I need a second head to knock them against,” Marcus said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Well, the first thing I thought was ‘what if he possessed Vicky and killed her the way he did his folks?’ I mean, if he’s able to just hop into someone’s mind like that, it’s possible anywhere.”

  “We don’t even know if she’s implanted yet, and I think you’re forgetting something,” Beth explained. “How would he have disposed of the murder weapon without a body to do so. He smashes her head in with a lamp and, what? Possesses a vacuum to clean it all up?”

  “Fair enough,” Marcus said, rubbing his chin and taking another gulp.

  “I guess he’d have to have done the murder ‘in person,’ so to speak,” Beth suggested.

  ” ‘In person’?” he echoed.

  “You know, while possessing someone else,” Beth said. “Maybe even using a bodyshell of his own or something. He must have been physically there to cause that kind of blunt trauma.”

  “I dunno,” Marcus replied in a dubious tone. “The bar was packed last night. We talked to a lot of people. No one says they saw anything out of the ordinary or heard any kind of struggle. You’d imagine that kind of assault would raise some suspicions in a place this crowded. Someone would have noticed something.”

  “That’s assumptive,” Beth replied. “We’re talking about a bu
nch of drunks and college kids out for a good time. I’m surprised they notice anything beyond the six feet surrounding them.”

  “I’m still not convinced. I think it’s much more likely that there was some sort of sabotage at play here,” Marcus said. “Maybe a booby trap of some sort. Someone who knows her routine and found a way to cave her skull in and try to make it look like a burglary.”

  “Sir!” a voice called from the bar’s entrance.

  It was one of the patrol officers Marcus had sent to search the block. He seemed to be carrying something in a bundle of bath towels, cradling it like a newborn baby.

  “What is it?” Marcus asked, getting up from the bar and walking over to the patrolman with Beth.

  “We found it in a postbox just down the street. It’s a broken lamp, sir, like you were describing. There’s even blood on it.”

  “Excellent!” Marcus yelled, clasping his hand down on the cop’s shoulder. “Good work, lad, thanks. Let us have a look at it.”

  He relieved the officer and took the bundle back towards the bar.

  “So it would seem the murderer was here in person, like I said,” Beth pointed out.

  “It would seem that way, yeah,” Marcus replied, his eyes downcast in mock shame. “That means we have a lead. We can check cameras in nearby buildings for anyone who’s out of place. Anyone who can’t be placed after the night of the murder. We need to know if Simon is out there using some poor soul as a meat puppet. Suggestions?”

  “I think we go over the witnesses once more,” Beth replied. “We need more specific accounts, especially now that we know what we’re looking for. Hammer down anyone who might have seen someone carrying a bundle or anything like that out the door. You want to get your guys to start rounding folk up?”

  “In the morning,” her partner said. “We can let everyone have a good night’s sleep before we prod them anymore. Besides, we need to still go over the facts we already have. Scrutinize anything we might have missed. Peter might even find something while we work. What do you say? Wanna lift back to the office?”