by Zachary Adam
He wasn’t entirely surprised his phone was going off. His glasses told him it wasn’t Niles, so he answered it as was his custom. “Därk.”
The unfamiliar woman at the other end of the phone had a voice like ice. “Agent. Are you having fun up there?” Vidcund kept his face expressionless as he stepped down from his ledge and made, rather quickly, for the door. This was an Agency-secured office building. However this person was looking at him, he would be safe indoors. “Who is this?”
“Nobody you need concern yourself with, I assure you. Are you having any luck with your search?”
“Who is this?” Greater urgency. Someone knew something they shouldn’t.
“You’re wasting your time. The real threat is not some dead doctor who dug up information he shouldn’t. It’s the living you need concern yourself with.”
“You understand I can trace this call.”
The woman sounded as innocent as a babe in church. “... What call, Agent?”
As he pulled the phone away to look at the dead screen and non-responsive controls, Vidcund could still hear her laughter on the other end.
03 – Cognitohazard
The Kraterburg Primary Facility was the semi-public headquarters of Agency Division; a nice, low-slung office block on the College of Judges campus in the heart of the sprawling metropolis. Beneath the public lobby, however, was a second lobby, feeding the underground facility where most of the real work in Kraterburg took place.
A panel above the reception in this underground lobby showed the shield-and-eye symbol of
the Agency Division along with its motto: Conserve. Contain. Control. Vidcund considered that. To him, and most of his fellow agents, that was the mission in a nutshell. Conserve reality (as normal people understood it) by containing and controlling abreality (which was to say, anything else).
While he hesitated to use the word personally,
paranormal effects and the technology derived from them was the source of Agency Division’s power – and his own. That that technology could be manipulated... it was among the few things in recent life to make him anxious.
“Ah. Good evening, Special Director Därk.”
The agent currently passing the threshold of the reception desk all but did a double take. He stopped, the customary response going unvoiced, and calmly turned and walked back to the receptionist, adjusting his shoulder-bag and peering at her through his glasses. The Augmented Reality interface scrolled information on her identity readily, updated wirelessly by his phone which had, also wirelessly, confirmed her identity through contactless RFID.
He covered the check for a name by adjusting the glasses to sit further down his nose. “… First day, Miss Bell?” “No, sir. I’ve been at this post for two years.”
He tugged on the holographic RIFD badge clipped to his lapel. “Black Header Bar is field operative. Two triangles for Special Agent.”
“Yes, sir. Your security credentials are outdated, but not expired. The reception system pulled up the correct information.” Bell cleared her throat. “It should be a silver header bar, now.”
She gestured to her display, which Vidcund could see outof-focus against the stainless wainscoting behind her. The Level 4 Atrium of the Kraterburg Facility was all steel and glass. Very modern, twenty years ago. Sure enough, there was now a slate-grey header bar over the digital representation of his badge. “Fair enough,” he said, as if this had all been a test, and carried on his way. “Let Deputy Facility Director Dowd know I’m on my way.” “A push notification was sent out automatically when you signed in.”
Vidcund stepped onto one of the four numbered travellators that spread out deeper into this level of the facility. They were below most of the original tunnelwork of the ancient capital, now, at least so far as the sections that could be accessed from the College of Judges’ campus. These much more modern tunnels had all the amenities, including sunlight-simulating florescent lighting, by the light of which the Agent was currently reading the latest updates on his investigation on an autofile.
The document, a piece of paper with registration marks along the top and right edge, was part of an ingeniously simple AR system, allowing him to superimpose any document he wanted onto the page, manipulating it exactly as though it were hard copy. He could even flip the paper over one way or the other to change the page, or scroll with gestures, so long as he was actually looking at it while he did so.
As it turned out, the unusual triskelion that had been spray-painted onto the rear door of the morgue had come to Research’s attention before. He used his stylus to redact several lines of griping on the part of the Archival Research agent who had prepared the report,
complaining about the difficulty of narrowing down such marks. Three-armed figures were common symbols, existing in the glyphic lexicon of most cultures the world over: Norse, Hindi, African, Celts, and so on. He got as deep into the report as understanding the origins of this particular figure, which seemed to be southern-coastal France, before he came to his stop and had to close the file. Stepping off of the motorized pedway onto a stationary side-corridor, he needed a moment to get his bearings. Level Four was a maze, a veritable warren of tunnels. Even in the administrative core region of the level, where the original planners had succeeded in a level of organizational design only vaguely imitated in the outer reaches, it could be a task and a half to find things. A part of him suspected this was by design, as some physical application of security by obscurity.
Someone as important as a Deputy Facility Director, however, usually had a corner office, at the intersection of two such corridors, and the door was in the base’s positioning network, so that it could be highlighted on Vidcund’s visual, just like the objective-of-the-moment in the hand-holding First Person Shooter videogames of the 2010s.
“Ah, Agent Därk. Glad you could make it.” The DFD was a curvaceous and well-tanned woman in her mid-30’s, of a coastal origin. Zvanesburg, maybe, Vidcund could assume.
He reached across to shake her hand, easing into a seat. “Stamatia. It’s not often people request to meet with me in person, anymore.”
“I thought, given the circumstances, it was appropriate.” The Agent cleared his throat. “I think I know why.”
Stamatia Dowd gave a soft frown. “I hate having my surprises spoiled, but I suppose in the Information Age, it can’t be helped. You’ve been promoted to Special Director of Task Force Creena.”
Vidcund heaved a sigh. For three weeks now, Gloria Creena had been off his radar screen. He still had contact with Niles Clayton, but with the detective also actively taking on other cases until there had been developments, Vidcund too found himself turning to other matters – Professor Johnson and his forbidden lore. “Surely the situation hasn’t become so far out of the ordinary that it requires its own task force.”
“You think depth-first, Vidcund. While your report from Thursday was correct in stating that we have no evidence for Gloria Creena being anything but quite deceased, there’s a disturbing pattern that is highly suggestive that the cult is reviving its practices, perhaps even increasing in size. Nothing supernatural, as yet, but there have been a spate in violent deaths that fit the profile.”
“The problem with the profile,” Vidcund argued, “is that it’s aggressively vague. Any death that involves any level of mutilation in which muscle tissue is separated from bone and can’t be accounted for as incidental trips the algorithms. I’d know, I helped design them. Also, three in a month is hardly a spate, in national terms.”
“All three cases were in the Terrwald Precinct, and two are being investigated by the relevant police groups as having cannibalistic elements.”
Vidcund sat up a little straighter. That was a pretty tight match to the profile. So tight, that he was curious as to why the system hadn’t alerted him directly. “Nobody’s ever made a task force because of a pattern.”
“You’re right. It gets more complicated. What do you know about Gloria Creena’s original arrest?”
Anfangsburg, depending on who you listen to, and was caught red-handed.”
“More than red-handed, Agent. The knife she had on her person at the time had all the hallmarks of the weapon used in every crime she was eventually convicted of. It was passed off to one of ours for analysis after the material – animal bone – triggered a red flag with one of our National Police Force plants. We still have it in our custody.”
“It had supernatural properties?”
“Every test, every indication, suggested that the knife was living, human tissue. However, there was a complication. The weapon had also been noted as consistent with ancient Terreran Geoglyphs. The precinct government of the Terrwald was sued by the White Keepers, who wanted the weapon turned over to a museum they ran, as they considered it an exemplar of their cultural heritage.”
Vidcund considered that for a very long moment. Such problems arose infrequently. The courts, headed as they were by elected Justices, tended to err on the side of public freedoms. This complicated Agency’s procedures, but there was a contingency for every eventuality. Somewhere.
“And a double was provided,” he surmised.
Stamatia gave the slightest nod. “A very, very close facsimile. It was stolen this morning. We have security footage.”
Vidcund was already manipulating his phone. “I’ll look at it when I’m given the chance. Is there more to the situation?”
“Yes. Consider your contact with the NPF compromised. We have reason to believe that he may have been the one who corrupted the drives at the morgue where Creena’s body went missing.”
“How’s that, now?”
“We finally managed to unscramble the drives
completely. The video footage was already deleted. As in, properly deleted, with the sectors back-written so that it couldn’t be recovered. Someone good with computers erased those files. Someone who was in the building after the crime was discovered. Only three sorts of people are so careful with digital media. One is our kind of people. The other is teenagers with nothing better to do.” There was an aggressive edge in the woman’s voice that was entirely too familiar in this building.
“The other is the kind they keep us around for.” The agent kept his face expressionless behind the black, square lenses. “… I’ll take care of him. One other thing.”
Dowd sat up more fully, her brow slightly furrowed. “Yes?”
Vidcund gestured with his new phone. “We’re going to want disbursements to have a look at their mobile security suites and bump them up a little. Someone fried my old phone remotely, and I already had that day’s security update.”
“Who?”
“I’m looking into it.” Vidcund said, more earnestly than any other commitment he had made so far. “I thought our smartphone antimalware suites were unbreakable.” “So did I, but logic would suggest that there’s not a lock in the world that can’t be picked.”
--The Pig and Pickle was one of maybe a dozen bars that got away with being open into the wee hours of the morning in Tererra, but it was the only one that offered regular patrons access to their wireless network, as long as you kept the booze flowing. Niles had kept himself in the green on a steady stream of Spanish coffee after an earlier evening of beer. He was tanked, but he’d considered the problem from nearly every other angle his sober mind could consider. Alcohol was, in neural terms, a lubricant, or so he had come to feel.
The strangeness of this security footage had been eating at him for three weeks now. Three weeks in which he had attended only minimal grooming, now sporting the beginnings of a scruffy beard. Even his boots, usually polished to a shine in spite of the rumpled nature of the rest of his daily clothing, were getting scuffed and rough around the edges. He slept little, and what sleep he had had was infected with the strong, hallucinogenic nightmares of a person a third of his age.
Still, the relative weakness of beer and the brandy in the coffee was balanced more or less by the caffeine, and he could keep enough brain power together in his corner booth to replay the footage once more.
It was a sweet mercy that the lights in the morgue’s cold storage room came on before the door of the drawercubicle in which Creena’s remains had been interred swung open. Damningly, there seemed to be no cause for either. There was no clutter to be disturbed, and indeed, nothing at all, be it body or shadow, to suggest a figure had entered the room, but the fact remained that the lights had turned on, and that the lever on the door affected its motions before the door itself swung open. In similar autonomy, the sliding drawer upon which the suspect-victim was presently resting slid to its fullest outward extent. The whole thing looked like the result of B-Movie special effects, but for the fact it was, to his layman’s analysis, unedited security-camera footage.
The outbreak of strangeness abruptly ended as Creena sat up. To Niles, this was the very least surreal part of the footage from the various cameras in the building – at least, those which showed any activity whatever. She sat up, as one sits up in bed when preparing to exit it, with all the same grogginess. She rubbed her throat as though it was sore, and it probably was, being as it had been one of the sites of lethal wounds that, in the coroner’s report, had left her very much dead.
When she retracted her hand again, Niles paused the replay. He was certainly no expert in video manipulation, and most of what you saw on television for video enhancement was sensationalized fiction. He could only zoom in on the area of her neck, and apply some automated filtering to reduce some of the sensor noise.
The sight of her perfectly intact neck was more perplexing than the question of however the doors had come to be open, or the activation of the lights. This was not a thing that jived with his understanding of the possible. He had seen a death faked so well that it passed medical examination once before, but open wounds? Lethal wounds, rubbed off like cheap stage prosthetics? It was like the block of ice that had been sitting in his stomach all evening slumped into his bowels, as it had done every other time he had viewed these few seconds.
Nothing he could do to the footage could convince him of his lying eyes anymore. Something had gone seriously wrong with the way physics manipulated biology. As a consequence, a small part of the security blanket Niles clung to, the fabric of reality, had been torn away.
He flagged a server over for a refresh on his coffee, and closed out this particular line of footage.
--“Thank you very much for coming, Detective Fougasse.” Vidcund was pleased to finally find an academic with a handshake, in the form of the Consultant Curator of the Museum of Tererran Spirituality. “Professor Coultier, it was my pleasure. I must thank you for your continuing help with this investigation.”
The Professor was a young man. Almost impossibly young for the titles and accolades at his disposal, being merely in his mid-20s. He had a shock of prematurelywhite hair owing to a deficiency in his body’s
pigmentation, and sported a rich tan unusual to the profession, but growing less so in the age of bottled sunlight and vanity. Vidcund’s practiced eye could detect no artificial quality in the glow – Malvolio Coultier did more than his share of work out-of-doors. This was unsurprising as he headed the Saffron Academy, and often oversaw their archeological exercises himself – more than a few of which had been funded by Agency themselves. “You of course know Professor Donnovan Kline.”
“Charmed, I’m sure, Detective.” Kline’s voice, issuing from the too-tall, too-pale figure beside Malvolio, was as silk on glass.
Even without his suspicions, and the long-running history of interactions between Agency Division and Professor Kline, everything about Kline rubbed Vidcund the wrong way. He was an anachronism, twenty years late in his fashion and about a century in mannerism, with an ef
fete handshake and annoying, ambiguous accent that seemed to have elements of every major European dialect, as well as seeming familiar-but-foreign to every region of the archipelago itself. Vidcund forced a smile to the best of his considerable acting ability. “I’m simply here to review the security footage from that evening.”
“Of course. This way, please.”
--The footage only continued to become weirder and weirder as time elapsed. Niles still couldn’t find the frame where the second figure entered the building – and had looked several hours backward in the record. A man, about 6’3” from his build, was about to round a corner in the corridor that lead to the exit, as Gloria headed in the direction of the door – and there was no good reason why he should be in the building at all. He was masked, from what the detective could tell, but he always seemed to occupy a field of poor focus in the frame, as though something had gone wrong with the auto-focus circuitry on the security cameras. He wasn’t in the shot of the camera that faced the corner from the opposite direction, either. It was as though the edge of the corner had itself obscured him from view. Like he had stepped onto set from the wings.
As he had a dozen times previously, Niles watched him round the corner to cut off her escape. There was no sound on the recording, but he liked to think that Gloria and the masked man had exchanged words. There certainly seemed to be a pause, before she had began to flee him – a charged pause, full of tension.
--Thousands of people had visited the exhibit where the Living Knife had been kept on the day that it disappeared. Before Vidcund could even start to process them all through the various identification databases he had at his disposal, he had to at least narrow the field.
The best hope he had was to catch a particular person in the act – but of course, if things were that simple, there would be no need for direct Agency intervention, task forces, or Special Directorships.
Not that he minded the promotion and the associated pay raise. Still, Special Director was a temporary position at best. Nailing down Creena, though... that could earn him something more permanent.