Chrono Inquisitor (Gods Be Damned)

by Rien Reigns

  “I have an older sister.”

  “You ever threatened her?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, when I was a lot younger, though.”

  “Wish I could say that I’ve matured more than I have, but it’s sometimes better to accept who you are then it is to keep pretending you’re something you’re not. I’ll admit that my temper sometimes gets the better of me, but believe me, this old dog doesn’t have any bite left in him, not after all I’ve seen and done.”

  Ranger-son looked like he was either making a mental note or consulting his CerA.

  “Were you at the banquet dinner earlier?”

  “Yeah, same as everyone else.”

  Shep suddenly looked at me with new eyes.

  “You were there, weren’t you? I thought you looked familiar.”

  I gulped down the rest of my beer. Ranger-son had wanted me to remain quiet, and so that’s exactly what I was going to do.

  He must have come to that conclusion because he spoke up, “He was there undercover.”

  “Did Travis lose his tongue?” Shep asked suspiciously looking at Ranger-son.

  “He’s probably in link with someone regarding the case.”

  Shep seemed to accept that answer so he turned his attention away from me.

  “What about after the dinner, during drinks?” Ranger-son asked.

  “Yeah, I stuck around, socializing with everyone until Ms. Matsuzaki’s presentation started.”

  “I understand that she’s your main competitor and the one who stole the contract out from under you.”

  I caught Ranger-son’s not so subtle manipulation of events, but then again, it could be the truth.

  Shep took a drink, finishing off his beer, and then opened another one.

  “Ms. Matsuzaki won the contract fair and square. I got no grudges. It was stupid of Julius to tell me the job was mine before it actually was, and it was stupid of me to believe him when I should have known better. Though of course at the time Ms. Matsuzaki was engrossed in another project that wasn’t supposed to be done for another few months. No one expected her to even have the time to put in a proposal, but then that’s what makes her the new star in the biz.”

  “Since you brought up Ms. Matsuzaki,” Ranger-son said with a strange smile, “I understand that she won the contract for this resort eight years ago when you were believed to be a shoe in.”

  This is getting worse every minute. Next we’ll be visiting Sam to ask her some questions.

  “Yeah, that’s when she first really showed up in the private security field. Took the industry by storm. I mean the tech she comes up with. And at her age. Amazing. Did you know a part of her is in each of us?”

  “I didn’t,” Ranger-son said.

  “She used to work for ChronoGen. Helped design the security features of the mytes and CerAs.”

  I had a sneaking suspicion Ranger-son was lying. If anything he would have done his homework and come across Sam’s record. It’s not like it was sealed.

  “Can I be honest?” Shep asked.

  “Please do.”

  “Just between me and you, I got a schoolboy crush on her. She may be my rival, but she’s also my role-model. It was her theories on taking the human propensity for stupidity out of the CerA/Mnemosyne interface and letting them encrypt themselves that became the basis for their security backbone. She’s practically the reason why hackers can’t jack your mind. Though that doesn’t mean they aren’t still trying.”

  I raised a hand to the back of my head and rubbed the nape of my neck.

  Fuck! Could Sam be the one who hacked my shit? I’d forgotten she helped build the Crevasse, which means if anyone could bypass it, it’d logically be her. Should I be thanking her then? If it wasn’t for my pad going schizo I would have been blown sky high. Does that mean she knows what’s going on? Is she the hacker? Fuck! This is getting too complicated.

  “Do you know anyone who would want Mr. Beit dead?” he continued.

  Shep sighed and shook his head. “To actually want someone dead, there has to be something wrong with you.”

  “I can understand that, but on the other hand, what about Hitler, or Kremalakin? Are you saying that you aren’t glad they were eventually killed, or that you wouldn’t have stopped them if you had the chance?”

  “Hitler was way before my time. Kremalakin though…?” Shep shook his head like he was having a hard time sorting his thoughts. He put his hands to his head and stopped himself.

  All the sudden it was like I was linked with him. Like I was feeling what he was feeling. I felt an overwhelming emotion of sadness. Felt a knot in my throat. I felt like I was going cry.

  Then it was gone. I didn’t know why I felt that way. We weren’t linked so I couldn’t have been experiencing his emotions.

  “I was young when his reign of terror began,” Shep said with an unsteady voice. “He’s the reason why I left college prematurely, signed up for the armed forces. Am I glad he’s dead? Hell yeah. If anyone ever deserved to be killed, it was him. I joined the Trishulas in hopes I’d be the one to put a bullet in his head.”

  Two seconds ago it seemed like Shep was on the verge of bawling, now I was feeling like he wanted to bash some skulls. No doubt about it. Shep was a killer. I could see enough of myself in him to be certain of it.

  “Look,” Shep said, and sat forward. “I’ve killed people. More than I care to admit. But that was ages ago. I was a different person back then. Like I said, to want someone dead, there has to be something wrong with you.”

  He was lying. To himself as much as he was to us. He wanted to believe all that death was in his past, but trust me, as a man who’s killed, once you’ve done it, it only gets easier.

  On the one hand though, I did have a certain respect for the man. He was a Trishula. I’d wanted to join, but Sam and I had just started our lives together and we’d recently found out she was pregnant with Blyss. Sam had begged me not to fight in the war and I have to be honest, I didn’t even argue.

  Instead I got a job at Kala Health & Life Insurance as a data analyst. I escaped the trenches, but in the end I think I killed just as many people as I would have had I fought. On the debatable plus side, I survived. So did Cook.

  After Blyss was born, Sam took a job at H+ Innovations. Less than a decade later both our companies got bought out by an up-and-coming business, ChronoGen Technologies Incorporated. In some fashion or another, I’d worked for the company ever since. Same for Sam, except two decades ago she decided to go independent and started her own securities firm, Alpha Guardians.

  At times I wondered how different my life would have been had I joined the Trishulas. Truth be told, the thought didn’t last long. Ninety percent of them had been killed in combat. In the end though, they were the ones who brought down Kremalakin. The man before me was a war hero of the highest order.

  Ranger-son nodded in agreement with Shep’s assessment of taking a life. “I would agree, but you haven’t answered the question. Do you know of anyone who would want to kill Mr. Beit?”

  Shep shook his head. “I wish I could help, but no one comes to mind.”

  “Did he ever mention anything about threats made against him?”

  Shep shook his head again. “Julius had a temper and definitely burnt some bridges over the years, but never so bad as to warrant someone wanting him dead.”

  “What was his relationship like with his wife? Must not have always been easy being business partners. I understand that she sided against him in the decision to use your company over Ms. Matsuzaki’s.”

  Shep shrugged. “They were like any other couple as far as I know. They had their good times and their bad.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe that Mrs. Beit would want him out of the picture?”

  Shep laughed at that. “You must be joking. They’ve been together for longer than anyone I know. If she wanted him dead, trust me, she would have made it happen a long time ago.”

  “Well then,” Ra
nger-son said, rising to his feet. “We thank you for your generous hospitality and your assistance.”

  Shep rose to his feet. “No problem. Anything I can do to help.”

  Except you didn’t do shit, I thought. Neither of you did.

  I stood. “Thanks for the brew friend, next one’s on me.”

  “I’ll hold ya to it,” Shep said, and patted me on the shoulder. I’d seen it coming and braced myself, but I stumbled to the side anyway. It was like trying to stand against hurricane force winds. The man was a behemoth.

  “But I guess for now, you’ve had enough,” Shep said with a laugh.

  Yeah, like that was the fucking reason. There wasn’t even any alcohol in my system. Besides, I could have drank him under the table. Well, maybe. Two days prior I could have for sure. Before I got my resurrected body.

  I smiled and pretended it was funny. Then we said goodbye and went on our way.

  What a waste of time that was. I was beginning to wonder if Ranger-son was the real murder. He definitely knew Mrs. Beit. I already suspected they had rendezvoused in the gardens during Beit’s murder, but what if he was the one who murdered him? Say he and Mrs. Beit were lovers. By her own admission she was the true owner of the company. It seemed to me that her husband’s death would leave her in full control. She didn’t have anything to lose, and if he was her lover, he definitely had something to gain.

  If I was going to solve the case, I needed to investigate it on my own. I needed an excuse though for ditching dickwad.

  “Well,” I said, after quickly coming up with a possible plan. “That was…boring. If this is what it’s like to be a Ranger, I’m glad I’m not you. Cook was nice though. Friendly as hell. Think he’s our guy?”

  “Is this a game to you?” he said, back to his bitter disposition.

  “Sort of,” I said with a grin.

  “Well it’s not.” he barked. “We’ve got a murderer out there and we’ve got nothing. No motive. No real suspects. No idea if he’ll strike again.”

  “That’s my point. At the moment there’s nothing to suggest that whoever killed Beit has any intention of killing anyone else. Technically we don’t even know if Beit was actually murdered.”

  “He was murdered,” he said.

  “Oh? You holding back on me now, because last I knew we didn’t even know the cause of death.”

  “While we were having beers with Mr. Cook, I got a call from forensics. His mytes killed him.”

  “Bullshit. That’s not possible. They’re designed to protect people, not kill them. They’ve got fail-safes and shit.”

  “Exactly, and that’s why I say he was murdered. It looks like someone discovered a way to turn mytes into a weapon.”

  “But how?”

  “Coroner said the Chrono, CerA, and Mnemosyne-mytes all started attacking each other. Said the easiest way to describe it was like an overactive immune response. I say it was like a gods damned civil war. They attacked his brain. Sliced it up into tiny pieces. Could be it was some fluke and he simply ended up as collateral damage, but I think it was intentional. That he was the target.”

  “No fucking shit.” I felt a chill course through my spine. Maybe Beit was E3 after all. Or at the very least, a Corruptor. It’s probable he was trying to hack his own mytes and in the process fucked up royally. Triggered some sort of anti-tampering mechanism.

  On second thought though, I doubted it. I’d never heard of such a thing. Not that it wasn’t possible. Maybe he was just a really bad hacker and all the other Corruptors knew the way around it. But then why hadn’t I heard of it? I couldn’t recall Sam ever mentioning such a thing.

  “Wait a second,” I said, deciding to voice some of my questioning. “That doesn’t explain why his Arkhive was wiped.”

  “True. Techs are still trying to figure out what exactly happened, but their guess is that someone managed to install a virus into the mytes, and that it was this same virus which turned the mytes against each other, but before that happened, the Mnemosyne-mytes uploaded another virus, or maybe even the same one, to his Arkhive, deleting his memories. Techs are hesitant to go poking around. Afraid they might catch whatever the hell it is. With the resorts security systems going offline, his mytes attacking himself and uploading a virus, I think it’s safe to say Beit was murdered, and that it was planned. There’s one more thing, which is why I initially thought you were responsible.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “There was BabbleBru in his system.”

  “And only Inquisitors have BabbleBru,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you question Noble and Dewhurst?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. They weren’t involved. They arrived afterwards.”

  I hated to say it, but, “We should talk to Sam,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Ms. Matsuzaki, head of security.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if what you say is true, she’s the only one I know who could do something like that.”

  “You think Samsara killed Julius?”

  And right there, Ranger-son slipped up. He hadn’t said Sam. He’d said Samsara. And he’d said it properly, with a Sem pronunciation rather than Sam.

  I guessed he’d been so shocked by the implication of what I was saying, he’d forgotten to stick to the plan of feigning he didn’t know her that well.

  Sure, it’s possible he happened to know how to say it right, but from my experience in the eighty-plus years I’d known Sam, only two types of people knew how to say her name properly. Those who followed Eastern religions, and those who knew her intimately. Ranger-son didn’t come off has the Hindu type to me.

  “Not necessarily. I was just thinking that since she was in charge of making sure something like that never happened, well, she’d be someone who could figure out how it was done. And if she can figure out how it was done, there’s a chance she can figure out how to prevent it from happening again.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said.

  So much for my plan to get away from him, and my plan to avoid Sam at all costs.

  I’d also forgotten about going to my room and changing. That was a big mistake. I really could have used my vault for what was about to happen.

  20: Malfunctioning Machinery

  We got on the elevator to go down to the administrative hub of the hotel. Specifically the security offices.

  As soon as the elevator began its descent, I felt an overwhelming loss of orientation. My vision started to fade and it was as if my innards were attempting to claw their way out of my throat.

  To my surprise, Ranger-son reached out to help steady me. I didn’t want his help. I brushed him away and backed myself up into the corner of the elevator. Firmly pressed against the walls I tried to steady myself as bile worked its way up my esophagus. I massaged my throat as if doing so could ease it back down.

  “If you throw up,” he said. “I’m not riding with you ever again.” Emphasizing his point, he stepped away from me, backing himself into the opposite corner.

  Because the massaging was helping, I took a moment and scratched under my chin in a sort of ‘fuck you’ manner.

  “Either way,” I said, once I felt it safe to speak. “I’m taking the stairs from now on. No more elevators for me.”

  He shook his head like he didn’t believe me. “If you insist on running up and down hundreds of stairs, I won’t stop you, so long as you manage to keep up and don’t blow this investigation.”

  Me blowing the investigation? Me?!

  Suddenly I was feeling a lot better. I erected myself. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  I tried to control myself. Not very well, mind you.

  “Is this an investigation?” I asked. “Because it sure doesn’t seem like it to me. What the hell was that back there with Cook? Or Mrs. Beit? It’s like you’re not even trying, yet you keep jumping down my throat about me screwing this up.”

&nb
sp; He held out his hands. “Take it easy, partner.”

  “Partner?” I laughed. “We aren’t partners. For fuck’s sake, you thought I was the murderer. Oh, and you were all gung-ho when you thought it was me. Do you just don’t care about this case? Was I just an easy target? The Horsemen are on their way. Are you just waiting for them to swoop in and take control? Free you from this burdensome task.”

  I didn’t realize it as I was doing it, but during my rant I kept taking a step towards him. I wanted to punch him. I was close enough to him that I could see in his eyes that he knew what I was feeling.

  “You’re right. You’re absolutely right,” he said. “We need to talk to Samsara. She’ll explain everything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think it’s best if she explains things,” he said. “You seem to be feeling better though.”

  Whatever. Speaking to Sam was beginning to sound better than I had thought. I shook my head and went back to my corner.

  “I understand you recently had a baptism,” he said.

  “So.”

  “I hate getting baptized.”

  Luckily I was turned away from him so he couldn’t see me suppress my laugh. Decades later it was still funny for someone to say that phrase. It made me wonder who the hell had come up with the terminology anyway. It had probably been some young anti-religious kids and somehow it had caught on.

  I heard him laugh behind me, apparently he had a similar thought.

  “You know,” he said. “I used to love amusement parks. I could ride the roller coasters sun-up to sun-down. But then, oh, about six years ago, I got an assignment to take down a gang terrorizing a town. Turned into a bloody nightmare. I mean that literally. By the time the dust settled, the lifeguards didn’t think I was going to make it. Now, I can’t ride a roller coaster to save my life. Ain’t got the stomach anymore. Lifeguards say my gut’s a genetic match to what it was. Same with my brain. Mind-mappers say some synapse must have been damaged in the process, even though they ran every test imaginable and say my mind was unaltered.”