by Jason LaPier
Runstom added the three numbers in his head. “I would think it’d be 12.”
“Oh yeah, well that’s another confusing thing. These are numbers, but when you put quotes around them, that makes them strings. A string can be any number of characters, and when you use a plus operation on two strings, you concatenate them.” He held out his palms facing upward and slid them together, so that his pinky fingers touched. “The two strings become one long string.”
“Right, of course,” Runstom said and took a step back, pulling his eyes away from the maddening notebook.
“Anyway,” Jax continued before Runstom could come up with a reason to escape. “This line 70 never even gets executed. Because if you look at line 60, it says, ‘if one is greater than zero, then go to line 80’. Well, one is always greater than zero!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “So this code right here is always going to skip line 70 and go straight to line 80.”
Runstom was filtering out most of what Jax was saying, but a thought crossed his mind. “So it’s like a smokescreen.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Jax seemed to chew on that for a second or two. “Or more like a big wad of tangled-up wires, that all need to be unraveled so you can figure out which ones are connected to anything and which ones aren’t.”
Runstom was quiet for a moment. “Well,” he said, shrugging. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do to help.”
“Nope.” Jax’s fingers tapped away violently. “Probably not.” With that, he hopped up and sprinted to the bathroom.
The ModPol officer went out for a couple of hours. He knew he probably shouldn’t be out wandering around, being that Space Waste was on the hunt for him, but he figured that since he knew they were looking for him, he had the advantage. He watched his back for tails and crisscrossed through the crowded streets of Grovenham, sailing his way through the sea of stout, white-faced people.
He came upon a park block and thought that maybe the artificial groves of trees would help clear his mind. He went inside and was surprised to find it much less crowded than the street. A few people strolled down the faux dirt pathways, many of them in their later years. Runstom trekked through the park and after a few minutes, found himself caught in a light, artificial rain.
It wasn’t particularly cold, and it wasn’t heavy, but the general wetness was mildly uncomfortable, so Runstom headed for a gazebo he spotted farther down the path, sitting in a clearing of trees. As he walked up and found himself a seat on a bench, he started thinking about the rain talk he once had with Jax. He realized that the rain he was caught in was probably a scheduled event, and that would account for the low occupancy of the park.
An older couple approached the gazebo and sat down on a bench across from him. Apparently Runstom wasn’t the only one to appreciate a light rain and a vacated park. They spoke in soft tones to each other from time to time, but mostly they sat quietly, hand in hand, staring out at the rain. He tried to share their sentiment in spirit, tried to enjoy the rain, but it was too much like water from a faucet, smelling clean and lightly metallic and chemical-like. Not like the wet, musty smell of genuine planetary precipitation.
Runstom felt a little awkward now that someone else was there, and he felt a compulsion to find something to be occupied with. He dug out his notebook. He had lost his original notebook back on the prisoner barge, but had made copies of all his notes for Jax, who, thankfully, managed to hold on to them. During the few weeks they spent on the superliner, Runstom realized the benefit of having a backup copy of the notes and began to re-copy the important bits into a new notebook. Ever since then, he and Jax would periodically lend each other their notebooks, so they could make their own copies up to date. Of course, their copies differed. Runstom’s notes contained details about people that in all likelihood were extremely trivial, but could possibly be identifying elements. Jax had no such interest in tracking such an intricate level of detail on individuals they’d encountered, but he did track technical details that Runstom couldn’t even understand, let alone see their importance. In the interest of being thorough, he asked Jax to mark the most relevant and valuable information so that he could copy it without losing his mind trying to duplicate everything.
He turned to the pages where he’d last written, as that’s where his bookmark was, but then realized he didn’t really want to review recent events. He felt like he’d had enough going around in circles with the few solid facts they knew right now. He flipped back to the beginning of the book. The notes he took from the initial investigation. The event seemed to have happened a whole lifetime ago.
Thinking about the investigation at block 23-D made him wonder what McManus and Horowitz were up to. He wondered if they missed Runstom, or if they were just glad to be rid of their awkward, green-skinned co-worker. He thought of George Halsey, and allowed himself to be sad that the galaxy lost a few good people on that prisoner barge. Halsey was always an asshole, but on the inside a good cop was buried under defense mechanisms and stifled emotions originating from years of always getting the short end of the stick, despite all the dedication and loyalty you could ask for. He hoped that back on some Modern Policing and Peacekeeping outpost, they recognized Officer Halsey for his better qualities posthumously. A hole appeared deep beneath his sternum as he realized that their friendship may have been born from some kind of bond between rejects, but it had become a lot more than that. He cursed himself for not realizing it while the man was alive.
He returned his thoughts to his notebook. His original notes had listed the full name and age of every single victim of block-23D, along with their occupation and cause of death. When he made the first copy for Jax, he had made sure to include those names, and once he began re-copying the notes, he made sure to save the names again. So much of this case seemed to be unrelated to the victims. That was a giant, gaping hole in their investigation. The victims almost always have something to do with the crime. Nobody goes through this many hoops, pulls this many strings, to kill off a block of people at random. Sure, there are some psychopaths out there, but this attack was so deliberate, so focused. So precisely planned.
Runstom ran over the list of names three times. None of them were ringing any bells, no matter how badly he wanted them to.
For some reason, he thought of the word obfuscation. The smokescreen – or as Jackson said, the tangle of wires – that the operator was trying to unravel, trying to see order among the chaos. The list of victims was like that. One victim was relevant; one victim was the real target. The rest served only to obfuscate the details of the crime. Runstom should have realized this fact from the beginning; but then again, he was just an officer trying to play detective.
In a murder investigation, when you have no leads on a suspect, you start looking at the people closest to the victim. The ModPol detectives, Porter and Brutus, seemed to look at the block of over thirty people collectively. To look at them as individual victims was too daunting a task. But then again, there was no standard procedure for dealing with that kind of homicide. No precedents had been set by previous mass-murder cases. Especially not in domes, in the civilized world. In deep space, gang-related crime was the only thing that came close, and gangbangers didn’t bother covering their tracks. In fact, most of the time, they let it be well known who was responsible for the mayhem left in their wake.
Runstom stared at the list of names one more time. A proper investigation would involve multiple detectives delving into the lives of each of these victims. He didn’t have multiple detectives at his disposal, or even access to the details of any of these victims’ lives, other than what was written in his notebook. He only had Jax, the LifSupOp and alleged murderer. They were coming at this case from the wrong side, and he feared that eventually they really were going to hit a dead end. They had been caught up in the moment, following each new clue as they found it, never looking back. It wasn’t a real investigation. And it was just a matter of time before they’d get brought in by ModPol a
nd would have to face the music.
When Runstom got back to the room, he found Jax passed out on one of the beds, notebook clutched tightly in his arms. He pulled on the notebook, managing to wriggle it free from the operator’s grip. Jax rolled over in his sleep.
The notebook was folded over, and Runstom looked at the last page. A dark, multi-lined circle highlighted: ZZZ-356201-RG
He flipped back through a few pages, but the chicken-scratch was difficult to make out, and what he could read he didn’t understand anyway. He looked at Jax and thought about waking him up. The operator was sleeping hard, and Runstom wasn’t even sure if he could wake him if he wanted to.
He tossed the notebook on the desk and decided to take advantage of the fact that they had rented a room for the night. The way things had been going lately, he didn’t know when the next time that he would have the opportunity to sleep soundly in a good bed might be.
“It’s the manufacturer’s fake block code,” Jax said. “See, blocks are labeled with an alpha dash number dash alpha. Dome, sub-dome, block. So block 23-D is actually C-23-D, but we usually just refer to it as 23-D, because everyone knows we’re talking about dome C, which we know as Blue Haven.”
“Okay,” Runstom said. “So the ZZZ part refers to some dome ZZZ?”
“Right. Well, yes and no. The ZZZ is the dome designation, but there are no domes called ZZZ on any planets. See, when a manufacturer rolls out a new Life Support system, they don’t know what dome, sub-dome, and block it’s going to be sent to. And they have to run a bunch of tests on it before they can ship it off somewhere. So they give it a dome number of ZZZ. As soon as you see that, you know it’s a fake. A test code.”
“Gotcha.” Runstom hoped that this was going somewhere useful. “So what about the rest of it?”
“That’s the good news,” Jax said, grinning. “That seemingly random sub-dome identifier.” He looked down at the page and read off the number. “3, 5, 6, 2, 0, 1. Every plant has a unique identification number. It’s a standard, agreed upon and accepted by the different companies that do systems fabrication.”
“So the number is a reference to a specific factory?”
“Yup,” Jax said, smiling. The optimism on his face and in his voice was infectious, but Runstom had been through too much to get his hopes up just yet. “And if we get to a library, we can find a directory that indexes all those identifiers,” the operator continued. He pointed at the terminal. “The programmer who wrote this code obtained his test system from a specific plant, and now we can find out which plant that was.”
Runstom nodded. It was better than having a whole planet to scour, but still seemed to leave things a little too wide open. “So you’re thinking the programmer is, or was, an employee at this plant?”
“Well, it’s how I would do it,” Jax said, shrugging. “That’s the easiest way to get access to a system like that.”
“Okay.” Runstom figured it was best to play along since this was all they had, and it was better than nothing. What other choice did they have? He pretended to be satisfied with their only option and did some thinking out loud. “If we can get in and get talking to the right people, we might be able to find out if there were any employees that worked for a suspiciously short amount of time there. Would they have tested the program on a system inside the plant?”
“Possibly,” Jax said. “But I think they might have tried taking it off-site to work on it. And then brought it back when they were done.”
“So in that case, there’d have to be some kind of record of it. Checking out equipment, checking it back in.”
“Yeah, most likely.”
Runstom was making notes. “Okay, good.” He looked back over his notepad. “What about RG?”
“Arr-gee?” Jax said absently as he gathered some things together.
“At the end of the ID. ZZZ-356201-RG. What does the RG mean?”
“Well, normally that’s the specific block within a sub-dome.” Jax stood quiet for a few seconds, thinking. “I’m not sure what it means on a test system. Maybe when we get to the library we can find that out.”
“Ah, the fab-combination,” Jax said, pulling his head out of a book. “This is very good!”
The Grovenham Central Library wasn’t anything like the library Runstom frequented back at ModPol Outpost Gamma. The precinct library had been very compact and largely digital, though there were a few shelves of physical books and periodicals. He’d spent most of his time there at work desks and terminals, cross-referencing events and notes related to specific crimes that caught his interest – both solved and unsolved – and studying the reports and the video and audio evidence. This dome library by contrast was almost entirely populated by physical books, despite the fact that all literature was generally consumed by domers electronically.
The library was also fairly well occupied by readers. In some spaces, small groups of people gathered, having hushed but spirited discussions over the subject matter surrounding them. It only just occurred to Runstom that a common place like the library might be a natural socialization point for domers. He’d always been alone when he visited the library back at the precinct, and had associated it with escape and solitude, not a place for people to commingle.
Once Runstom and Jax had found the relevant materials, the library’s patrons melted into the background as they furiously searched for the information they desperately needed to make their next move. Jax’s voice had broken a long silence.
“What combination?” Runstom was flipping through a manufacturer directory, trying to find the 356201 ID in the index. Rather obnoxiously, the listing was sorted alphabetically by company name, rather than numerically by ID, so he’d been flipping and scanning for almost twenty minutes. The pages were not paper, which he’d encountered very rarely on visits to environments with enough atmosphere to support actual plant-matter – such as Terroneous. Instead these pages were the standard, everyday, all-purpose plastic that everything in a dome was composed of, from candy wrappers to clothing to buildings.
“Well, apparently, during the fabrication process, the Life Support systems take a certain path,” Jax said, paraphrasing his book. “They come down an assembly line, then they get imprinted with their core code set, then they get a physical inspection, and finally a system-level inspection. But it’s not always the same from one to the next. They mix it up so that problem areas are easier to find. So that different inspectors are inspecting different fabrication and imprinting lines. The last two letters of that ID string represent a combination code.”
“Okay,” Runstom said, only half paying attention, still scanning the index. Another reason they had to come to a building full of physical books was that the information they needed wasn’t actually available in any electronic form. The corporations that were located on colonized planets such as Sirius-5 were required to make all of their manufacturing process details public – along with their organizational structure and finances – but most of them weren’t happy about it. So rather than provide the required data through one of the digital networks, they complied with the transparency regulations by obtusely printing physical books and distributing a handful of copies to the public library.
“Don’t you see?” Jax grabbed Runstom’s arm, but not his attention. “The system that was used to test the program had a fab-combo designated ‘RG’. That means, there was a specific assembly line that it came down, it was imprinted by a specific system-imprint operator, it was physically inspected by one specific inspection team and one specific inspector ran system-level tests.”
“Ah ha!” Runstom said. “I got it!”
“Oh,” Jax said. “Good.” He sounded disappointed. “I guess I don’t have to explain in detail for once,” he muttered.
Runstom ignored the comment and read out of the book. “Vitality Systems, Incorporated. Plant number 11.”
“Oh, that. You found the plant ID? Does it give a location?”
“There’s another re
ference here.” Runstom flipped through some pages. “Okay, here we go. It’s in Industrial Sub-Dome A, Grovenham.”
Jax lit up. “That’s only a short mag-rail trip from here!”
“Let’s roll,” Runstom said. “You can explain that whole fab-combo thing to me again on the train.”
The mag-rail had deposited them in the center of aptly-named Industrial Sub-Dome A. From there they’d taken the walkways to the main office of Vitality Systems, Incorporated. The VSI plant occupied roughly a quarter of the entire sub-dome, so the main office wasn’t far away from the mag-rail stop.
Runstom had been anxious to flash his credentials upon arrival, but Jax had managed to talk him out of pulling them out first thing. The operator wanted to have a chance to try a less hostile approach.
“So that’s the story,” Jax said to one of the Sirius-5 plant managers that had come out to greet them. “I’d signed up for the exchange program as part of the Continuing Education Training requirement we have in the LifSup department in Blue Haven. But somewhere between there and here, I lost track of the paperwork.” He shrugged sheepishly and murmured, “It’s my first interstellar trip.”
The office itself was small and Jax felt the ceiling looming just above his head, though it seemed to afford the squat Sirius-Fivers ample room. The plant manager was a woman in her mid-fifties, with shoulder-length black hair and the same beige-white skin that everyone on the planet had. Her face registered a mix of emotions as Jax talked: annoyance, suspicion, exasperation, and then finally turned positive at the mention of education.
“I think the training programs are very important,” she said. “But it’s just that the office staff couldn’t find any record of you in our system. We’ll have to d-mail Blue Haven and have them send us a verification.”
“D-mail all the way to Barnard-4 is going to take days,” Runstom muttered.
“Ah, that’s true,” Jax said. The manager gave Runstom a sideways look and Jax gave a short laugh to regain her attention. “You’ll have to excuse my sponsor, he’s just looking out for my best interests.”