Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change

by Michael Kilman

  Chapter 10

  The First of Many

  The first thing that Major John Daniels noticed was the smell. He wrinkled his nose. He had seen a lot of bodies over the years, vacant husks with eyes staring wide and open at the endless chasms of emptiness that lay ahead for them. He had been in his share of battles, both before migration and after, had seen thousands fall from both conventional weapons and the H.A.D... But there was no getting used to that smell.

  Several of his men were taking pictures and bagging evidence from the crime scene. He couldn't help but notice that they were just like flies buzzing around the corpse. Daniels grimaced. He didn’t need some fortune teller from the lowers to know this would be the first of many deaths in the days ahead. Whoever did this was one sick fuck.

  The room was a mess. Several panels were open, and wires were sticking out of the walls. Parts and circuit boards were scattered around, but Daniels didn't think either of those things had anything to do with the murder. These engineers loved to pull everything apart and put it back together. There didn't appear to be too much of a struggle, which suggested that the victim either didn't see what was coming, or it was someone they knew.

  The expression on Patton’s lifeless face made him shudder. His features were frozen and rigid. If his heart were still beating, he would be screaming. It was like an old painting or photograph that capture a single slice of time. A work of art, from a certain point of view.

  He put on protective gloves. Blood crusted just under the bangs of Patton's hair. Daniels brushed it aside. On the top of his forehead, three marks stood out. The blood had smeared and run, and for a moment he thought he saw a pattern. Leaning forward, he saw the letters 'C. O. G.'

  “How long, Johnson?”

  “We think about 36 hours or so, Sir.”

  “Damn. How did it go unnoticed for so long?”

  “Until a few hours ago, the AI was completely disabled in this room.”

  Daniels scratched the stubble on his face. “Manhatsten.”

  The cities AI responded, “Sir?”

  “I need you to pull everything you can on the last 72 hours of Patton’s life. If there is any surveillance footage of his death, I want to see it as soon as possible,”

  “Sir, I have already compiled every piece of available data on Patton, James. Additionally, I have already constructed a personality profile of Patton, James and a list of suspects and motives.”

  “Good, have everything ready for me at my security station. Oh, and one more thing.”

  “Yes, Sir?”

  “What in the Hell is 'C.O.G.' and why is it carved in this man’s forehead.”

  “My apologies, Sir, I am not familiar with this abbreviation."

  Daniels frowned. Something occurred to him. The AI had compiled all the evidence he needed without a query. He tried to think of a time when it had done something like that before, but try as he might, he couldn’t. In the twelve hundred years he had worked with the AI, it had never taken the initiative like that before.

  There was something else too. Lately, the AI had been more... chatty. It reminded him of 17. He wondered what in the hell had prompted the change. Was that architect messing with the AI? Daniels had always been distrustful of machines, especially advanced artificial intelligence, but it was 1291 AC, and in all that time, the AI had done nothing to suggest it had any malevolent intentions. Still, he didn’t like it. He would need to ask some of the engineers a few questions about the personality change in the AI later. Patton's murder investigation came first.

  “Johnson, what was he working on?”

  “I’m not sure, shouldn’t we ask the AI?”

  The AI said, “Sir, Patton, James was working on data communication lines. He had filed a report that he felt he could increase the bandwidth of this line so that it would be more efficient in carrying data.”

  And that was the first time that Daniels had ever heard the AI respond without being directly queried. He felt a cold shiver down his spine. He liked none of this. Were Patton’s death and the AI’s new behavior related?

  “AI, why did you respond just now?”

  “I responded based on Johnson, Mark’s query.”

  “But he didn’t make a query to you. He asked my opinion if we should query you.”

  “My apologies, Sir, but I misunderstood the nature of the use of my designation.”

  Daniels was silent for a moment. He didn't move. A whole minute passed.

  “AI, I want you to run a full diagnostic on yourself and let me know if anything is... different.”

  “Could you define the parameters, ‘different’?”

  “Let me know if anything has changed in your system in the last 72 hours.”

  “Yes, Sir.” The AI fell silent.

  C.O.G., He knew that abbreviation from somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where. It was on the tip of his brain.

  There was a lot of theft, assault, and rape, mostly in the Lowers, but murder was not all that common in Manhatsten. Autopsies were even rarer. It would be tough finding out the exact cause of death. If Patton had used an alcove in the last week, the lingering effects of the alcove would mask any toxins or strange physiological conditions that might be present. The alcoves also did something to decomposition. Sometimes it took much longer for bodies to break down. Judging by the smell though, this wasn’t the case here. Patton was a Mid, so it was likely he had used an alcove recently.

  “How old was he, Johnson?” Daniels asked.

  “Only 71, Major.”

  “Damn shame, I liked this kid. What do you think killed him?”

  Johnson’s jaw opened and shut several times. He pursed his lips. Then, he cleared his throat and motioned a few feet to the left of Patton’s lifeless body. Daniels had not noticed the small lump of red meat sitting on the floor next to the body. Flies swarmed it. Now that he saw it, he didn’t know why he didn’t notice it; it was so obvious. It stood in stark contrast to the gray and silver of the spare parts and wires.

  “Holy shit, is that...” Daniels couldn’t finish. Was the lump of meat still quivering? Still beating? He blinked his eyes a few times and looked again. No, it was still, just as lifeless as the corpse it had come from.

  Johnson nodded. “We also found this lying on top of it, Sir.” Johnson produced a piece of paper. The words on the paper danced around wet blood stains and bits of tissue. It was strategic, intentional. The blood blotched to make some kind of sick art with letters dancing around it. Daniels read the poem. Then he read it again. His mind couldn’t grab hold of it. His eyes kept drifting back to the bloody lump on the ground that had been the man's heart.

  “Read this for me, Johnson.” He handed him the paper.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Greed and lust and fear and hate

  Left our world in a dismal state

  We will save our mother from the parasites

  We will sacrifice to put the world right

  We will bring about this city’s end

  So that no longer we have to pretend

  That man himself is good for the earth and soil

  It won’t be long now; we are coming, her wrath will uncoil.

  - C. O. G.

  It was a long moment before either man spoke. The world around them was being wrapped in plastic, photographed, and bagged for later examination. But these two men stood like mountain islands in a sea of silence. Only the smells seemed in motion.

  “Johnson, I want the entire city on heightened security alert. Double the patrols and place checkpoints at all the entrances between the Lowers, Mids, and Uppers. I want facial recognition scanners at every checkpoint, and I want those Runners I put on standby activated and patrolling the exterior of the city.”

  “Sir, isn’t this stuff you should tell the AI?”

  “Something about the AI isn’t right; it's acting strange. It’s probably nothing, but until I’m sure it’s nothing, I prefer to have you carry out my orders. No vidscreens. I want
you to hand deliver orders.”

  “Don’t you think that’s being a little... I mean that will take a while, Major.”

  Daniels unlocked his gaze from the bleeding lump of flesh and looked into Johnson’s grayish brown eyes. He held his gaze, and Johnson winced a little.

  “We will bring about the city’s end. That’s the line that bothers me the most. I’ve dealt with a few nutjob cults in the city over the years, Johnson. Hell, you’ve helped me root some of them out. But none of them ever threatened to destroy the city.”

  Johnson looked pensive. He too was struggling to unlock his eyes from the gore. One of the women moved over and bagged the heart. It left red streaks on her gloves and red streaks down the sides of the plastic until it settled into an unmoving mass.

  “I trust your judgment, Johnson, which is why I want you to recruit a few others to help. There aren’t a lot of men around here I can trust, especially now. But I need you to trust me and do your duty. Either the killer is a twisted sick fuck who is playing some kind of game, or there is a threat to the city. I’d rather plan for the latter and end up with the former. But we have to be careful.”

  Johnson nodded. “Yes, Sir.” He turned and left.

  Daniels trusted Johnson more than most of the security detail. They had worked together for four-hundred years. He had been in battle a few times and had even donned an EnViro Suit twice with Daniels to stop a raid from Lundon. Johnson was a good man, a reliable man, one who never complained about any of the orders. He needed more like him. He wouldn't find any. People in this city were so damned entitled.

  Daniels looked around at several others of his security personnel. There wasn’t much else to be done here.

  “Ruiz, take this body down to Josepher, tell him I want a full autopsy. Tell him to get every scrap of information he can out of it.”

  “But Sir, I am off duty in twenty minutes, and Josepher's on the other side of the city in the Mids.”

  Daniels sighed. Johnson had been off for over forty-five minutes. Had he complained? There was that entitlement. In his ancient military days, he wouldn’t have had to deal with such horseshit.

  “Are you shitting me, Ruiz? Off duty? Since when are any of us in security detail off duty?”

  “But Sir...”

  “Don’t ‘but Sir’ me. You can either follow orders, or I will have your ass out in an EnViro suit training new Runners so fast you’ll swear you have whiplash.”

  Ruiz obeyed and made no secret of his distaste for dealing with a dead body. Daniels supposed it might be because few of the younger generations had never seen a dead body.

  “Wallace, I want you to take that note up to the Chemist. Find out if there are any fingerprints on it, verify that the blood is Patton’s, and then have them find out what that paper is made of and where it came from, if possible.”

  Wallace didn’t argue, he was just about off duty too, but he had just seen Daniels put Ruiz in his place.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Daniels headed back for the lift. He had seen enough. The rest of his staff could clear up and analyze the mess. He stepped in the lift again and noticed something strange. The poster, the propaganda poster, was gone. Who could have taken it down? It had been up only minutes before.

  The door closed and he began his trip up to his command.

  He was glad to see the poster go. He hated those things. In fact, he couldn’t think of a single person who wasn't at least a little bothered by them. Maybe he would ask one of the Senators if they could keep the posters out of central command. Who was in charge of that shit, anyway?

  He let his mind drift for a minute it and centered on that heart. He couldn’t help but imagine it beating as he stared at it. He shook his head to clear the image, but it did not good. It was one that we wouldn’t soon forget.

  Something Travers had said returned to him. The missing people, did they have something to do with this? Low resources, a murder, missing persons. Something was happening, but how did he and his team get ahead of it? And what were they trying to get ahead of?

  The lift opened, and he stepped out. Security was busy. There was a lot of data to sift through. He moved back up into his post and reintegrated himself with the system. He wasn’t sure how long he sat in his chair, but the time passed and one day faded into the next.

  Then, Fallman stood from his station and approached his chair.

  “Major Daniels, Sir.”

  “Yes Fallman, what is it?”

  “Sir, I updated the command system and the heads up display for everyone with the new firmware. Would you mind if I finished the upgrades on your chair? It should only take a few moments.”

  “Right now?”

  “Well Sir, since I upgraded the rest of the system, if your station isn’t upgraded right away we could need a system-wide recalibration.”

  “How long are we talking?”

  “Oh, it should only take about twenty minutes to sync with the rest of the system.”

  "Fine, I'll grab something to eat."

  Daniels directed his thoughts left then right and released the shoulder clamps. Unplugged again, he stepped off the platform and headed back toward the elevator.

  The elevator door opened and as Daniels’s right foot crossed the threshold of the elevator entrance, noise erupted from behind him. He felt heat lick his back and felt the force of the thing push him forward into the elevator, the doors shutting behind him.

  In the event of an explosion, earthquake, or various other events that might damage the city and its people, the elevators and sky bridges went on lockdown. Usually, this was a good thing; it kept people protected from all kinds of terrible accidents. Now, face down on the steel grating, the lift door closed and locked itself shut behind him. The red emergency lights came on. It only took Daniels a single moment to realize he was locked in.

  “Son of a bitch, what in the hell was that?” he shouted.

  “AI what in the hell was that?”

  There was no response.

  “AI? Respond please.”

  Again, no response.

  “Goddammit, AI. I told you to run a diagnostic yesterday, not to shut yourself down.”

  Still no response.

  A moment of panic washed over Major Daniels. What if the AI was permanently damaged? Was there was some kind of sabotage going on? Had all of central security been destroyed by a saboteur?

  He took a breath and centered himself for a moment. Daniels picked himself up off the ground. Blood was trickling into his mouth. It was a nosebleed. He must have hit his nose on the floor when the blast knocked him forward. He checked his person for any other injuries, and he appeared to be all right.

  He checked his paranoia, putting it aside for a moment. It didn’t have to be an attack. A console could have exploded. The damn things were ancient, maybe that firmware update Fallman was working on went wrong? But that didn't seem right. The force of the explosion had been enough to knock him down; he doubted a console could do that. Gods, what if it was the whole system?

  His suspicions reasserted themselves. It seemed hard to believe that Patton’s death, the AI, and now this explosion were all separate events. Something was going on here.

  The good thing about the lift going on lockdown was that it didn’t move. It stayed where the lockdown occurred, and the brakes froze in place so the elevator could go neither up nor down. This meant that Daniels was still just outside of central security and that he could manually open the doors. It wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done.

  “Hey,” screamed Daniels. “Hey, what in the hell is going on out there?”

  There was no response. The elevator wasn’t soundproof, but if something serious was happening outside, he might not be heard. The worst-case scenario occurred to him. What if they were all dead? He pushed the thought away. No, if the blast had been that bad, he didn't think he would have survived it either. He was certain that at least someone was alive in there.

  “This is D
aniels, respond if you hear me.” He beat on the metal door with his fists, a futile gesture, but it was worth a shot.

  There was nothing for a few more moments, and just as he stopped his pounding and shouting, someone spoke up.

  “Yes Sir, I hear you.”

  Relief.

  “Who’s that and what’s happening?”

  “Sir, it’s Lieutenant Long and Sir, most of us are okay, but Fallman...”

  “Help me get this elevator door open. Pry it open from your side, and I’ll pry it open from mine.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Daniels wedged his fingers into the tiny opening where the elevator doors met. There wasn’t much grip, and he wasn’t sure that he could open it, but he pulled anyway. It didn’t budge, not even in the slightest.

  “Sir, I can’t get my fingers in there.”

  “Then get something to wedge in the door and pry it open.”

  Daniels looked around for something to pry the door on his side, but no luck. Later he would have to requisition emergency crowbars inside the elevators for every building in the city. The Senate would moan about resources, as they always did, but he thought if he just locked their asses in an elevator for a few minutes, they might see it his way.

  He slumped back against the wall. There was nothing he could do but wait.

  “Greetings, Sir, I am sorry that I was offline for so long. Let me help you with that door.”

  It was the AI. It had reactivated. The emergency lights switched off, and Daniels heard the hum of power return, and a large lock clicked. The elevator door opened. Daniels jumped up and charged into central security. His heart sank.

  His chair was gone, his station was still smoking from the explosion. Fallman lay on the ground surrounded by a medic and several others. Daniels squatted down at Fallman's side. His left arm and shoulder oozed blood from several wounds, and a few pieces of metal gleamed in his chest. Chunks of flesh were missing from his cheek and nose. He was breathing, but it was shallow and ragged.