by JK Ellem
Shifting his light up and across the naked abdomen and then to the chest revealed two small mounds of underdeveloped, adolescent breasts, blackened and bruised. Cruel fingermarks obvious. A girl, Kobe thought to himself. This realization tightened something deep within Kobe’s gut, like a snake constricting itself around his stomach.
She was completely naked, yet the upper body was covered in shades of deep purple and yellow and an assortment of cuts, bruises and contusions. A story of pain and suffering then eventual death.
Once at the Law Enforcement Academy, or LEA as it was known, Kobe’s entire first-year class had to sit through the complete anatomical dissection of a human cadaver, a harsh welcome to first-year medical physiology and gross human anatomy. Whilst nearly all of Kobe’s classmates scattered for the exits, to throw up in the trash receptacles in the corridor, Kobe stood unflinching right next to the medical technician as he dove in, elbow deep into the chest cavity, lifting out vital organs and entrails, wet with fluid, glistening under the surgical lights. It didn’t seem to bother Kobe, the sight of blood and gore. Whilst each organ was removed and held up for examination, Kobe wondered how everything inside the human body managed to stay connected and upright as people moved and went about their day. With such a jumble of connecting tissue, slippery organs and tubes, it was a wonder everything didn’t just sink to our ass and slide out in one wet, meaty discharge.
Kobe lifted the plastic further, exposing a little more of the small-framed body, and saw bright red abrasions around her left wrist: ligature marks where perhaps she had been tied with rough cord or rope. Shining his light back up to her head, he lifted away the blood-matted hair to reveal the same red, abrasive marks around her throat.
Strangulation?
Maybe partial strangulation, he thought, repeated over and over, without actually killing the victim. Just enough to bring them to the brink of unconsciousness before they were released—before the process started all over again.
To Kobe, the girl couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old, yet through her injuries, he could see that around her lips and eyelids, garish makeup had been applied to make her look much older than she was. Maybe because the victim looked only a few years younger than him and that he had just turned 22 years old was why he felt some partial connection.
Lifting the girl’s arm, Kobe could feel a slight warmth seep through the fine skin of his gloves, like some of her remaining life essence was transferring to him in a last-ditch effort to preserve itself. Rigor mortis, the stiffening of the muscle tissue after death, was minimal. She had not been dead for more than a few hours at the most.
Kobe wondered how she could have ended up here, like this. At some point in her young life, someone had loved her like a daughter, nurtured her as only a mother could, raised and cared for her. But now all life was gone, torn so violently from someone that was so innocent. But this seemed beyond just pure violence. From the extent of the injuries, it was obvious that someone had taken their time, in a long, drawn-out act of pleasured torture. They just didn’t want to kill the girl. They wanted almost to experiment on her, inflicting layer upon layer of pain and suffering until eventually the heart just gave up and stopped. Her pain was someone else’s pleasure.
Kobe stood up and rubbed the sudden ache he felt in his legs and took in the surroundings. The smell of decay, rotting food and urine hung in the air like a fog that stung the back of his throat and sinuses. The alleyway was narrow, hemmed in by walls of rough crumbling brickwork, stained with grime, filth and mildew. There was the constant sound of dripping water as waste seeped from cracked and twisted downpipes that were buckled with age and ran up the walls on each side to the roof guttering high above.
On one wall in fluorescent orange, someone had sprayed their words of wisdom or maybe defiance. Octagon is a fallacy. It’s all a lie. They had even taken the care to insert the apostrophe correctly. A rebellious, troubled but grammatically correct artist. Kobe smiled.
In some parts, moss grew on the ledges of bricked-up windows and in the crevices of crumbling plaster. Underfoot, the damp cobblestones glistened and dark puddles reflected back the flashes of lightning from overhead. The old cobbles sloped into a central gully where the runoff collected, forming a stream of oily waste that cut through the middle of the alley before running into a heavy storm grate in the middle near where the body lay.
The stench of decay seemed to cling to your skin, altering your chemistry.
Against one wall, a zigzag of rusted ladder work was bolted that climbed upwards like a twisted metal vine before finally disappearing into the darkness above. The constant chatter of people and the sticky wet sound of traffic could be heard spilling over the rooftops and down into the alley below, where Kobe stood.
A myriad of cheap food stores backed directly onto the alley, and despite it being almost midnight, the throng of people, hurrying to get home or catching a quick meal, never ended. Like rats, they came out at night to fill their bellies with coarse processed meat, rice and starchy bland noodles. The smell of food mixed with the reek of the alley made Kobe want to vomit.
Precinct 13 was a maze of grimy back streets and alleyways like this one that intertwined into the size of six city blocks, just a few miles from Central City. It was far enough away that the stench didn’t reach the city but close enough to still cast its shadow that pulled in the unsuspecting city people. Kobe had only been out of the Law Enforcement Academy for less than twelve months, but this was his third visit to Precinct 13. On his first visit, he was nearly killed.
Precinct 13 sat on the fringe of the city limits and seemed to attract the dregs of society. It was a hive to petty thieves, drug dealers, and black market racketeers, who traded, lived and hid amongst the Precinct’s network of eateries, back streets, dark alleyways and connecting rooftops. From real meat to fake snakeskin, companionship to love, pain to pleasure, all could be bought, stolen or traded amongst the filth and depravity that made up this depressing neighborhood.
Crime takes root and festers at the raw edge. Like a disease, it first infects at the cut, the bleed point. If the city had a cut, a wound where corruption, evil and depravity could seed itself to then germinate, Precinct 13 would be that cut.
Except for Precinct 13, crime throughout New Los Angeles was virtually nonexistent. But this hadn’t always been the case.
Kobe, being an only child, didn’t really understand what this new corporate controlled world was about. He didn’t really care, as long as there was enough food on the table and both his parents were happy. And that was the same for nearly everyone. Back then, people just didn’t care anymore about the politics or a new global-warming summit or which country was dropping bombs on whom. The quality of life was so depleted that all they cared about was their own families and what they needed to earn, scrounge and perhaps steal to get by and survive.
People had had enough of a world racked with debt, rising unemployment, and levels of crime that were spiraling out of control. They wanted real solutions and real action from their leaders, but all they got in return was the same political rhetoric and broken promises broadcast from the mouths of the pixelated talking heads. Public services, healthcare and living standards continued to deteriorate whilst taxes, government waste and politician’s salaries continued to reach new lofty heights.
It wasn’t so much an uprising when the system finally broke. It was more of a complete and total takeover of all the world’s economies by the eight largest and most powerful global corporations. They simply banded together, pooled their reach and control and rejected the centuries old system that governments were needed to rule the world. Under increasing overpopulation, food shortages, government corruption and government waste, the leaders of the most powerful eight corporations in the world decided enough was enough. They took control, threw out the politicians, and disbanded all levels of government, replacing it with corporate efficiency, accountability and sustainable management.
At the nucleus of this global conglomerate stood one central entity, Octagon, that controlled and oversaw the other eight corporations. Octagon wasn’t considered to be a corporation in its own right as much as it was a collective representation of the other eight. It sat as a singularity, but was represented by a director from each of the eight corporations within the group forming the “Collective.” These faceless directors were never seen, nor were their identities ever known.
Yet all global resources, total production, infrastructure and amenities were placed in the hands of these people and this led to efficiencies and governance, whereas prior, reckless mismanagement and wastage by all levels of government had bled the Earth dry.
Some speculated that Octagon was its namesake because it was made up of eight global corporations. Others said it was named that because it now controlled what they termed the eight facets of society: food, shelter, information, medical, science and technology, public order, production and distribution. Famine, poverty and even war were all solved under Octagon.
It made sense to Kobe to replace the inefficient and wasteful machinery of government with companies to better manage the Earth’s resources. Yet crime still existed; it could never entirely be wiped out. Kobe thought maybe it was just in our DNA, our genetic makeup. No matter how far we had come, advances in science, medicine and technology, that black seed buried so deep in our subconscious could never be reached and eliminated. It was our failing, the taint that made us human.
Looking down at the body, the victim of someone’s sadistic pleasure, Kobe wondered if society could ever rid itself of evil.
Something more sinister was at play and it made his stomach twist even more. There was something truly sickening when violence was perpetrated on the innocent, especially the young and defenseless.
There was a sudden “beep” and vibration at his hip, and Kobe looked down and unclipped a small black handheld device from his belt. Notifications were starting to land. He glanced at the small luminous screen on his Personal Data Assistant, or PDA, and scrolled down the list of messages. A small, saucer-shaped icon blinked in the upper left corner of the screen; a Law Enforcement Drone, or LED, was inbound. Whilst drones played an ever-increasing role in law enforcement, Kobe never felt really comfortable with them hovering above him, watching his every move. He often wondered how many actual eyes were scrutinizing him through the single eye-in-the-sky that spied down on him as he worked.
Thousands? Maybe millions, he thought.
Crime By Drone or CBD was on the increase, that much he knew for sure. Two days ago, he’d attended a crime scene where a woman had been killed, shot dead whilst standing on the balcony of her apartment by a weaponised drone that was hovering outside, twenty floors up, waiting for her to emerge. It turned out that her vengeful ex-husband took an extreme disliking to her new boyfriend, so he remotely piloted his own self-built drone to her high-rise. CBD was becoming a difficult fact of life for police to cope with. Everyone from school kids to vindictive ex-employees were building their own drones and putting them to malicious use.
There was a high-pitched whine from above, and twin conical beams of bright halogen light cut through the darkness of the alley and lit up the ground where Kobe stood. Covering his eyes, Kobe looked up as the drone dropped vertically down into the narrow channel of the alley. The twin shafts of light landed on then rotated over the plastic-wrapped body as the drone perched itself in a hover just above Kobe’s right shoulder, like a large, mantis-like mechanical insect. The drone was the size of a manhole cover, made of armored polycarbonate, and was powered by low emulsion tilt-jets that pivoted from each of its four claw-like arms. The LED’s main role was to be first on the scene to offer backup to law enforcement resources deployed on the ground, especially in hostile locations. It would provide defensive cover as well as threat assessments to the officers and relay vital crime scene information and status updates back to HQ for other inbound drones or officers to follow. A drone could be deployed to a crime scene and offer protection much faster than any other law enforcement resource.
This was one of those rare occasions where Kobe was thankful that the drone was there, covering him, watching out for him in this godforsaken place.
Like every other public service, law enforcement was now controlled by Octagon. At first, there were the expected budgetary cuts, but spending was increased in areas that counted in the delivery of law enforcement. Pay scales were increased. Officers were given newer and better equipment and access to more effective weapons. This was one of the reasons why Kobe had joined the Academy. Pay and working conditions had vastly improved under the Octagon subsidiary that had taken over all aspects of law enforcement and public order.
Under Octagon, prison overcrowding was also a thing of the past. Offenders were simply sent to Exile for reconditioning. Once reconditioning was complete, which usually took a few months, offenders were then released back into the general population like a completely new, rehabilitated citizen. Prisons were eventually closed down and decommissioned, saving billions in taxpayer money. Previously, under government control, prison overcrowding, spiraling crime rates, and crippling debt led to the complete collapse of the penal system. Octagon’s solution was easy; don’t build more and bigger prisons, get rid of them and focus on the root of the problem, the mind of the offender. Fix that, and then they won’t reoffend.
Under Octagon, it was an offence to own a computer. Death if you were caught with an Internet connection. In fact, after the corporate takeover, all network connections were terminated and Octagon took complete control of all communications, information and data. Octagon had its own closed corporate network that could only be accessed by its high-level executives, management and by law enforcement. No one else. That was one of the prices you paid for total control. All data, including metadata, was stored at one of Octagon’s many server farms. Huge underground installations that housed thousands of computer servers where all of humanity’s data was catalogued, stored and accessed only by the corporate elite.
Kobe retrieved his PDA. Pressing the touch screen, he activated the DNA scanner. All he needed was a scan from the body’s surface and he would identify the victim in seconds.
All citizens’ DNA was recorded, catalogued and stored by Octagon. It allowed the tracking of any person from birth to death. Octagon also controlled all genealogy, bloodlines and birth histories of every person living and dead.
As Kobe squatted down again to take the DNA scan, his partner Mila De Soto appeared out of the darkness. After arriving on scene, she had left Kobe to go take a statement from the food stall employee who called in the body. The greasy-looking employee had noticed a wrapped plastic shape when he was dumping food trash into a compactor in the alley at the back of the stall.
Only De Soto could turn wearing a sidearm into a fashion statement, Kobe thought, as he watched her approach. Tall and slim, with dark shoulder-length hair, De Soto cut a striking figure. She was athletic, not muscular but toned and fit. She didn’t wear much makeup, preferring instead to be minimalistic, because her mother, now dead, once told her never to leave the house without some makeup on. She had a fiery attractiveness thanks to her part-Spanish heritage. Most male officers found her intimidating and she preferred it that way.
She stepped into the pool of light that shone down from the drone above. “Any ID on the body yet?” she said as she crouched beside Kobe. As she leaned in, Kobe caught a whiff of her scent. She smelt like an oasis amongst the surrounding pool of filth in the alley.
He pulled back the plastic sheet again and brushed a bruised forearm with his PDA, allowing the scanner to process the surface skin cells.
“No. All I can tell is that it’s a female, probably around twelve to fourteen years old.”
De Soto was ten years older than Kobe, and she’d been assigned as his training partner after he graduated from the Academy. They had already spent six months together and the full rotation would last another six m
onths. After that, he would be assigned to another officer.
Kobe stole a sideways glance at her face as De Soto lifted the end of the plastic further to reveal the battered face. Kobe could feel De Soto tense, and her deep emerald eyes narrowed ever so slightly even though her face was expressionless. To De Soto, the elements of torture were obvious. Sometimes she gave the impression that she was stone cold and focused on her job. But Kobe could just see her jaw tighten as her eyes drank in the horror and suffering that lay cocooned in the plastic sheet.
Once the DNA reading was complete, Kobe turned and pointed his PDA at the drone that hovered above him and transmitted the scan results to it. Within seconds, the data stream was relayed by the drone to a low-orbit satellite that bounced it back to the Octagon servers for comparison. Within minutes, the DNA match was beamed back.
The face of a young girl appeared on Kobe’s PDA screen together with all her details.
Her name was Grace Maleny, fourteen years old and tagged for reconditioning six months ago. Why would someone so young be tagged for reconditioning? Kobe thought. What crime could a fourteen-year-old have committed that would warrant her being sent to Exile?
“What did the food stall employee say?” Kobe murmured as he continued to scroll through the display.
“Nothing. He just came out back into the alley to dump some trash and discovered her wrapped in plastic. Called us in and didn’t touch anything,” De Soto replied without taking her eyes from the body. She had already take the employee’s DNA just incase he was lying. To De Soto everyone lied, that was her distrusting streak and view of the world she was in. No I didn’t touch the body. No I didn’t cheat on my wife. No I never knew the deceased. To De Soto the world and the people in it were like flies caught in a web of deceit and untruths spun by our own dishonesty. In her ten years of being out on the streets, there wasn’t a lie she hadn’t seen, witnessed, touched or tasted that made her think otherwise.