Humble Beginnings

by Greg Alldredge

  The Force was at the scene, cordoning off the area and blocking foot traffic. Slamming the door after the killer escaped.

  This was a fresh kill. There might be time left to catch the culprit, but not with the hasty dragnet. The more bodies that showed up, the higher the likelihood some mistake would be made. However, the more death that came to the station, the higher the risk of panic or Rollin being fired for not catching the killer.

  His language implant was acting up, thinking with words Rollin himself would never use. His had a more basic vocabulary. A majority of single-syllable words filled his brain. The computer embedded in his head must be working hard to make him sound smarter than he was. Rollin was infatuated with implants and whole replacement parts, not with some of the negative side effects.

  Another human corpse. Rollin might look human. Some even suggested there was a common ancestor from prehistory between the two races. As far as Rollin was concerned, the only thing humans and Patapay had in common was looks. Everything else about them was different. Genetic testing proved the point: the human race had more in common with an Earth tulip than it did Rollin’s race of cyborgs.

  The cop once scanned part of an article that suggested all life in the universe was seeded by space itself. All species of the ‘verse sprang from the same star-stuff… He was certain the theory drove more than a few racists crazy. Other than a topic to ponder over the strongest possible drink, he found little use in the research.

  Never the most liberal of thinkers, Rollin subscribed to the belief that every person had the given right to be as stupid as they wanted to be. Live and let live was his way of thinking. In the long run, it didn’t matter how life was spread, it all seemed destined to kill one another in the end. That was the greatest truth to life. Live and let kill.

  His body moved to the scene of the crime on autopilot. His embedded CPU would keep his body safe while his brain scanned the details — or thought about what he would have for lunch. The added processing power gave him true multitasking capabilities. The moving sidewalk took him to the lift. He turned the implanted optical facial recognition scanner off during his travels. Left on, it tended to overheat his brain, killing too many brain cells in the process. It took a massive amount of bandwidth and power to keep running. Thankfully he didn’t have to pay for his connection.

  Many of his more expensive implants had been paid for by the Force, or a certain company that had reason to test unregulated gear on a willing sentient being. Rollin fit most of the requirements for the project, and he got the first crack at the newest gadgets.

  This new body was discovered in a lower gravity area, a fancy neighborhood. Money and death brought the news services… This crime was certain to gather more attention than those that came before. More than the Rankin station rulers wanted. More news meant more pressure to find the killer, or at least end the killings. The cop’s life was about to become a larger pain than it already was.

  Rollin arrived to find the Force had coordinated and sealed off the halls several sections away. Drones flitted about, filming everything possible. Some were operated by the Force, most by the news services. Somewhere deep in the core, a computer scanned the faces of the crowd, looking for patterns.

  Talking heads stood shoulder to shoulder, feeding live into the net. Uniformed local officers maintained the perimeter, while agents of the Force moved inside the temporary barrier. The scene was a chaos of movement with little being accomplished.

  U’bud Jones, one of the more obnoxious female Luska reporters, pushed her way through and got in Rollin’s face. “Detective, do you or can you confirm the body is of the notorious smut dealer Burke Hare?”

  “No comment.” All indications leaned to the fact this was going to be a shitshow.

  U’bud pushed harder for an answer, “The public has a right to know if the largest dealer in immoral pleasure has come to an untimely end.”

  That was where the victim’s name came from… He thought it sounded familiar. Rollin grunted, “No comment,” and passed through the laser tape cordoning off the no-go zone for the press. Any drone past this point would be taken out, the news service fined.

  The woman’s voice continued to speak as Rollin tried to ignore her. “There you have it, folks, you need to make up your own mind and decide what the Force is hiding… this time. What are the Rankin overlords not telling us? Is everyone that uses the pleasure facilities in danger? Is this another attack from the Moral Justice League?”

  Muttering under his breath, “Pack sand, lady…” Rollin hated the fear-mongering press. He felt in his metal bones things would only get worse.

  Rollin had followed the narrative pushed forward by the news services that some mysterious Moral Justice League was lurking in the shadows waiting to strike anyone they deemed immoral. The truth was most people didn’t give a shit what others did in public or private. Standards had sunk that low.

  The vultures would make up any news they thought would trend. All in the name of the almighty advertisers’ credits. For a post-scarcity economy, there was an awful lot of scrambling for wealth going on. Maybe the social scientists were wrong, sentient creatures would never evolve, no matter how quickly the technology did.

  Rollin made his way to the rooms. Plural. This scene, this apartment, was larger than his normal beat. Hell, by the look of it, the stiff had more script than his entire neighborhood down below, and the space to prove it. Why would a single person need so much room?

  Scanning lasers played over the surface, searching for anything out of place. Numbers flashed past his vision when his eyes passed over any object. The Force brought out the high-tech gear for this crime. Nothing like the one or two cops that might show up on the lower levels. Seemed in death, as in life, influence had privileges. People stood about the room, trancelike, taking in the data from the scans, eyes twitching while they correlated information. With all this equipment, how could any crime go unsolved? Yet the station held an abysmal unsolved ratio.

  “What ya got?” Rollin asked. He’d worked alone since his last partner, Kano, went crazy… He preferred working alone. No one to worry about going insane. No one to question his drinking or other activities.

  Kneeling at the side of the body was a lab tech, dressed in a white containment suit. “This one is different. We have a suspect.” The mask did little to hide the human accent.

  Rollin should have been more surprised when the female looked up at him, but he couldn’t bring himself to be… Humans were turning into a plague that spread throughout the universe. Until recently, unable to leave their own system. In a few short years, they spread to the farthest reaches of known space. Rollin shook his head. He imagined a hundred years from now, light years out in the black, they would find Earth flags planted on every rock available. They had a thing for marking what they considered theirs.

  Back to business. “How so?” he asked. “What we got?”

  “The murder left vid and DNA.” The human female turned her attention back to the body.

  “Give me what you got?”

  Information flooded into Rollin’s brain, augmented as he was. The data flowed into ready-made files for later retrieval. He might be able to store more evidence than an average cop, but he could still only focus on so much at a time. As far as he was concerned, the vid clip was inconclusive. It showed the human male entering the apartment with what some might confuse as a child but what experience told him was an adult Dylier playing dress-up… only posing as a human child. They both faced forward, but the computer was able to extrapolate the full-face image for both. Other than the situation, they both looked normal… respectable even.

  Some creeps got off on strange kinks. Money seemed to attract the stranger fetishes. At least it wasn’t a real child. The press was going to eat this shit up. A sexual fetish, death, and money would trend high enough for some to get a nice bonus of water.

  Once the pair entered the apartment, the feed was cut. The body must have installed
a kill switch to keep his perversions all to himself. That was strange. Most perverts liked to share their conquests with fellow travelers down the twisted highways in dingy backrooms and secluded VR meetings. Since Burke Hare dealt with the twisted souls of the station, it only made sense he was a kindred spirit. “You need to double-check for offline recording devices,” he muttered to the human.

  This case had been twisted all along, but Rollin feared it was about to take a turn down the bizarre.

  “It gets stranger.” The short woman tapped in the air before her face. “I can’t find a record of the murderer leaving the room.”

  “The cameras were turned off?” Rollin did a quick scan of the room.

  “Not that I can tell. They show the door, and it never opens.”

  Rollin shook his head. What the human said was impossible. These rooms weren’t that large. There was nowhere to hide. “You cleared the rooms, right?”

  “Those first on the scene did…”

  Rollin pulled his pistol and stepped to the foot of the bed. The identity of the Dylier female came back from the DNA sample they pulled from the victim. The female’s name was T’all… Rollin knew right off someone played them. That particular female was dead, the report informed him as quick as the words registered in his brain.

  “Looks like we got a ghost.” He chuckled, trying to hide his confusion. “Someone got you, human… I think if you search the records, you will find that Dylier female died several cycles ago. I knew her.” Rollin replaced his weapon then leaned over the body and used his ocular implants to inspect for bruises left on the victim’s neck. “Must be a new type of DNA bomb to throw us off.” Crime-fighting was always a race between those who caused it and those who caught them. DNA bombs had been around for years to ruin a crime scene, but inserting a sample from the dead was a new twist. He found no indication the man was strangled.

  The tech growled, “The human has a name, you know… call me Mal…” She stood, only reaching to his chest. She was short, well under one hundred and fifty centimeters. Short even for a fragile human female. “No… facial recognition confirms that creature seen walking into the room with the victim is the Dylier known as T’all.”

  “That’s impossible…” Rollin shook his head and stepped outside the room with the body. He needed a moment to gather his thoughts, and the pressure felt by the shorter than average human female threw him off his game. What he really needed was a drink.

  Sure enough, leave it to the rich to have a well-stocked liquor cabinet in plain sight. The crystal decanter held an amber liquid that promised to take the edge off.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mal asked.

  Rollin turned. “It isn’t like he’s going to need this now, is it?” He lifted the glass high in salute, before downing the contents in one gulp.

  One of the problems of extreme augmentation, like the entire race of Patapay embraced, was an over-revved metabolism. Rollin could have drunk the whole bottle of alcohol and been more or less sober before he left the crime scene. He would need a more powerful sedative later for sleeping. Now, he needed to refresh his memory. Some escape from the constant pain his body felt.

  “Pull up the files on Kano and the events surrounding his disappearance.” Rollin didn’t need to vocalize the words. He could have brought them up with a single thought, but he spoke the words for the benefit of the nosy woman who refused to leave him in peace.

  His request came back blocked.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” He glared at Mal.

  She returned the stern look. “I could ask you the same.”

  “You go fiddle with your science. I am working.” Rollin used his free hand to shoo her away. There should be no reason for the file to be flagged. As far as Rollin knew, Kano disappeared while chasing ghosts. T’all a victim of an industrial accident. The problem was, the cop had become so dependent on the memory backup his implants gave him, his natural recall wasn’t what it used to be. Like any unused muscle, his brain had atrophied from lack of use. Rollin might forget his name if not for the computer constantly reminding him.

  There was that damned implant sticking words he would never use in his thoughts once again.

  Leaving the past forgotten for the time being, better to focus on the present. It only took a quick search of the downloaded case file, and Rollin knew everything available on the body laid out next door. It seemed the dead man earned his early script by importing luxury items before moving into the sex business. The file didn’t go into great detail what the items might be. Whatever product started with, by the size of the apartments he afforded, the sex business was booming.

  “Mal… I’m going to check out a lead. You all right here?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not really. Do me a favor, pull up the last minutes of the victim’s footage, will you?”

  Mal cocked her head. “You know the room recorders were shut off.”

  With a quick tap to his temple, Rollin silently asked for the unthinkable.

  The shocked look that spread over the female’s face was priceless. “You know that shit is illegal…”

  “And I can buy it all easy enough on the black market. Just copy me the file. Send it to me when you got it, and don’t whinge about it too much, men find it unattractive.” Rollin grabbed the decanter full of liquor and walked out. He gave the woman a fifty percent chance she would come through with the file. The victim’s last moments recorded in his buffer. It might be the only way to find the killer.

  If the station officials really wanted to stop crime, they would have made the buffer recordings avail in every case. It seemed there were some lines the privacy lobby would not allow crossed. It was fine to record the public areas, even store it all in the name of safety, but the thought of using the last moments of life to catch a criminal… that was where the Rankin drew the line. As far as Rollin was concerned, it was a crappy place to find moral outrage.

  Mal nearly spit the unfamiliar words his implant didn’t translate, “C’est la vie.” The cop ignored the glitch in his translator implant.

  There was little chance the offices kept by the dead man would prove any leads. As far as Rollin could see, this was another industrial accident. A man died while in VR, accompanied by a dead female… The case would disappear soon enough. No one wanted people thinking VR was dangerous. Too much of modern life revolved around the industry. The only suspect a long-dead woman… when that hit the waves, the story would become a public relations nightmare… Not his problem.

  On the off chance the perpetrator returned to the scene of the crime, Rollin switched on his facial recognition program. His brain hooked up with the central core and started running the identities of everyone he passed.

  It would give him a raging headache, but he put his body on autopilot while he traveled and split-screened his consciousness. Vid by vid, he started backtracking where the victim and dead woman came from. It took some work with the missing video coverage, but Rollin tracked them backward in time.

  That was when he first discovered the anomaly. The pair disappeared from the station recordings. The next camera files at first showed as corrupted, then they disappeared.

  In his mind, he went to the previous file and found it damaged as well. One of two systems showed the images were blurred or outright missing.

  “We got a problem…” Rollin sent the message to Mal. “People are disappearing from my feed.”

  “That’s impossible…”

  “Tell me about it, but someone is deleting files while I search the history… or erasing all traces of T’all.” Rollin tried desperately to save the scan of the files, but someone hacked the main core — and possibly his installed storage. This was bad.

  An unintelligible, garbled message from Mal flashed over the comm link before it went dead.

  “What?” He had time to ask before… A wave of nausea washed over Rollin. It took concentration to not lose the scotch he’d just finished drin
king. His autopilot turned off, all connection with the net severed. He must have overheated his link, running the facial recognition for so long… That was the only thing he could think of. If he had burned it out, his brain would be fried… The emergency override must have shut it down.

  The Force paid for his connectivity that allowed for the advertisement-free use of the neural net that connected the inhabitants of the station with… everything. Now he was effectively brain-dead. Stumbling around in the dark, unconnected.

  From somewhere, he mumbled the strangest words, “Qui vivra verra.” The meaning escaped him, as did the language. Just another glitch in his hardware.

  The sidewalk ended quicker than expected. His cybernetic arms and legs did the work without his thinking and kept him upright rather than planting face-first on the deck.

  It took a moment for his eyes and ears to compensate for the loss of feed. Luckily, he’d not gone in for the full replacement of visual and aural sense, or he’d been screwed. He rightly assumed deaf and blind, to add to the headache and nausea… The lack of feed into his head created a deafening silence.

  He looked up, and hidden in a mass of Prod tourists stood a lonely Dylier female, gray skin standing out in a sea of black faces. Her huge unblinking eyes glued on him. With no implants to magnify her face and natural memory to rely on, he was certain T’all stood less than thirty meters away spying on him. Not a bad trick for a dead woman.

  Back in the day… When T’all still lived, she was a known white-hat hacker. Many agents, including Rollin, used her to dig up information they didn’t want the Force knowing about. As far as Rollin knew, she never had the skills to hack the whole of station storage or a person’s brain…

  Rollin’s dead partner was the last person to see her alive. The report claimed her death as an industrial accident. She jacked into the wrong files and got brain spiked, or some such bullshit. Didn’t matter how it happened, the cop was certain she was dead. He was one of the first officers at the scene. His former partner Kano missed the bullet there, nearly killed by a faulty sexbot.