Mardock Scramble

by Ubukata, Tow

  –Still, I want to try it out. Just as Oeufcoque is trying. I want to try.

  “Sheesh, you don’t make things easy for me, do you…” the Doctor mumbled, then laughed to try and cover his feelings up. “Look, I can lay out all the bare facts and data in front of you and advise you as to what I think is best, but I can’t make your decisions for you. And I’m not sure that I can provide the, uh, best environment for you to develop in. You’re probably best off going to school, really…”

  –If you want me to study, I will. I’ll help you as I study.

  The Doctor finally caved, throwing his arms into the air in surrender. “Well, for now let’s focus our efforts on solving the case at hand. After all, if we don’t get a result soon, all three of us are likely to be disposed of by society—we’ll be together then, but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind. So, first we solve the case—and then why not have a proper chat with Oeufcoque after that. Just talking to me is going to give you a pretty one-sided account of our work, after all.”

  Balot nodded and picked up the coffee cup again.

  –I’ll learn how to make proper coffee too.

  Balot was deadly serious.

  The Doctor watched, bemused, as Balot steeled herself to the task of learning what was involved in good coffee.

  Balot made the next pot.

  ≡

  There was enough food in the kitchen to last them for a while.

  The Doctor and Balot ended up sharing kitchen duties.

  “I still can’t believe that Boiled—fancy firing at a Humpty! However much he sees himself as our enemy, he didn’t have to go so far as risking becoming a felon!” the Doctor grumbled as he tucked into a hamburger.

  –That man used to be Oeufcoque’s partner, right?

  “That’s right. He was every bit as accomplished as you are at using him.”

  –Why did they split up?

  The Doctor was momentarily lost for words.

  –Is there something you can’t tell me? Were they lovers? Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

  “No, no, nothing like that.” The Doctor shook his head hastily. “They were the perfect fighting team. No one could stand up to them. But then, this one time, Boiled went on a rampage.”

  –You don’t mind me asking all this, do you?

  The Doctor seemed to be thinking hard. He put his food down. “It’s probably no bad thing that you understand what sort of a man Boiled is. So I’ll tell you.”

  Such was the Doctor’s preface to what was to come.

  “It was about a year ago, on a certain case. A young man—a university student—had been beaten up so badly that he was in a comatose state. The client was the father, and the young man was his eldest son. There were five of them in the family: the father, the mother, the student, and a younger brother and sister. The father ran a factory, but it was up to the hilt in debt. The family’s only hope was the eldest son, the student. He was a so-called ‘golden boy’—not only did he have a full scholarship to the university, but he worked on the side, bringing in money for the family. He was their main source of income.”

  –So who attacked him?

  “At first we all supposed drug dealers. The student’s girlfriend had become hooked on drugs, and the student challenged her dealers, leading to the fight that put him in a coma. Oeufcoque, Boiled, and I took on the case because we thought that by doing so we might be able to find a drug link back to OctoberCorp and crush their illegal trade that way.”

  –And then?

  “First we honed in on the people who allegedly put the student in the coma. It wasn’t too difficult to track them down. It was the group of drug-dealing students, and the university was their turf. But then, something strange happened.”

  –Something strange?

  “The ringleader of the group—another student—suddenly committed suicide. He was drugged up himself. People put it down to something stupid he did while he was out of his head, but it all seemed a little too neat for us, and we figured that something suspicious was going on behind the scenes. Then, about the same time, the comatose student’s addict girlfriend went missing. And we discovered that behind the original university drug ring was another, more complex, organization—all part of a scheme to sell OctoberCorp’s illegal wares. The police were involved too. It was all one big tangle. And it was pretty difficult to work out who was controlling whom.”

  –The organization was trying to hide something?

  “That’s what everyone thought. We tightened the screws on some of the people we managed to track down—they all thought the same thing. But our enemy was all people connected to the drug trade, one way or another. And at the core of all this was the original comatose student.”

  –What do you mean?

  “We’d misread the situation. The student wasn’t just the victim. He was also the perpetrator.”

  Balot was visibly stunned.

  The Doctor furrowed his brow and continued with difficulty. “I told you that the comatose son was the main source of income for his family, right? Well, drugs were the main source of income for him. To all outward appearances, the ringleader of the student drug ring was the youth who’d committed suicide. But behind the scenes it was the comatose son who had been running the show. And that wasn’t all. It was the son who had gotten his girlfriend addicted in the first place. It’s called fishing—they tried to collect as many girlfriends as they could, using drugs as bait.”

  –So who put him in the coma?

  “The student who ended up committing suicide had punched him. Because of an argument over money, or maybe just because he was on a bad trip. The blow caused him to stumble and fall down a flight of stairs, and he hit his head against the wall at the bottom. The student who hit him was so shocked that he retreated further and further into his drugs until one day he got so high that he decided to dive head-first from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy roadway. The incident was pretty gruesome, and there were cut marks on his arms and legs, so we assumed that somebody had decided to make an example of him. But no, it turned out that it was just a straightforward suicide by an addict who happened to have a history of self-harm.”

  –That’s hard to take in. Who would have suspected that the victim was also the perpetrator?

  “Yup, it was hard to take in for us too, and we were working on the case. The police were investigating it as well, and at the same time they were indicting a number of their own for corruption and involvement in the drug ring—it was a great scandal at the time. Some of the police had been keeping the drugs that they had confiscated on raids and selling them off on the sly to the student drug ring, you see. And the student who killed himself was involved in that part of the operation. Not particularly heavily, though. Everyone just saw him as someone who was there.”

  –So it was one wrong guess after another?

  “Well, the comatose student’s family had put in a pretty staggering request, you see. In order to pay off the debts of the father’s factory, they had to try and wrangle a huge sum of money out of the Broilerhouse in the shape of child welfare reparations. But in reality, the student was just as guilty as he was a victim, and really he was just reaping what he had sown. And the student’s family didn’t help matters either—his younger brother tracked down one of the other dealers and assaulted him. It was pandemonium. Eventually, though, the missing girlfriend re-emerged. It turned out that she had fallen asleep in a car in a drugged-up state and slept for three days solid. It was only when we discovered the girl that we managed to get to the bottom of the case and were finally ready to go about solving it.”

  –So how did you go about solving it?

  “In the worst way imaginable.”

  The Doctor put his hands to his forehead. It was as if all the horrors of the time were flashing right in front of his eyes.

  “If the truth were made public, everybody involved in the whole sordid affair stood to lose. We tried to imagine what would have happened, and it
went something like this: the student’s family would suffer the worst—they’d lose their factory, the younger brother would be arrested for violent and disorderly conduct, and not only that, they’d end up having to pay out reparations, never mind receiving them. The whole family would live out the rest of their lives in debt. The police and the Broilerhouse would suffer an embarrassing loss of face, and the university where the whole sordid scene was set would be known forever as ‘the drug school.’ The drug ring would split up into smaller units, and one of these would eventually rat on their police connections, causing additional scandal. So, you see, we were in a real predicament. If we were to let things slide then the Broilerhouse would do more than rap us on the knuckles—they’d repudiate our usefulness, our very reason for existence. So with enemies all around us, or so it seemed, Boiled came up with the worst possible solution to the case. He didn’t even tell us what he had planned.”

  –What did he do?

  “He annihilated.” The Doctor spat the word out as if he were vomiting up an indescribably bitter object. “First, he shot the comatose student.”

  The Doctor saw Balot’s eyes widen but just shrugged his shoulders weakly. “Yes, he killed the very same piece-of-shit student that we were hired by our client to protect in the first place. Then, he found the junkie girlfriend, dragged her back to the car she’d been sleeping in, and shot her. After that, he rounded up the students in the university who were involved in the drug ring and killed them one by one. Then he went after the ringleaders who were involved behind the scenes and killed every single one of them too. Accurately and swiftly. Oh, and in the process of this he also killed a number of corrupt cops along the way.”

  –How many people did he kill?

  “At that point, eleven.”

  –With Oeufcoque as the weapon?

  “Oeufcoque trusted Boiled completely. He thought that Boiled was acting according to his own directions.”

  –Oeufcoque’s directions?

  “When we discovered that the student was at the heart of the drug ring, Oeufcoque said that we should tell his father the truth. Try and get him to drop his claim for reparations. Oeufcoque was just trying to work out what the right thing to do was, until the bitter end. Boiled headed out with Oeufcoque in order to do as Oeufcoque suggested, but along the way Boiled decided that he had a better way to solve the case. For the next forty hours or so, Boiled told Oeufcoque that he was protecting the family from the drug ring, who were now out baying for the family’s blood. They went on a killing spree—nearly twenty people in total. Boiled’s story wasn’t totally unbelievable, as some of the drug ring were actually out to get the family.”

  –How come Oeufcoque never worked out what was really going on?

  “Both of Boiled’s hands have metal fibers grafted into them for electronic interference, just like your skin grafts,” the Doctor said, surprising Balot again. “Not quite as powerful as yours, though. At the time, Oeufcoque wasn’t really able to grasp his surroundings after he had turned—he didn’t need to. So all the main information about his surroundings was fed to him through Boiled’s hands. This allowed Oeufcoque to turn with the greatest level of precision and speed. It’s different now, of course. He has omnidirectional receivers to pick up sights, sounds, and—in particular—smells. He’s like a Christmas tree decorated with cameras instead of baubles. Like the compound eyes on insects. Oeufcoque asked for all this after the case had finished. And I obliged his request in order to try and assuage his paranoid neuroses.”

  Balot nodded. She understood Oeufcoque so well that it hurt.

  How it felt to have things done to you when you had no control, no knowledge…

  It was a type of hopelessness. No hope in others, and no hope in yourself. She felt pain in her chest. As a victim of violence—and as a perpetrator of violence.

  –When did Oeufcoque learn what he’d done?

  “Long after the family’s factory was sold off, and after the family only received one-eighteenth of the reparations they’d originally put in for. When Oeufcoque learned the truth he fell into a trancelike torpor, shut away inside himself. To make matters worse, Boiled killed another two people using Oeufcoque while Oeufcoque was in this state. After that, Oeufcoque never entrusted himself into Boiled’s hands again, and Boiled in turn disappeared straight after the double murder. According to rumor he was picked up and recruited straightaway by OctoberCorp’s scouts.”

  The Doctor sighed, remembering the past. “At one point it seemed as if Oeufcoque and Boiled might end up killing each other. I even wondered to myself whether I’d made the right decision in choosing Scramble 09. But… I didn’t want it to end like that. Oeufcoque and I have since acted as Trustees on a number of cases to try and recover our credibility as PIs. Boiled is Boiled, and has ended up on the opposite side of the fence to us in order to prove that he didn’t make the wrong choice, that his solution was the best. And the result of all this is that here we are again, happy families, with our guns rammed down one another’s throats.”

  The Doctor took a sip of his coffee to try and wash the bitterness in his mouth away.

  –Thank you for sharing all that with me.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  –Why does Boiled kill so many people, do you think?

  “The last bit of stability he had in his life was his military training. Killing is probably the only way he can cope with the great emptiness he now feels. The sense of nothingness that he carries around with him isn’t your everyday stress and strain, after all…”

  –That man wanted Oeufcoque.

  “I’m sure he did. Oeufcoque is the only handheld Living Unit in the world. He’s the ultimate hand-to-hand weapon.”

  –I think I can empathize with Boiled a little, though.

  The Doctor choked on his mouth full of coffee. “You’re not saying that you want to become a PI so that you can turn into the ultimate killing machine?”

  –No…but I still understand Boiled a little, I think. Because I was like that, for a while. I raped Oeufcoque. He became a sacrifice to my own burnt-out moral bankruptcy. And I think Boiled was the same. It’s hard to give that up when you’re on your own.

  “You’re different from him, though,” said the Doctor. But the truth was that the Doctor knew that everybody had it in them to turn into another Boiled. To arrive at a state where the only way to wash away your dark and hollow sensation of world-weariness was to see yourself as a monster and act accordingly…

  –Do you think Oeufcoque will ever be able to forgive me?

  “There’s nothing really to forgive…” The Doctor caught Balot’s eyes and nodded neatly. “You’ll be fine. You’ll learn, you’ll reflect on your actions, and you’ll grow. Oeufcoque understands that all too well.”

  Balot nodded too. Both Oeufcoque and the Doctor were very kind people.

  But she didn’t want to start relying on that kindness—she suppressed any feelings in her that suggested she might. She was too embarrassed to rely on other people anymore.

  She needed to think for herself, decide what her best course of action might be and act on it.

  “Oh, by the way… Do you mind if I ask you something in return?”

  –What?

  “To do with Shell’s hidden memories…” The Doctor seemed awfully reluctant all of a sudden, as if he were terrified of imposing on her.

  Balot put her hand to her mouth.

  –I’m sorry. I’d completely forgotten.

  She was speaking the truth.

  Then she blurted out:

  –Chips.

  “Chips…?”

  –One of Shell’s casinos is called Eggnog Blue. They have chips worth a million dollars each there, and he’s hidden these special media storage devices inside them.

  “A million-dollar casino chip, eh? Well, well…a hidden treasure-within-a-treasure, huh?” The Doctor looked at Balot, full of admiration. “Well done, a great spot. You’re really quite something.”
>
  –Tweedledum helped me. I never would have been able to work it out on my own. There’s a strict ban on taking the chips out of the casino, and other than at the big Shows the punters rarely get a chance to see them.

  “They’re probably there as a way for other companies in the OctoberCorp group to secrete away some of their accumulated funds. They deposit a million dollars in the casino as a way of laundering money. At the same time, it’s great for the casino as the chip becomes an ostentatious sign that the casino has funds in reserve.”

  –Yup. It looks like they were doing exactly as you say, Doctor.

  “But to go out of your way to hide your memories in there…”

  –I looked at the production records for the chips, and there were traces of evidence that they had been made specially. The records themselves had been deleted, but there were still fragments of data flying around, so I reconstructed them.

  “Amazing. I know you had the might of all of Paradise’s facilities behind you, and Tweedledum’s support, but even so it’s pretty incredible that you managed all that in just a few hours.”

  –I wouldn’t mind trying it again sometime.

  Balot laughed as she spoke. The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Violation of Commonwealth law and aggravated hacking—you’re looking at up to twenty years in prison. If you don’t play your cards right you won’t be able to go near another computer for almost half a century, either. So just do me one small favor, will you—don’t go near that thing again unless absolutely necessary.”

  –I’m sorry.

  Balot seemed to grow smaller. She’d been told off for something similar by Oeufcoque not that long ago, and here she was doing it again. She needed to wield her power from a state of readiness. She was done with abusing power. She felt truly ashamed.

  “No, don’t feel sorry. It just means that, in reality, you’ve taken a whole load of risk upon yourself, and you need to be ready for that. So, back to those million-dollar chips—how many of them are there?”