Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  Every few seconds, I get a discovery ping from Rodriguez’s temporal lobe implant, which flashes red in my overlay. Usually, you set your TLI on discovery mode if you want another device to find you over the Mindnet. Some neural activity must have triggered the response, but I’m no doctor, so I don’t bother dissecting it.

  Our blood spatter analyst corroborates the stories from a couple of eye witnesses that gave their take on what went down at the gas station, including the attendant: Rodriguez had walked over to Yee, who was buying a bottle of water at the kiosk, and shot him point blank in the face, without provocation.

  According to Dispatch, two officers in a squad car heard the gunshot from down the block and zipped over in their cruiser. They engaged the suspect and squeezed off a number of shots before Rodriguez fired back, just twice, taking down each officer from about fifty feet away after being critically wounded. The crazy part is that the suspect made no attempt to run or hide.

  Mullins shares my sentiment. “He just stood there and picked them off. I’m telling you, he was on something.”

  I search the kid’s pockets, turning them inside out. House keys, cash card, mini flashlight, and a packet of breath-freshening strips.

  Mullins squats next to me. “Nada, huh?”

  I want to agree, but I pop open the plastic dispenser and hold it up to my nose. It smells of cinnamon and cloves and something else I can’t quite place, but I’m positive what we’re dealing with without needing to wait for results from a lab. I lick my lips, imagining how it would taste, dissolving the wafer-thin strip until only the exotic oils remain on my tongue.

  Mullins calls my name, but I don’t respond until he says it a second time. “Parker!”

  I snap the dispenser closed. “Yeah, just thinking.”

  “Well, think out loud.”

  I hold up the blue plastic case. It’s half the size of my thumb. “Homegrown.”

  “You sure?”

  “Smell.” He does, but his face clouds over, like he’s trying to wrestle with the fact it’s not something you buy at a 7-Eleven. He wrinkles his nose. “What kind of product, you think?”

  “Switch.”

  He nods slowly, getting it. “Told you he was on something. They usually come in pasty dots, printed on paper ribbon, or in clear tabs. Haven’t seen this form before.”

  But I have.

  Sublingual delivery is by far the best way to get it into your bloodstream. Dots, tabs, strips—doesn’t matter. Stick one under your tongue and say goodbye to foggy thoughts. It’s big with the underage crowd because they love to surf the Mindnet in long marathon sessions. Rat race junkies enjoy the extra boost when they have to pull eighty-hour workweeks. Athletes have been accused of taking it, but there is no mandatory testing yet in the sports community. Same with military and law enforcement.

  The best way to describe the experience is to imagine a massive caffeine high. You get that awesome rush, that laser focus, that burst of euphoria, like who cares if it’s Monday morning at the office with a ton of shit to do. Nothing matters at the moment because your brain has turned off all your concerns, all the pain, all the problems of the day—everything. What you’re left with is your subconscious mind taking over; and you just go with it. Switch does that. It gives you a mental edge over those around you. You think better, you work better, you fight better. You are better.

  Unfortunately for the enthusiast, it’s illegal, and you don’t just get a misdemeanor for possession these days.

  “Well, it explains a few things.” Mullins waves a hand over the scene. “But it doesn’t explain why he snapped and went on a killing spree.”

  Mullins is wrong, but I don’t say it. He’s never had a taste, so his only experience is what he learned during morning briefings, and on the Net. This is cutting-edge, psychotropic-grade product, and the scientific community is just starting to discover its true potential. In my mind, this stuff is a game changer.

  I hold the dispenser between gloved fingers with newfound respect, almost reverence. So small, yet a powerhouse of mind manipulation. I place it in an evidence bag and resign it over to Mullins. “See if your guy can get us an expedite on this. I want to know how much is in our susp’s system.”

  Mullins holds the bag up to the light. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I come to my feet, and the blood returns to my cramped legs. We need to finish processing the crime scene. “All right, chief, let’s get a move on.”

  ***

  It’s almost midnight by the time I crawl into bed. I’m so exhausted I can’t sleep. We made a statement to the press, buttoned up the scene, and tried to interview the murder suspect’s mother, who was in pieces over her son’s death. Then I had to spend almost thirty minutes on a call with Tommy, trying to calm him down. The whole evening was a mess.

  My wife Suzie’s eyes flutter open when I turn on the lamp. She looks over at the clock radio on her nightstand and frowns. “So late. Everything okay?”

  “It’s just work. I’ll tell you about it in the morning, sweetie. Go to sleep.”

  She yawns. “Caitlyn asked about you. I wished you would have called.”

  “I know.” Our four-year-old loves to hear my voice at least once before she goes to bed, even if I’m on the job. It’s not like me to miss the opportunity. If I had even the briefest moment alone…

  I give my wife a cursory kiss on the cheek and let her roll onto her stomach, covers pulled up to her neck. She tells me in her drowsy voice that she loves me.

  “I love you too, babe.”

  Thirty seconds later, she’s asleep. I watch the soft rise and fall of her back and the dark-brown tumble of hair lying across her shoulder blades. I’ve been married twelve years, and I still see the same twenty-one-year-old, that fragile girl who defied her parents to marry a cop.

  Caitlyn is the spitting-image of her mother. She’s incredibly smart and uses the Net better than anyone I know. She was born into the Mindnet generation. I was sixteen when it became commercially available, touted as the “Internet for the mind,” and twenty-nine when I got my temporal lobe implant. I used to the think the Internet was the end-all-be-all, as a kid. Then the Mindnet came along, and all of a sudden, we were using wearable prosthetics that could connect our brains to banks, retailers and social networks. TLIs followed, replacing cell phone calls, e-mails and texts with thought-enabled communications. My parents would laugh, recalling a time when a networked computer was a marvel. Now it’s the brain, and little Caitlyn will think of the Mindnet as I did of its predecessor, and how she never knew a time before it existed.

  I shut off the lamp, but I still can’t sleep. I’m smelling cinnamon and cloves and…

  Cardamom! That’s the spice I couldn’t think of!

  I connect to the Net through my TLI and quickly pull up a wiki on Switch. It appears in my retinal overlay as a semi-transparent page against the room’s darkened background. There’s a complete onscreen breakdown of the history of Switch. It started as an accidental offshoot of a popular antidepressant, found to increase memory retention and response time in rodents. The pharmaceutical name is Duoxatane, but it was never approved for human trials. Still, somebody came up with the brilliant idea to package it into digestible form and put it on the street. The Cardamom masks the bitter taste of the active ingredient.

  Thoroughly awake, I log into the precinct portal and pull up the case file for today’s homicide. A thumbnail of each page is tiled across the bottom of my overlay. I select the first one and start at the beginning. Some of the information on the expired suspect has been updated, but it will be at least tomorrow when the lab work comes back. I remember Alicia Rodriguez crying her eyes out, wondering how her son could have shot anyone. There were similar reactions from the father and younger sister, who swore Kurt Rodriguez, track and field star of Forest Hills High School, was incapable of perpetrating the murder of one police officer, let alone three. Wait until they find out how much Switch was in his system.

/>   I get out of bed and peek in on Caitlyn. She’s asleep, thumb in her mouth, with the covers bunched around her feet, same long, dark hair as her mother. She’s got my wide-swept ears though. I feel bad about missing our nite-nite chat. I pull her blanket over her shoulders and tell her how much Daddy loves her. She snoozes on. I wish I could sleep like that.

  I go down to the basement, my man cave. I’ll never get the smell of cigars out of the carpet, but it’s comforting to me, and this is where I do my best thinking. There’s a workbench by the water heater, with an old, rusted vise mounted on the side, and a bunch of small tools I use for my hobby work. I rest my palm on the vise for a moment. It was my father’s. He was a tool-and-die worker, and spent most of his career at a ball bearing manufacturing plant in Philly. He always wanted me to find an honest job, and stick to it; and all I wanted to do was make my old man proud.

  I take a deep breath and ease open the plastic organizer that holds the assortment of nails, screws, washers and bolts. There’s a box of matches underneath a dozen ten-penny nails. It doesn’t have any matches in it. I turn on the bench light and open the box. Like precious bars of gold bullion, the wafer-thin strips glint in the light. I’m greeted by a fresh burst of apple and hint of cardamom. There are only three strips left, and a slight panic settles in. I usually do a strip before breakfast, but on a night like tonight, especially when my conscience is weighed down, I’m tempted to do a second. That would leave me a day to restock. Suzie doesn’t know about my secret habit. I could never tell her.

  A pang of guilt floods my innards. I imagine what my father would have thought of my stealthy enterprise. What would I say to him—that I started because of the long hours at work; that it helped me cope with the Nolan Yee’s of the world; that I kept going to deaden my nerves any time I came upon a teenage tragedy like Rodriguez’s? My father wouldn’t buy any of it.

  I reach over and give the vise a good pat. Thank goodness the old man’s not around to witness this. He had that sixth sense, the kind that kicked in anytime I did something wrong, no matter how good I thought I was at hiding it. Tommy, on the other hand, seemed to get away with everything.

  I dislodge a paper-thin sheet from the matchbox. It adheres to the moisture on my fingertip. I hold the see-through amber film up to the light, marveling at how such a thing could have driven Rodriguez to murder. I can understand the elevated aggression with higher and more prolonged doses, but the same could be said of alcohol. Was the Switch enough to make a star athlete snap?

  I have a lot of questions percolating through my head. At the top of the list is finding out what drove Rodriguez to murder.

  I place the strip on my tongue. It dissolves in seconds. Immediately, my head is clear, my concentration restored. I can feel the heat from the light, the faint scent of glue from the applicator across the room, the electrical pulse of my TLI firing packets of data out into Mindspace.

  I am not the man I was a minute ago. I am not like my partner, whose mind is dulled by everyday living, nor like the honest working man I aspired to be. I am something else entirely. Free. Evolved. A new category of species. My unamplified self would condemn my actions. But in my enhanced state, I am exactly who I need to be.

  ***

  We’re in our cubicle farm at the precinct, a little after eight in the morning. Mullins distracts me with his nasty habit of biting his nails. Forty-three, divorced with five kids from two different marriages, and alimony payments to both wives, he’s a perpetual ball of nervous energy. I thank my stars Suzie and I have stuck through thick and thin and waited until I made Detective before we had Caitlyn. Mullins was fresh out of the academy when he had his first kid. He looks like an old man, with deep rings under the eyes on his puffy face. I feel sorry for him, but not as sorry as I do for his children. My parents divorced when I was seven, so I know about shitty deals.

  The second dose from last night kept me going until dawn. Even though I started out the morning feeling like a zombie, I’ve had two cups of coffee on top of my usual strip, so I’m a little more wired than usual. I don’t like to dose in the evenings for exactly this reason, but I needed the extra perk to keep my mind from racing in random directions, which would have kept me up anyway. With my cleared thoughts, I was able to contend with the culpability of using, of being a deceiver who classified Rodriguez as a criminal when I wasn’t much better.

  But then again…I hadn’t shot Yee in the head.

  Mullins stops gnawing long enough to speak. “I don’t get it. He was being interviewed by scouts from two top-ten universities, with the chance at a sports scholarship. He had his whole life ahead of him. What’s wrong with this generation?”

  I’ve asked myself the same question a million times.

  As expected, the lab test came back positive for Duoxatane. We’ll have to wait four weeks for the full toxicology report, but at least we have a preliminary finding that supports my suspicions. Rodriguez had twenty-two milligrams of the drug in his system, a lethal quantity. There were also markers indicating cumulative dosing. It means he was an experienced user, and that he knew what he was doing when he dosed up. Now I’m really irked. And the more I think about it, the more I want to know where he purchased his product. There aren’t too many dealers that supply Switch in the strip form. Could it have been my guy? I give it a few seconds of serious consideration before I dismiss it as coincidence. It could have been anyone—a close friend, a family member, or someone at school.

  Mullins pops open a can of soda and slurps loudly. “I’ve been doing a bunch of medical research on Switch.” He pauses to belch. “It doesn’t just amp you up; it interacts with the same neuroreceptors that our TLIs use. I’ve been thinking about how our suspect took just three shots and hit every target. He struck each of our guys above the neckline. You know what kind of skill you need for that in a firefight? How about the fact he didn’t hit them in the Kevlar, like most suspects would? See—this shit is different.” He crosses his arms, smug, as if he’s telling me something I haven’t already figured out.

  I flick his can with a finger. “I guess you ruled out paramilitary training, or that he might have been an experienced marksman with a handgun.”

  Mullins knots his forehead, not getting my joke. He uses a nail clipping to floss his teeth. It bugs me to no end. “Do you have to do that?”

  He frowns, then wipes his saliva on his sleeve, and shrugs. “All I’m saying is that this stuff is potent.”

  I grab my jacket.

  Mullins looks up. “Where are we going?”

  “To get answers.”

  ***

  “Look, I don’t know where he got it. I already gave my statement. You think I would have let him take that crap under my roof?” Mr. Luis Rodriguez is angry. He’s clutching a white handkerchief embroidered with his initials in his left hand while seated on a bourbon-tinted leather armchair.

  We’re at the Rodriguez’s three-bedroom co-op in Forest Hills. It’s upper middle class like the rest of the neighborhood. Mr. Rodriguez works for Delta Technologies in Manhattan, a maker of smart furniture. Supposedly the leather couch I’m sitting on can sense when my back is aching and offer oscillating stimulation to pamper me. It doesn’t feel any different than the other overpriced couches I’ve sat on.

  I read over the hand-written notes on my yellow pad. We’ve already spoken to deceased’s mother, sister, track coach, last girlfriend, next-door neighbor, and a former coworker from where the young Rodriguez caddied at a golf course last year. His father is the last stop on a day of zero leads, and I’m hungry. It’s half past four, and the last thing I ate was a bagel with cream cheese first thing this morning. Mullins is sitting next to me, probably ravenous from the way he’s massaging his belly. We’re no closer to getting any answers than before we left the station. The only thing of interest came from the coach who said Kurt Rodriguez had smashed the state record in the hundred-meter dash about a month back.

  I give Mr. Rodriguez a few seconds to se
ttle down before I ask the next question. “What about his behavior? You must have noticed something different.”

  Mr. Rodriguez’s tone is less confrontational. “Not really.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  He scratches behind the ear. I examine the body language, but it doesn’t look like he’s covering up for his son.

  “I guess the only thing that jumps out at me is that he was studying really hard before the summer break,” Mr. Rodriguez says. “He stayed in his room a lot.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Kurt used to hang out with his buddies after track practice every day. His sister said he stopped doing it altogether and complained he was in his room all the time, playing loud music. I’d always come home late from work, so I didn’t notice the change, and I didn’t think a lot about it.”

  I tap my pen against the scribbles on my notepad. I’m surprised the sister didn’t say anything to us about her brother’s newfound seclusion. “How do you know he was studying when he was in his room?”

  Mr. Rodriguez looks at me oddly with his tired, sunken eyes, either surprised or offended by my question. “His grades were the best I’ve ever seen. His GPA was always in the high twos, low threes. He got a 4.0 his last marking period. He even scored a perfect hundred on his Math Regents exam. He’d never gotten more than a C in math. So, yeah, I assumed he was studying in his room.”

  I want to write something down, but the information is unremarkable. “What about changes in mood? Was he happy, mad, irritated, depressed?”

  Mr. Rodriguez glances off to the side. Any hostility he felt toward me is replaced by sadness. He presses his fingertips into the hollows of his eyes while holding up his other hand. I give him a moment. When he opens them, tears roll down his face, and he quickly wipes them away.

  “Mr. Rodriguez, I’m sorry, but we need to ask these questions.”

  He nods rapidly. “It’s just that—” He clears his throat. “I mean, there are all these calls I have to make. I have to arrange the—you know—the funeral and—” His voice catches. He rubs the stitched initials on his handkerchief with his thumb, and then notices me looking at it. “Kurt gave this to me a week ago for Father’s Day. He had it personalized. See?” He turns it over, and the stitching reads, “To the best father in the world. Love, Kurt.” The anger returns in his voice. “You think he would have done that if he was messed up on that stuff?”