The 88th Floor
By Benjamin Sperduto
www.benjaminsperduto.com
Expanded Ebook Version
© 2014 Benjamin Sperduto
Original Version Published in Techno-Goth Cthulhu, edited by
Mark Anthony Crittenden, Red Skies Press, 2013.
© 2013 Benjamin Sperduto
Cover Image
“6 Hearts” by George Cotronis (2012)
“What a fucking mess.”
Rees nodded and took a drag from his cigarette.
“Where the hell is forensics?” he asked.
“They’re on the way, sir. Still running behind after that bombing on Highland this afternoon, I guess. You heard anything else about that?”
Rees hadn’t.
“Everybody’s saying it’s another terrorist attack,” the patrolman said. “I hear the SICA guys aren’t letting anyone near the blast site.”
“Figures.” The city’s intelligence agency had a well-deserved reputation for not playing well with others.
Rees checked his phone.
3:26 AM.
“You ever see one this bad, sir?”
Rees looked at the mangled, bloody corpse sprawled across the floor just a few feet away. He drew deeply from his cigarette again.
“Why don’t you go see what’s keeping the lab boys?”
“They already said–”
“I know what they said. Just humor me, okay?”
The patrolman nodded and walked over to where a few other officers were busy blocking off the area. It wasn’t a difficult crime scene to secure, considering they were eighty-eight stories above the streets inside the unfinished Sircotin Technologies building. The night work crew had already been sent home.
Rees knelt beside the victim. All that remained of the face was a twisted clump of flesh and bone that was fused together as if the head were partially melted. The hands and feet weren’t much better, little more than misshapen stumps. Then there was the blood that had poured out from at least half a dozen bullet wounds.
“Poor bastard. What the hell happened to you?”
“Detective Rees,” a cool, monotone voice said, “please step away from the victim.”
Rees stood up and raised his hands.
“Relax, Morgan,” he said. “I didn’t touch anything.”
He turned to face Doctor Morgan, one of the department’s more experienced forensics experts. The digital pupil of his left eye narrowed, focusing intently on one of Rees’s hands.
“You are contaminating my crime scene, Detective Rees.”
Rees glanced at the cigarette and quickly extinguished it.
“Sorry,” he said. “Old habits, you know?”
“I am quite afraid that I do not. Now, if you would kindly step away from the victim I can begin my examination.”
“Yeah, sure,” Rees said. There was no use trying to say much of anything to Morgan these days. Rees had known him for years, but even he had a hard time telling where the man ended and the machine began.
The doctor’s face betrayed no reaction to the disfigured corpse.
“Interesting… ” he said.
Rees could do little but wait patiently as Morgan activated his sensors and data recorders to examine and catalogue every minute detail of the scene. His gaze strayed away from the corpse and took in the details of the unfinished room.
“When was the victim discovered?”
“About an hour ago,” Rees said, still examining the room. For such an expensive project, the workmanship was awfully shoddy. He wondered if the crew had something against straight lines. “We got an anonymous call and a patrolman dropped by to check it out.”
Morgan didn’t indicate whether or not he heard the answer, but Rees knew he had. The bastard could listen in on every conversation within five blocks if he wanted to. Rees knew better than to take being ignored personal and was surprised Morgan had even bothered to spare the miniscule processing power required for simple conversation. It really didn’t bother him since most of his attention was still on the layout of the unfinished eighty-eighth floor. The more he looked at it, the more he thought he discerned a pattern to its odd angles and edges. Something kept tugging at his peripheral vision, an image that almost took a definite form before flickering away when he looked at it directly.
Morgan analyzed the corpse for some time, running thousands of calculations inside his cybernetic brain. He then injected a small vial of nano-bots into the body that were designed to crawl through the bloodstream and transmit a detailed analysis of its condition. Lastly, he opened another vial of nano-bots beside the corpse and allowed them several minutes to spread over and scan the immediate area.
Rees was getting drowsy by the time Morgan spoke to him again, his whirring servos and humming circuits lingering just beneath his voice.
“I have completed my examination, Detective Rees. Quite a remarkable case, I must admit.”
“Remarkable?” Rees asked. “How’s that?”
“As of this moment, I am afraid that I still have yet to identify the victim.”
“What? You didn’t get anything from a DNA scan?”
“No,” Morgan said. Rees wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected frustration in the digitized voice. “While it is not unheard of to occasionally encounter an individual whose genetic code is not registered in the national databanks, I have never seen a sample returned as completely negative.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, Detective Rees, that your victim’s DNA does not register as human.”
That was definitely something Rees had never heard before.
“How is that possible?” he asked.
“I do not know.”
That, as far as Rees knew, was also a first.
“There are, however,” Morgan said, “a number of unidentified toxins in the victim’s bloodstream. It is possible that these toxins could have an adverse affect on the DNA scan. I will need to examine the victim more thoroughly and subject its blood to a number of tests before I can tell you more.”
Rees didn’t bother to ask about the implications of the corpse not being human.
The case was already weird enough.
“What about the injuries to the hands and face?
“To put it simply, Detective Rees, they are the most unusual I have ever encountered, but they did not cause the victim’s death. He was shot eight times, with two bullets puncturing the heart, two hitting the stomach, one in the skull, and the three remaining bullets becoming lodged in the spinal column. Standard sidearm nano-rounds.”
Rees couldn’t believe there were still people stupid enough to commit murder with a modern gun. Every firearm manufactured within the last fifty years fired a caseless, computerized bullet that recorded the time and location from which it was fired. The bullet also carried the registration information of the gun that fired it and the DNA coding of whoever pulled the trigger. There were still a few antique lead-spitters floating around on the streets, but most of them had been confiscated and melted down as part of the government’s crackdown on illegal firearms.
Morgan continued.
“The first bullet was fired at precisely 2:33:21 AM and struck the victim’s heart. The next six rounds were fired quickly, within a span of ten seconds, but the bullet to the skull was fired a full five minutes later. All eight rounds were fired at point blank range. The weapon was fired by a Sircotin Technologies executive named George Vandum, Vice-President of Optics Research and Production.”
That certainly wasn’t the kind of suspect Rees had expected, but considering that the case involved a body with melted flesh that might not even be human, he wasn’t about to let anything surprise him.
“Do we have a current address on him?”
“Yes,” Morgan said. “I have already transmitted my report to headquarters and filed a warrant for his arrest.”
“Oh,” Rees said.
“Do you have any further questions, Detective Rees?”
“No, I can get anything else I need from your report.”
“Do you require a hardcopy?”
Rees nodded and felt fortunate that the department hadn’t yet made it a requirement for all officers to have datachip implants. He was one of only a handful who weren’t wired in any way.
Morgan reached up to the tiny computer drive plugged into the back of his skull and produced a small piece of plastic that he handed to Rees. He looked at it.
Case #4563367-6638 Dr. L. S. Morgan.
“Good night, Detective.”
As the doctor left, his assistants entered the room, each one snatching up something Morgan had indicated was worth taking back to the lab, including the body. They were finished in less than five minutes.
When the elevator door closed behind them, Rees slipped the chip into his coat pocket and lit another cigarette.
“Right to the point, aren’t they, sir?”
Rees glanced at the patrolman and thought he seemed a little too eager for his own good.
“Yeah,” he said. “Have to beat them to the scene to get a decent look at anything these days.”
“So what do we do now?”
“It’s out of your hands. Go get some sleep and try to forget about it.”
“What about you, sir?”
“Me?” Rees took a deep drag from his cigarette and then shrugged his shoulders.
The patrolman made his way to the elevator and Rees’s gaze drifted back to the jagged corners and uneven walls of the eighty-eighth floor.
“Hey, let me ask you something,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“This floor look strange to you? Like they didn’t put it together right or something?”
The patrolman looked around a moment and shook his head.
“No, sir; looks pretty solid to me. Maybe you should think about getting some sleep.”
The patrolman’s eyes shimmered as the light struck them. Artificial, Rees thought. Maybe it was time to trade up, after all.
“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”
***
It was nearly dawn by the time George Vandum was taken into custody and brought back to the station for questioning. Rees had tried to get some sleep at his desk after getting back from the crime scene, but the constant activity around him made it difficult. He felt horrible. It was getting harder for him to keep up with the department’s eighteen-hour work shifts, especially since he stubbornly refused to get a neural regulator nanochip implanted when the workday was officially increased. He still found the notion of putting different parts of the brain to sleep throughout the day a little too unnatural to be of any good.
The arresting officer explained to him that the suspect was found cowering in the closet of his uptown apartment, but Rees was so tired that he didn’t hear most of the details. He allowed himself to be led through the corridors of the station to the interrogation room where Vandum was being held.
For a man who was supposed to be one of Sircotin’s big shots, George Vandum didn’t inspire much confidence in the corporation’s brain trust. He looked more strung out than Rees felt.
“No lawyer, Mr. Vandum?”
He said nothing as Rees sat down.
“You are aware that you’ve been charged with murder, right?”
No response.
“Mister Vandum, I’m Detective Rees, I conducted–”
“Rees?” Vandum asked, looking at him for the first time. “Detective Nicholas Rees?”
Rees reminded himself again that he wasn’t going to be surprised by anything.
“Yeah, do we know each other?”
“No. I’ve heard your name once or twice.”
Rees wasn’t sure how that was possible, seeing as how he’d been lucky enough to keep his name out of the media spotlight.
“So,” Vandum said, “I guess you’re the one who found it?”
“Found what?”
“Come on, Detective. You know what I mean.”
Rees nodded.
“Yeah, I was first on the scene after it was reported.”
“Quite a mess, wasn’t it? I never thought there could be so much blood.”
“So you’re not denying anything, then?”
“Why would I? I’m the one who reported it.”
Rees chuckled.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Vandum shook his head.
“Now why the hell would you do that?”
No answer.
“Look, if there’s more to this story, you need to help me out here, because all I’ve got to go on is a dead body and bullets that identify you as the shooter. This is an open and close case as far as I’m concerned unless you’ve got a damned good explanation for why things aren’t as they appear.”
“You said I’m being charged with murder, correct?” Vandum asked.
“Yes. In the first degree, I might add.”
“Humor me, then, Detective. What is your definition of murder?”
“The killing of another human being.”
“Exactly,” Vandum said. “Knowing that, how can you possibly hope to convict me of murder?”
“Look, we have the data proving that you fired eight bullets into… ”
Rees recalled the particulars of Morgan’s analysis of the victim’s body.
“Ah,” Vandum said, “so you saw the DNA scan, didn’t you?”
“It was inconclusive,” Rees said. “Toxins in the bloodstream probably distorted the scan. I’m sure it’s been sorted out by now.”
“Come on, Detective, you don’t buy that, do you?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Rees said. “Why did you feel the need to put eight bullets into this guy?”
“Because I didn’t think one would be enough,” Vandum said, chuckling.
“Cute. Just answer the damn question.”
“I’m being serious, I didn’t know what would happen when I shot that thing.”
“Who was this guy to you, anyway?” Rees asked.
“You want to know who it really is or who it claimed to be?”
“This is your story,” Rees said, “tell me what you think I need to know.”
Vandum leaned back in his chair.
“I first met it a year ago when we were planning to put up the new building downtown. We called in a bunch of architects, looking for designs we liked. There was this guy nobody had ever heard of, we don’t even know how his name got on the list of candidates. He was weird; the sort that made you feel like he was never telling the whole truth when he told you something, you know?”
“Sure, I guess I know the type,” Rees said. “He have a name, this guy?”
Vandum nibbled on his lip briefly before he answered.
“Kurush,” he said. “Name was Aran Kurush.”
“Go on.”
“Well, strange as he was, he seemed to have a way with people. His proposal blew everybody away; it was like nothing we’d seen before, really cutting edge stuff. Nobody was surprised when he got the contract. We broke ground a few months later.
“Everything went along fine until they started construction of the top floor a few months ago. For some reason, it kept lagging behind schedule. Kurush was having a hard time with the contractor, said they couldn’t follow his plans properly. That’s when they called me in to help.”
“Wait a minute,” Rees said, “what the hell do you know about architectural design? You’re the VP of optics research, not a construction foreman.”
Vandum smiled.
“You’re a good listener, Detective. I like that. Yes, I handle most of Sircotin’s optics research, development, and marketing. Believe me, I was as surprised as anyone to be called in to help.”
“So what does optics have to do with this?”
“Kurush insisted that the workers needed to have their vision corrected, said his plans required such precision that their eyes weren’t up to the task. We’d gone through three or four contractors by that point and the board of directors was getting tired of the delays, so they were willing to let him try anything. Kurush even offered to pay for the procedures himself; had every worker outfitted with our latest DeepSight cyberoptic implants.
“After that, construction started moving along again. I went up there one day to follow up with Kurush and make sure none of workers were having problems. Everything seemed okay at first, but the more I watched what the workers were doing, the more something seemed… off.”
Rees leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He needed a cigarette.
“What do you mean by ‘off’?”
Vandum shook his head.
“I didn’t quite know,” he said. “Just a hunch more than anything. It was almost like the workers were seeing things that I couldn’t see, if that makes sense.”
Rees shrugged, remembering the odd angles and poorly finished surfaces of the building’s top floor.
Vandum leaned over the table and stared at him.
“What?” Rees asked.
“Your eyes. You don’t have implants, do you?”
Rees shook his head.
“Tell me, Detective, what did you see up there?”
“Shitty workmanship,” he said. “Looked like nobody on the work crew owned a damn level.”
Vandum smiled.
“Strange, don’t you think?”
It was strange; Rees couldn’t deny that. He had a hard time squaring how a multi-billion dollar corporation would settle for anything less than perfection from its contractors.
“Sure, I guess so. What does that have to do with you pumping eight bullets into the guy on a slab downstairs?”
Vandum’s smile vanished and his eyes widened.
“Downstairs? You mean you’re keeping it here?”
“Morgue’s here at the precinct, Mr. Vandum. No secret there. You think they’re going to do an autopsy at the crime scene?”
“Detective, listen to me,” Vandum said, his voice trembling. “You have to destroy it. Burn it, shred it, recycle it, I don’t know what will work, but you’ve got to get rid of it as soon as you can.”
The 88th Floor Page 1