The 88th Floor

by Benjamin Sperduto

  The process began slowly, an image here, a conjecture there. But before long, the dreaming subconscious would start connecting points that were better left disjointed, finding patterns and ideas that eluded the more limited, systematic reasoning of the waking mind.

  Each dream brought Rees back to the unfinished rooms of the eighty-eighth floor. But the place was different somehow, or maybe he was the one that was different. He noticed the seams in its construction, the architectural gaps that offered a glimpse into something else, somewhere else. A queer sort of light spilled out of unfinished corners, casting bizarre shadows across the room.

  Someone was there with him, always lingering on the edge of his vision. A faint electrical hum filled the air, like there was loose wiring connection in one of the exposed conduits. When he listened closely, Rees thought it sounded almost like whispering.

  Vandum was there, or what was left of him anyway. His severed limbs were nailed into the wall in some haphazard geometric pattern, his entrails tracing a crooked circle around them. Vandum’s head rested on the floor just a few feet away from the rest of his remains. The eyes had been removed, leaving nothing but empty, dead sockets behind.

  Rees felt something cold in his hands. He looked down to see the thin, fiberoptic cables dangling from each of his closed fists. They glistened with blood.

  Trust those eyes of yours…

  ***

  “Rees?”

  He came around slowly, like his consciousness had to traverse a vast gulf just to return to his physical body. When Rees finally opened his eyes, Squibby was standing over him, her hand resting on his shoulder. Somehow, she looked older than when he first entered the room. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he didn’t recall ever seeing so many wrinkles on her face before.

  Once he was stirring, she stepped back and slumped into her chair. She’d brewed another cup of tea and had stuffed her arm elbow-deep into a bag of chips. The strain of the direct neural datafeed was hard on the body. Squibby probably burned off almost a thousand calories every time she plugged in, so she always had a craving for something with a lot of fat and salt whenever she disconnected.

  “How long was I out?” Rees asked. Without any windows, the apartment seemed to exist in a tiny pocket of space unaffected by time.

  Squibby put just enough space between her mouthfuls of chips to answer.

  “About four hours,” she said.

  He was more tired than he thought. If not for the dreams, he might have actually felt refreshed after such a long nap.

  “You just finish up?”

  “Yeah,” Squibby said. She crunched another handful of chips and washed it down with a gulp of tea.

  “So what’d you find?”

  Squibby didn’t answer right away. She took a deep breath and seemed ready to answer, but didn’t. The second try failed as well.

  Rees had never seen her at a loss for words.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Rees, I think you need to let this one go.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, let’s start with what I know. Whoever this Kurush guy is, that can’t be his real name. There’s no trace of anyone by that name prior to him showing up and pitching the tower project to Sircotin. Somehow, though, he’s got all kinds of references from various companies that don’t seem to have any previous connection to him. There are pictures of him floating around here and there over the last few years, but they’re all slightly different enough that it’s impossible to construct a verifiable image of the guy. It’s weird, almost like every picture has been altered after the fact to make him hard to pin down.”

  “You think someone’s trying to cover his tracks?”

  “No,” Squibby said, “this is something different. Far as I can tell, the problem is in the photos themselves. I found a few raw images pulled straight from camera feeds. No post-shot alterations or anything.”

  “Video records?”

  Squibby grunted.

  “Sucks. All of it. I’ve never seen a messier video trail. Not a single clear shot of his face. Either something passes through the frame just as he turns or there’s a lens flare or the image integrity breaks down.”

  “What about the DNA scan Morgan ran?”

  “That was a tough one,” she said. “There’s nothing like it on record in any public or private database, secure or otherwise. But if you go back further, back before DNA screening scans, you start to find some similar cases. Nothing concrete, but circumstances that resemble this one: disfigured body, strange amount of influence for a John Doe, some politician, preacher or businessman always swooping in to make any problems go away.”

  “How far back are we talking?”

  “Last known case was back in the twentieth century, but there are some that go back even longer. I even found mention of cases from fifteenth century Spain and tenth century Iraq.”

  Rees doubted the extreme cases could be of much use. They were probably coincidental matches anyway.

  “What about Sircotin itself? Anything useful there?”

  Squibby shook her head.

  “They transferred most of their servers to the new building a few weeks back. I don’t know what’s going on at that place, but it’s got security like I’ve never seen before.”

  “AI?”

  “I… I don’t know,” Squibby said. “I don’t think so. AI’s adaptive; most of the time it responds to what you do or what it thinks you’re going to do. This stuff, though, it’s like it doesn’t give a shit what you’re doing. It comes at you in weird ways, does things I’ve never seen or heard of before.”

  “So you can’t break through?”

  “Not yet, leastways. I’ve got some sweepers sizing it up now. It’ll take them a while to get a clear picture, but once they’re finished I’ll have a better idea of how to crack it.”

  “How long will that take?”

  Squibby shrugged.

  “A week or two? Maybe a month at the most?”

  That wasn’t going to be much help. Sircotin would have scrubbed anything useful from its records by the time Squibby got access to them.

  “Isn’t there any way to speed that up?”

  “Not from here,” she said. “If I was on-site or had a hardline tap into the system that I could access remotely, then I could probably force my way in. Trying to access it from the outside is tougher; kind of like sizing up a perp through a window instead of standing in front of him.”

  Rees thought for a moment. The building’s upper levels would be locked up tight now that Sicrotin’s lawyers were undercutting the investigation.

  “What about Vandum?” he asked. “Anything unusual there?”

  Squibby bit her lip and sighed.

  “Dead.”

  Rees blinked, dumbfounded.

  “What? How?”

  “Suicide. Sircotin put him on house arrest in his apartment, but he threw himself out the window just a few hours ago. Some pedestrians made off with pics of the body before some security goons scraped him off the pavement.”

  “Shit,” Rees said. “Anybody file a report?”

  “Of course not,” Squibby said. “Looked pretty messy, though. He hit the ground so hard that his eyes popped out.”

  “Wait, his eyes were missing?”

  Squibby nodded.

  “The images weren’t the best quality, but the eyes were definitely gone.”

  Rees was still trying to digest that bit of information when he phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and checked the screen. There was a message waiting for him. The phone didn’t recognize the number.

  “Squibby,” he said, “run a number for me, will you?”

  She punched the numbers in as he relayed them.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  “What? Who is it?”

  “That number’s registered to George Vandum.”

  Rees tapped the screen to open the message.<
br />
  Southeast elevator. 816-121-5225-318-1620. Trust those eyes of yours, detective.

  ***

  The first three floors of the Sircotin Technologies building were open to the public, with stores, workshops, and med-clinics all hawking the latest gadgets and goodies the corporation had to offer. There was still plenty of security, of course. Armed guards were positioned near the exits on each floor and the security checkpoint at the main entrance ran a detailed risk assessment scan on everyone that walked through the doors. Left to his own devices, Rees wouldn’t have made it two steps inside before a security officer in riot gear met him to confiscate his gun and assign an escort to take him wherever he needed to go. If he wasn’t there to shop and didn’t have a warrant on file, the guard might even show him outside then and there.

  Fortunately for him, he had help from Squibby. She’d fixed him up with a scrambler that intercepted every external scan directed at him and bounced back a preprogrammed, adaptive signal that left him looking as innocuous as a file clerk. Security personnel still might have flagged him as suspicious, but they were used to trusting whatever the scanners fed into their optic implants. Short of walking through the door with a gun in hand, Rees could do just about anything without drawing undue attention.

  He headed for the elevator at the southeast corner of the building. It stood by itself, far from the cluster of elevators used by the shopping public. He activated the keypad next to the doors and punched in the number from his phone.

  816-121-5225-318-1620.

  The doors hissed open and Rees stepped into the elevator.

  “I’m in.”

  Squibby guided him from there. She had a copy of the building’s blueprints handy and knew where he needed to go to tap into the main Sircotin network. It was a simple matter of finding the right floor, opening the elevator door, and deploying the splicer drone, which was small enough to fit in Rees’s pocket. Once the device hit the floor, its spidery legs snapped into position and it scurried along the floor almost too quickly for the naked eye to follow. It would hunt down the closest network cable and cut in, inserting itself into the connection and transmitting a clean access point back to Squibby’s apartment. By the time Sircotin hacked through the scrambler signal to find the drone, Squibby would already have everything she needed and the drone’s self-destruct trigger would melt down its nano-circuitry into a puddle of toxic wax.

  Rees waited in the elevator after deploying the drone. He had another one just in case something went wrong. Looking down at the elevator’s keypad, he scanned the numbers.

  The numbers stopped at eighty-seven. The button after it was blank.

  “Got it,” Squibby said over the transmitter. “Signal’s clean.”

  Rees stared at the blank button.

  Had it been blank when he took the elevator to the crime scene yesterday?

  He couldn’t remember.

  “Rees?” Squibby asked. “Are you still there?”

  Trust those eyes of yours, Detective.

  Rees pressed the blank button.

  “Hang tight, Squibby. I’m going to have another look at the top floor.”

  ***

  The elevator doors opened to darkness.

  Rees pulled out his flashlight and switched it on.

  There should have been a night crew working on the floor’s interior, but there was no sign of anyone.

  Slowly, he stepped out of the elevator, sweeping the flashlight toward every corner as he went. Not much work had been done since the previous night. The crooked angles and distended walls were still in place. He found that focusing on any part of the building for too long gave him a headache, so he kept his eyes moving, examining the various walls and half-finished rooms quickly as he moved through the interior of the eighty-eighth floor.

  Squibby’s voice crackled over the transmitter.

  “… es? Can… ear me?”

  There must have been some sort of interference from the structure. That seemed odd, considering that many of the walls were unfinished and the top floor was so high.

  “You’re breaking up, Squibby.”

  “Access… feeds. Somebod… rased… eight… loor.”

  “Listen, I can’t hear shit up here. Save it till I–”

  “Wha… uck?”

  There was a tinge of panic in her voice, something Rees wasn’t used to hearing from her.

  “Squibby? What is it?”

  “Sec… ity!”

  He thought back to what she said about the building’s unusual security program. It shouldn’t have been able to trace her so quickly.

  “Don’t try to–”

  “Shit!” Squibby said, her voice finally coming through cleanly.

  Then she screamed.

  The signal erupted with shrill static and Rees yanked the transmitter out of his ear. His ears felt like they would keep ringing forever, but after a few seconds, he realized they weren’t ringing at all. The sound was coming from all around him, a faint hum that filled the air and made the hair on his arms stand on end.

  He knew that sound, remembered it from somewhere.

  Gripping his flashlight tightly, Rees continued through the unfinished halls of the eighty-eighth floor. The construction become more riotous as he went deeper. Sometimes the angles of the walls and ceiling seemed to change when he swung the light over them, reverting to a more bizarre form once the darkness enveloped them again.

  Stubbornly, he kept going until he came to a large, open space along the tower’s outermost wall. Light should have been pouring through the large windows there, the glow from the surrounding buildings and slivers of moonlight that managed to punch through the nighttime smog.

  But there was no light. The glass was blacker than tar, and even the light from his flashlight seemed to leave it untouched when it passed over the surface.

  He swept the light downward. The pool of blood from last night’s murder had congealed on the floor nearby.

  There was another sound then, somewhere on the far side of the room; a staccato of rips that sounded like a length of fabric being shredded. The air seemed to shift from warm to cold with every breath he took and he felt slightly nauseated.

  He leveled the flashlight on the black void of the window.

  Another tearing sound, louder this time.

  Something in the glass shuddered under the light and the flashlight’s bulb went out with a pop.

  The darkness crashed in on Rees like he’d been tossed into the water on a moonless night. He stumbled back as the tearing sound grew louder and nearly fell, but something caught his arm.

  “Where are you going, Nicholas?”

  The voice was a chorus, a vast array of the familiar and the alien. He heard Vandum and Morgan, Squibby and Nallick. He heard voices he didn’t know, some he’d forgotten, and others he dearly wished to forget. It was all of them and none of them at once.

  Whatever held his arm tightened its grip as he tried to pull away.

  Panicked, Rees reached for his gun.

  The first shot ricocheted off something on the far side of the room, but the second and third thumped into something just a few feet away from him. His arm came free and he fell backwards, firing wildly. Two more shots clanged off the walls and a third smashed into the glass window. It shimmered for a moment, the light from outside blinking through like a strobe before the darkness slammed shut over it once more.

  Rees scrambled to his feet and ran blindly through the pitch-black halls. He bounced off walls, tripped over construction equipment piled on the floor, and clipped his shoulders on doorframes as he tried to find his way back to the elevator.

  A gust of air roared after him and flung his stumbling body forward. His head slammed into something as his feet went out from beneath him. He went down hard, his gun flying from his hand and skittering off into the void.

  Before he lost consciousness, Rees heard the bizarre choir of voices again.

  “Come now, Nicholas. I have so much to sh
ow you.”

  ***

  “Rise and shine, Detective.”

  Rees’s eyes responded sluggishly and it took a few seconds for the woman standing before him to come into focus. She wasn’t familiar, but he could tell what she was just by the way she looked at him.

  “Detective Rees, my name is Amanda Reilly. I’m with the city’s Special Intelligence and Counterterrorism Agency and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  There was a slight, stinging pain on the back of his head. Rees tried to raise a hand to rub it, but his limbs didn’t respond. He was strapped into his chair.

  “Please, Detective, this will go much smoother with your cooperation.”

  Rees knew enough about SICA’s interrogation procedures to take her word for it.

  “Where am I?”

  Reilly smiled, which made Rees wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

  “I’m afraid I can’t say, Detective,” she said.

  True to form, Rees thought.

  Reilly reached into her pocket and produced a small plastic chip.

  “Case #4563367-6638, Addendum. Dr. L. S. Morgan,” she said. “You remember this, I presume?”

  Rees nodded.

  “Who else has seen it?”

  “Everyone that should,” he said. “You know the procedure for that sort of thing, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I also know that this isn’t a routine autopsy report. I’ll ask you again, Detective: Who’s seen it?”

  Rees shook his head. She likely already knew the answer, anyway.

  “Just me and Morgan.”

  He remembered Squibby’s transmission then, that last moment when something had gone wrong.

  “And Squibby,” he said. “What happened to Squibby?”

  Reilly raised an eyebrow.

  “That would be Lynn Squibel? Ex-cyberanalyst for the department?”

  “Yeah,” he said.