The old man was dead.
Eleven years old. She is Myrna Lang and she is eleven years old. She hears voices in her head. Worried, her family take her to a doctor. The doctor calls the Judges. They take her from her family. They tell her she is special. They tell her she is psychic. One day she will be a Psi-Judge.
She doesn't want to be a Psi-Judge. She misses her family. She is lonely and unhappy.
The years pass. Her Psi-Tutors try to counsel her, but her feelings do not go away. She begins to hate her own powers. She resents them. If she didn't have psychic powers, she could have a normal life...
"I need a doctor!" Anderson yelled, her voice a lonely echo across empty hallways. Her hands were at Lang's chest, performing compressions, her mind awash with Lang's memories as the physical contact provoked a sudden psychic transference. Blood dripped from an unseen wound hidden by the hair at the back of the rookie's head. Lang's eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling, chillingly lifeless and vacant.
"I need a doctor now!" Anderson yelled again. She continued the compressions, not daring for a moment to stop long enough to either check the woman's pulse or use her own radio to call for assistance. Right now, she suspected her hands were all that was keeping Lang's heart beating.
"C'mon, Lang," she said. "I know you can still hear me. You've got to stay with me!"
There was no reaction. Lang's eyes seemed as empty as the corridors around them.
"C'mon, Lang," the words first became a mantra, then a prayer. "C'mon, Lang."
By the time a doctor finally arrived to help her, Lang's body had started to grow cold.
Thank you, Leonard, Daniel said. In the aftermath of the old man's death, he wore a contented smile. Thank you for everything. I'm sorry we ever argued. You've been a good friend. The best friend I ever had.
The moment the old man had breathed his last, something weird had started to happen to Daniel. The boy seemed to fade away before Leonard's eyes, as though he was gradually becoming just as invisible to Leonard as he was to everyone else.
"Daniel?" Confused, Leonard watched the boy continue to fade until he could almost see right through him. "Is there something wrong? Are you all right?"
I'm fine, Leonard, Daniel's smile was calm and peaceful. I've just found a place where I can be happy. You mustn't be sad. And I remember my promise to you. I said I'd help you find your mother. I know where she is. I've always known, really. But I couldn't tell you before, not until you had helped me.
Daniel was almost gone now. Even his voice had begun to fade, the sound like the gentle rustling of a breeze through long grass.
Before Leonard knew what was happening, Daniel disappeared. But, with his last words the boy kept his promise. He told Leonard who his mother was and where she lived. Most importantly of all, though, he told him her name.
Grace. His mother's name was Grace.
TWENTY-ONE
REUNIONS, GOODBYES AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS
"We'll do our best," the doctor told Anderson as they wheeled Lang into surgery. "You have to understand, though, there's a limit to what we can do. Even if we manage to stabilise her condition and remove the bullet, there's every chance she's suffered irreparable brain damage."
There were some words which seem final when you hear them from doctors. Watching as Lang was taken into theatre, Anderson realised she felt as helpless in this situation as an ordinary citizen might feel in dealing with a Judge. Nor could she do anything to improve Lang's chances by sitting around the hospital waiting for news. All she could do was head back to the streets.
Besides which, there was the matter of unfinished business.
The mutant, Lenny, had managed to escape from the hospital in the midst of the confusion while Anderson and the other Judges dealt with the threat posed by Roderick Lowe's bodyguards. The irony was the extreme measures Lowe had taken to protect his life had worked against him. While his guards responded to the override command to go on a pre-programmed killing spree, Lenny had broken into the operating theatre and strangled the old man.
Still, irony was a sword that could cut two ways. In this case, it seemed as sharp on one side as it did the other.
For while Lenny the mutant had killed an old man, he had not killed Roderick Lowe.
"It's almost like it was some kind of providence," a twitchy, nervous surgeon named Langstock had told Anderson when she interviewed him in the immediate aftermath of the carnage. "I mean, I'm not a religious man. But, well, if that monster had come into the operating room a few minutes earlier, he would have killed Mr Lowe."
Roderick Lowe was not dead. He had been undergoing a Total Body Transplant when Lenny had attacked him. What the giant could not know, however, was that the procedure had been a success. By the time Lenny entered the operating theatre, Lowe's consciousness had been successfully transferred to his new body. The old man Lenny had strangled had been nothing more than an empty and discarded shell.
As lucky escapes went, it was right up there with the guy who had fallen off the roof of a two-hundred storey housing block, only to land safely on a window washer's platform suspended outside the one-hundred-and-ninety-ninth floor. Anderson found it difficult to feel any great joy at Lowe's escape, though. From what she knew of the reasons behind the boy and the giant's murder spree, and given Lowe's age, it was likely he was involved in some way in the fifty-year-old child abuse case. That, and the matter of his cyborg bodyguards' rampage, would leave him facing a lengthy list of charges when he recovered from the transplant. It turned out Lowe was a wealthy man. It took more than deep pockets, however, to deter the Judges of Mega-City One. There was every chance Lowe would spend a great deal of the extra years he had bought himself inside an iso-cube.
Or not.
In the weeks following his transplant procedure, it became clear that irony cut three ways in its dealings with Roderick Lowe. Despite an initially positive prognosis, over time it became apparent something had gone seriously wrong with Lowe's transplant. Whether it was through some unforeseen surgical error, or simply bad luck, Lowe did not regain consciousness. Instead, he remained locked in a permanent vegetative state, trapped inside his new body and unable to communicate. He lived for another fifty-seven years; a drooling basket case, kept alive by machines, with one tube to feed him and another tube to take away his waste. The various charges against him were held on file, but he was not sentenced nor was he ever arrested. Financially, it made little sense for Justice Department to go to the considerable expense of imprisoning a man who was already a prisoner in his own body.
The general consensus was that Lowe had already suffered a fate worse than death. Some even saw it as a sign that Grud really did have a sense of humour.
Still, if the Almighty did indulge in the occasional joke, He liked to play them straight.
For Dr Richard Langstock, the events at the Siegel Medical Centre that day heralded the end of a promising career. Generally, in the years that followed, he traced the beginning of his misfortunes to a short conversation he had had with Psi-Judge Anderson in the wake of the Lowe transplant.
"You realise there's a reason why Total Body Transplants are so heavily regulated?" Anderson had told him. "Justice Department likes to make sure the body donors are legit and no one is going around murdering people to steal their bodies. I take it all your paperwork is up-to-date?"
"Of course," Langstock had found himself unable to prevent his voice from trembling as he answered her. He was a fine surgeon, but a very poor liar. "We're very careful about these things. I'm sure you'll find everything is in order."
"I'm sure we will," Anderson had smiled at him. "That's why I've ordered there to be a complete audit made of your records for the last ten years. We'll also be sending a couple of Judges from the Accounting Division to take a look at your personal finances. After that, you're booked in for interrogation at your local Sector House. We'll send you to see the Dream Police. PSU have pulled all the records of your recent movements. Who kn
ows, maybe when they're finished with you, they'll send you back to me for a full telepathic probe. That's the thing about Justice Department; we don't like to leave any stone unturned."
In the fullness of time, other matters were resolved. Although Operation Lazarus quietly folded its tents within a few days of its inception, the investigation into the operations of the Organizatsiya and the remains of Konrad Gruschenko's criminal empire continued for years. Over time, arrests were made. Arthur Whittaker, AKA Peter Arkady, tentatively identified as Gruschenko's successor as head of the Organizatsiya, was killed in a shootout with Judges while resisting arrest.
At least, that was the outcome recorded in the Justice Department casebooks. For years afterwards rumours would occasionally surface in the underworld that Arkady had followed the example of his one-time leader, faking his own death so he could resume his criminal activities under a new identity. There were a number of claims made of sightings of him over the years.
The sightings were never confirmed.
As for the decades-old child abuse cases whose existence had been revealed by the discovery of the meme-encoder among the effects of Joseph Kapinski, they were diligently investigated by the relevant Justice Department divisions. It became clear that Roderick Lowe had been a prime mover in the crimes, alongside a number of other wealthy and distinguished members of Mega-City One's high society - most of whom had long ago succumbed to old age and were, thus, beyond punishment by earthly powers. Arrests were made where they could be, while the now-adult victims of the crimes were offered counselling.
With the investigation completed, the records were filed away. But while it was the end of one particular case, elsewhere in the city children continued to be abused. With the best will in the world, the forces of Law could not be everywhere, nor could they see everything. For every single case of abuse that was brought to light, it was estimated as many as ten went unreported.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There was one unexpected development, however. The investigation into Roderick Lowe and his associates uncovered evidence linking them with the previously unsolved disappearances of at least thirty-seven children over a period of several decades. A number of sets of human remains were found, all but one of which were eventually claimed by grieving relatives once forensic tests had established the identities of the deceased. The one exception was the skeleton of a young boy, estimated to have been approximately eight years old at the time of his death, which was discovered buried beneath the basement of a derelict factory in Sector 45. Despite exhaustive tests by Teks and Med-Judges, the boy's identity could not be confirmed.
In a curious side-note, it was Judge Anderson who came closest to being able to identify the boy. Once facial reconstruction software had been used to create a computer-generated Tri-D portrait of what the boy might have looked like in life, she realised he bore an uncanny resemblance to the ghostly child she had seen clinging to the mutant giant's shoulders in City Bottom.
Despite this, the boy's name was never discovered. As for the child ghost Anderson had encountered, he was never seen again.
All of which left only the matter of Lenny the mutant.
The mutant had escaped the hospital, but given the fact he was bleeding copiously from the bullet wounds riddling his body, Anderson found his trail easy to follow. In the company of a tac-team, she tracked him across the city. Fleeing the hospital the mutant had hijacked a car, forcing the terrified driver to transport him to a run-down neighbourhood in Sector 43.
By the time Anderson and the others arrived on the scene, Lenny had abandoned the car to make his way on foot to a third-floor apartment in the nearby John Merrick Block. Wary in case a hostage situation developed, the Judges had approached the apartment with caution. Finding the front door open, Anderson was the first one through the doorway into the apartment. Inside, she was greeted by an unexpected sight.
The mutant lay dead on the floor of the living room, his head cradled in the lap of an old woman who knelt crying over him. From the amount of blood on the floor, it was clear the mutant had bled out from his wounds. It must have taken a titanic final effort for him to reach the apartment before he died.
"Lenny!" Not realising the mutant was dead, one of the tac-team Judges levelled his Lawgiver at the corpse and began to bark out orders. "Step away from the woman! Now!"
"Leonard," the old woman corrected him. She smoothed her hand gently over the mutant's hair, as though he was sleeping. Her eyes were red with tears. "His name was Leonard, just like his father. He was my beautiful special boy, but you Judges had to take him away from me. You put me in the cubes. You kept us apart all these years. And now you've killed him. My poor, special little boy."
Her hand continuing to stroke gently at his hair, the woman began to hum a lullaby. In death, the giant's face was peaceful as though he had been where he wanted to be as he breathed his last breath. There was a quiet, contented smile frozen on his lips.
Leonard the giant had found his mother.
THE END
EPILOGUE
FATES, BOTH WORSE THAN DEATH
"She's doing as well as can be expected," the doctor said. He stood by the observation window and drew Anderson's attention to the place in the room beyond where former Psi-Judge Myrna Lang sat staring blankly into space. "The bullet did a lot of damage to her frontal lobes. Her memory is gone, as are most of her higher brain functions and her personality. But her motor skills are largely unimpaired. Naturally, she's having to re-learn everything all over again. Right now, she's a blank slate. But, given enough time and patience, we should be able to teach her to eat, wash, even dress herself on her own again."
"Are those her parents?" Anderson asked. A door inside the room opened as a middle-aged man and woman entered it. Noticing them as they approached her, Lang smiled.
"Yes, they come here every day," the doctor nodded. "It's strange really, but they seem to be the only people she remembers."
Inside the room, the woman had produced a spoon and a jar of baby food from inside her purse. Sitting down to face her daughter, she began to feed her.
"I was surprised when Psi Division allowed her to be transferred to our facility," the doctor said. "I thought Psi-Judges who were too badly injured to continue their duties had to stay inside Omar House."
"Not in this case," Anderson shook her head sadly. "The damage to her brain destroyed her psychic powers. There was no reason to make her stay in Omar."
Watching as Lang's mother continued to carefully feed her daughter, Anderson wondered if Lang hadn't been given exactly what she wanted. Lang had hated her psychic powers, resenting the fact their presence had caused her to be taken away from her family. Now, Lang's powers were gone and she was with her family again. In some ways it was as though the clock had been turned back: as though Lang had returned to her childhood. She wondered if, given the choice while she had still been in possession of her full faculties, Lang would have accepted this as her only way out of Psi Division. Personally, she found it hard to believe anyone would choose to have this kind of thing done to them. To be robbed of your reason, reduced to little more than an infant: to Anderson it seemed a fate worse than death.
Mercifully, however, and for better or worse, Lang no longer seemed able to realise what she had lost.
Trapped inside his own body, Roderick Lowe was screaming.
He screamed continually, desperate to make himself heard. He was vaguely aware of his surroundings. He knew he was in a hospital bed, his body wired to a variety of tubes and machines. But, no matter how hard he screamed, no one could hear him.
No one except the boy.
That was the worst of it. Bad enough to be trapped, unable to move, inside the prison of your own flesh. But Roderick Lowe was not alone. There was another mind in his body with him. A mind set on vengeance.
They can't hear you, the boy whispered to him in an eerie sing-song voice. You can scream all you like, Mr Lowe.
No one will do anything about it. No one even knows we are in here. There's just you and me. You and me. Do you remember when you hurt me, Mr Lowe? Do you remember when you killed me? You're a bad man. And bad men should be punished.
Abruptly, the character of Roderick Lowe's screams changed as agony coursed through him. The boy seemed to have the power to inflict pain on him whenever he wanted. He tortured him constantly, minute by minute, hour by hour, inflicted torments far worse than any human idea of Hell. And, all the while, Lowe was helpless; he was a puppet to the boy's will.
You're a bad man, the boy said. And you need to be punished. You need to find out what it's like to have other people hurt you when you can't do anything about it. That's why I decided to come in here with you when I saw you at the hospital. I knew I'd be happy in here. I knew I could punish you as much as I want, and as long as I want. For as long as I want, Mr Lowe. We've got all the time in the world.
The pain began again, like a thousand hot stabbing needles all at once. Then, it changed, become a sensation of fear and suffocation. It changed again, the pain of being gouged by ten thousand razors. The nature of the pain changed with every second, giving him no time to grow used to it. The boy was an artist of pain, with a vast repertoire of fresh agonies forever at his fingertips.
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