Thirteen Authors With New Takes on Sherlock Holmes

by Michael A. Ventrella

  “I’m a doctor,” Watson said, yanking himself out of her grip. Her hair was coiled back as tight as a snake to the nape of her neck, to reveal a ruddy-cheeked face with deep-set brown eyes.

  “We don’t run a scrap heap here, Doctor!”

  While Watson dusted himself off and G. Lestrade crossed her arms to stare him down like an offending schoolchild, the Sherlock revolved with many a click and a clack of armored feet around the body arranged on the gurney and being prepared for processing.

  The mortuary attendant, hooked knife in hand, watched the machine with his mouth open, a cigarette clinging to the edge of his lip like the small finger of a baby. The tiles and the flooring were awash in a miasma of body fluids and water. Bodies were laid out in various stages of being cut open and having their organs removed before being shipped to their places of final rest. The smell was indescribable, but unmoved by all of this, the Sherlock leaned over the body like a praying mantis, set its fingers against the waxen skin to examine the eyes, probed the neck, and look over the body entire. Its eyes fixed an eerie blue light as it scanned images, radiating a ghostly corona that reminded Jovan of legends of marsh fire his father used to tell him when he was young.

  “Dehydration,” the Sherlock pronounced. “Starved, too, no doubt. Look how loose the skin is. Vitamin D deficiency, exceedingly pale.”

  “His skin is supposed to be pale,” Watson said, curious to know if the machine would put to use its other talents, namely, its ability to take blood samples and put it through a blood profile. A drop of blood through its pin-sharp fingertip, and the Sherlock could surmise the layout of one’s diet, nutrition levels, and functioning of internal organs. Watson had never thought to put it to the test with a dead body. Even Lestrade had stopped protesting, with her hands on her hips, sharply disapproving but too curious to put a stop to it.

  “His skin is currently gray,” the Sherlock said, “but before this he did not spend much of his time outside. An office worker.”

  “We’ve ruled out homicide,” Lestrade said.

  “I haven’t,” the Sherlock said, and pressed a fingertip into the skin. Its hard disc began to quicken, to whir. Watson found an inexpressible pleasure watching his machine contradict the detective and hearing its fan engage, cooling off the processor unit inside. The Sherlock’s brain was working overtime. By God, it’s excited.

  “I don’t think so,” Lestrade pressed. “We don’t even have identification, and all we have is a tourist in poor health who collapsed. At the end of the day, I have plenty of dead bodies with knives and bullet wounds, and you want to quibble over whether the boy had three square meals a day and a stroll at the beach, eh?”

  “Worked to death, Lestrade,” the Sherlock said. The robot leaned back from the corpse, yanking the sheet down to his waist. It lifted the hand of the boy, brandishing the corpse’s wrist for the detective to see. “Carpal tunnel. See the marks on his fingertips? Soft hands, but constant pressure, indicative of using a computer constantly. It would not surprise me if he has a wrist band among his possessions, and his blood levels suggest he has been dosing himself with a series of stimulants, some as innocuous as coffee, and at the worst, methamphetamine.”

  “Junkies die in Russia every day,” Lestrade sneered. “Prove to me I should care about this one and maybe I will spare you both from a day in a prison cell.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to be the detective that cracks the case on the troublesome hacktivist activity against your politsya’s servers?”

  She tilted her head back and laughed.

  • • •

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Watson snapped.

  The Sherlock managed to look forlorn as it took a seat beside Watson in the holding cell at the Saint Petersburg Police Station.

  “I thought career advancement would be a noble motivator for Officer Lestrade.”

  “That’s because Pytr thinks police are here to help you in life, not steal from you, and so you adopt the naïve belief he installed into your coding. Next you’ll be drinking like he does.”

  “Isn’t that what police are for? Isn’t that their function in society?”

  Watson did not have the hours to explain all the nuances of culture that Pytr, in his very protected stratum of society, had failed to program into the thing. Yet the Sherlock was demanding an answer and Watson found it hard to admit that in fact, that was not the politsya’s primary function in Russia.

  “No,” muttered Watson. “Now, would you just concentrate on getting us out of here? I have exams to grade, students are depending on me. And the sooner we get back, I can plug you in and see what the hell to do about you.”

  “What are you implying? You are planning to shut me down?”

  “You’re not made for—for whatever this is that you’re doing! You’re engineered to save lives and further the progress of science, not solve crimes.”

  “Well, that’s bloody boring.”

  “Remind me to reprogram you in Russian.”

  “I’m more Russian than you are. At least my spare parts originated here. Your father was a wretched Englishman.”

  “By God, if you don’t apologize to Lestrade, I will shut you down, right now.”

  It managed to look horrified. “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Watch me.”

  Watson sat back and didn’t care that he seemed a truculent child, but he was cold and hungry, the vodka buzz had long since faded, and he wanted nothing more than to sleep.

  “Fine,” the Sherlock snapped. Testy. “Give me your wallet.”

  “Why would I give you my wallet?”

  “Do you want out of here?”

  Watson sighed and pulled it out of his pocket. He felt a moment’s reservation as he passed it into the cold metal palm of the machine, and then reservation became out and out horror as the machine stripped the wallet of all the rubles as easily as one might shuck an ear of corn, and cast the wallet onto the grimy floor of the cell.

  “Officer!” the machine said, waving the rubles through the bars.

  The officer behind the desk looked up and took a brand-new interest in his prisoners when he saw the splayed rubles in the machine’s hand.

  “Could I pay the fine to grant me and my fellow here freedom from your wonderful establishment?”

  The officer confirmed that they were alone and a quick negotiation occurred through the bars. Money passed from machine hand to human, and then there was a clank of keys as the cell door opened. The Sherlock plucked Watson’s wrist into its mechanical grip. It was like being manacled by a pair of handcuffs.

  “I don’t think Lestrade will like to find us gone,” Watson muttered, but the Sherlock hushed him as the officer opened a door down a back stairway and suddenly, the machine was dragging him down the steps, swiftly, eager to put distance between himself and the possible raging detective that would surely follow.

  “No programming can explain this,” Watson said as the machine released him. The robot reached for the door handle that would spill them out onto the street outside, but Watson shoved it back closed and the machine turned, the sound of its hard disc spinning in a distant, electronic hum and its eyes casting their eerie marsh-fire blue.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t made for this,” Watson explained. And what on earth was he expecting the machine to say? It seemed natural to speak with it, just as though it were, well, human.

  “I was made for precisely this,” the Sherlock countered. “I was made for finding the patterns in disparate data, for collating information and the application of knowledge, and the evolution of intelligence.”

  “You were never designed for artificial intelligence.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I was designed for. No one designed fire when they set flint and tinder against one another, but sparks result all the same. Now, will you waste all your time having an existential crisis for me, or shall we figure out why that Chinese boy died?”

  • • •


  Watson, however, was not content to leave it alone.

  All reason dictated that the Sherlock should not be, and yet, like a golem, it was invested with a life of its own, independent and sentient and seemingly not in need of Watson’s help at all; yet at no point did it abandon the doctor as they set to taking the train back to the university. As though the machine took pleasure in the companionship.

  “A mistake. That’s what this is. An awful mistake.”

  “Are you still going on about my intelligence? There’s simply not the time to be arguing over unintended consequences, you know. Now would be a good time to think about what occupation might work a healthy young man to death.”

  “I thought you said he was a hacktivist.”

  “That’s silly. I just said that hoping to engage the paranoia of the politsya. I didn’t take into account general apathy and corruption.”

  “So what was he, then? How did he die?”

  “Worked to death, clearly. At a computer. The way blood was pooling along his legs, thighs, his buttocks. Thrombosis. Typical blood flow problems from working in excess of fourteen hours in front of a screen.”

  “And what else does my amazing machine deduce from this?”

  “I imagine his family is looking for him. He’s not a citizen. Came on a work visa, perhaps, but unlikely.”

  “Why is that? Why unlikely?”

  “No identification in his wallet.”

  “Wallet? Where, when—”

  The machine reached over to its bicep, and tapped a metal plate. The plate swung out like a small door, to reveal a cache holding a small billfold, which it withdrew and held out to Watson. Fumbling, the doctor took it with an expression of amazement tinged with a small element of fear. The machine was capable of deception—what else would it do? Was it lying to him now? Was he safe with this thing?

  “In the morgue,” the machine explained in a hushed tone. “While our good Lestrade was giving you a dressing-down, I divested him of it.”

  “This is stealing!”

  “He’s dead, I’m certain he won’t miss it.”

  “No, you don’t understand, it belongs to somebody—”

  “I’ve heard of this ‘finders keepers’ idiom; I assume it takes precedence with the effects of dead people as well.”

  Watson gave up. Ethics would clearly not be the machine’s strong point. “I need to drink.”

  “You need to look into his wallet.”

  Watson did and shook his head. “Empty, but it doesn’t mean anything. The attendants at the morgue could have emptied it.”

  “They’d have nothing to gain by stealing his work visa, though, meaning he had none to begin with. No money. All very suspicious.”

  “Human trafficking?” Watson hazarded.

  “There’s many a way to hold a human against their will, and some more subtle than others.”

  The train lurched to a stop and the machine, unbalanced, began to tip forward into the passengers in front of them. Watson thrust his arm against its armor-plated chest, forcing it back upright. Cold metal, but Watson felt colder with the Sherlock’s last words. What in the world did the machine know about holding humans against their will? As more time passed, the more frightened he became by the implications of his most extraordinary machine. The conclusion was undeniable—when they got back to his office, he was shutting the machine down for good, and that was how it should have been from the first.

  The tipping machine bumped into the knee of a seated passenger, who dropped her newspaper to the floor with a curse. The Sherlock apologized to the startled woman, snatching the paper up and presenting it to her. The welded plates of armor hitched up in an awkward smile, but the woman snatched the paper back, her lips drawn back in a fear-grimace.

  See? Even regular people don’t like the thing. It’s a bad sign all around.

  Resigned, Watson experienced a stab of guilt as the Sherlock and he departed the train, walking on up out of the station and back onto the main street.

  “Did you see the newspaper?” the machine asked. Excitement in its voice. Pytr must have put in an all-nighter for the programming to be this richly featured.

  “You made her drop it, by accident.”

  “On purpose,” the machine pointed out, and by god, was it proud of itself?

  Indeed, it was.

  “The headline was about the new digital currency; surely you’ve heard of it while you’ve been cloistered in your schoolrooms?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of digital currency, I’m not a fool. It’s been around for decades.”

  “Well, you’ve heard of LightCoin, then?”

  “All I know is I have little enough of regular money, which, by the way, you stole from me. I’ll worry about LightCoin when I have a few spare rubles to throw away on police bribes.”

  “What do you suppose a young man working at a computer day and night might have in common with digital currency?”

  Watson stopped on the sidewalk. It was not a revelation that happened all at once, but descended, ferocious by degrees.

  “Yes!” the Sherlock cried, and virtually cavorted around him. It snatched at Watson with both hands, gripping him at the shoulders and grinning the way a monkey does when it’s trying to imitate a person. “Yes, I see it in your eyes, Watson! The game is afoot!”

  And the Sherlock clapped its metal hands so they rang like a bell. People avoided them on all sides while Watson, stunned and excited himself, pulled the Sherlock out of the busy street and away from the foot traffic.

  • • •

  That was why the Chinese boy had no money in his wallet; he carried all his currency digitally.

  “Of course, that’s a remarkable perception, but you know, I fear he will remain an unknown tragedy,” Watson said.

  The Sherlock snatched a newspaper out of the trash beside them, where a cigarette textured the air with streams of tobacco smoke. The Sherlock spread the front page out for Watson to see.

  “See this? This man has been running the foremost bank in the region for years. He made a killing in the nineties. And he was the first to advance the digital currencies of the future, during the 2010s.”

  The Sherlock tapped the figure of the president, an unremarkable man with a mustache and an expensive suit, smiling for the camera.

  “The problem with digital currency is it’s a bit harder to manufacture out of thin air than paper,” the Sherlock said. “It depends on algorithms to work. Do you follow, Watson?”

  “I’m not an imbecile, you know,” Watson said, peevish. “Continue with your line of reasoning.”

  “Well, if you run a bank that’s not entirely trustworthy, you can print more money, or steal it from someone else, but these digital currencies are not quite so pliable. An old thief like this needs to game the system. The only way to game the digital currency is by old-fashioned sweat and blood.”

  “Perhaps I am an imbecile. Come again?”

  “You have to solve mathematical problems to make LightCoin. That’s how LightCoin works. So you need computing power, or a lot of people to do it. That’s how the coinage is ‘mined,’ as they call it. It can take hours just to solve a single problem. Each problem solved yields an amount of coin. In this way, the currency can’t be artificially inflated, the way our rubles are if the government decides to print more. It devalues the money. But it can’t happen with digital currencies because it depends on the limitations of human function to create more money. Unless…”

  Watson felt the light speed crash of epiphany upon him, quantum leaps of understanding, and thought to himself: This is all quite fun. I’m enjoying myself.

  He had not thought about how cold and hungry he was in quite some time.

  “Unless,” Watson finished the Sherlock’s train of thought, “unless you make a lot of people work overtime to mine the digital currency for you. Brought here illegally, and done in secret so no one knows you’re gaming the system.”

  The Sherlock slapped him on
the back and Watson felt an odd swell of pride.

  • • •

  Instead of making the right down the street that would take them down to the familiar university building, the Sherlock made a sharp left and set them on a path Watson did not know. Tall city buildings hugged the sky into a narrow blue line, and then the Sherlock was angling across the street. A car swerved to avoid the upright and determined machine as Watson chased after it into the miasma of car exhaust and yelling drivers. An angry motorist careened around the robot and Watson dragged it the rest of the way across.

  “We have to get back to the university,” Watson panted, and found that the Sherlock was not listening at all, like a dog let off its leash. It merely walked past him and into the building behind them, with the faint ring of a bell and the whoosh of a glass door.

  Groaning, Watson turned and followed it into the building, looking up quickly enough to snag the name Batiushka Bank as the door closed against the city sounds behind him and he breathed in the new, stifling scenery of the interior room.

  The bank was small and dark, claustrophobic with the tightness of the walls. Imperious and unaffected, the robot strode up to the counter where a young man was shuffling paperwork from one pile to another.

  “I have an appointment,” the Sherlock said.

  The young man paused with a sheaf of papers in his hand, and stared at the robot. He eyed the dull metal of the armor plates, the alien blue light flickering behind its eyes.

  “With Kirill Alkaev, please.”

  The youth blinked and looked at Watson, who nodded and summoned his most serious face for the occasion. He smiled and proceeded to put the papers down, opening up a drawer with the rattle of a lock and key.

  In seconds, he pointed a revolver from above the counter at the machine and pulled the trigger.

  Watson felt his breath sucked away into a vacuum; panic galvanized him as he watched the young man fire the gun. Metal plates showered sparks and Watson heard the zing! as one bullet and then two ricocheted and rattled through the Sherlock’s metal exoskeleton. The hard drive stopped, the spinning sound winding down and the light extinguishing behind the mercury-laden eyes, and the entire figure collapsed in on itself like crumpled tissue paper.