The Long Fall Into Darkness

by Charlie Cottrell

  “Wow, that’s…” I started.

  “That’s a hell of a lot,” Ellen said, watching it all scroll by. “How does she have this much information about you?”

  I shrugged. “Ooh, look, there’s my high school transcript,” I said, watching it scroll by.

  “You did not do well in Algebra II,” Vera noted.

  “That teacher signed my yearbook and told me I was a nice kid but that I should never take another honors-level math class ever again,” I said proudly.

  “You drove her to drink, didn’t you?” Vera asked.

  “Most definitely,” I replied. “Okay, so Carmen definitely had a lot of information on me. Like, a whole lot. It’s gonna take us days to get through it all and figure out what we need to clear my name.”

  “I’ll get a team to start digging,” Vera said, walking away and pulling up phone tools on her computer.

  “I wonder what else is on here,” I said. Maya took it as instructions and found a directory for me. “Huh. Thanks, Maya,” I said, scrolling through the directory. “Hey, what’s this?” I clicked on a label and opened up a folder in the vid window.

  “What’d you find, Eddie?” Ellen asked, coming around to look at the same vid window I was poking through.

  “I dunno. Maybe nothing, maybe something big. Look at the folder name.”

  Ellen read it. “Steve Rogers? Sorry, I don’t know who that is.”

  “Didn’t you read comic books as a kid? He was the original super soldier. Faster, stronger, sharper. Could hurl a shield around like it was a discus, bounce it off a half dozen walls and knock a dude out, and it always came right back to his hand.” I chuckled. “The Star-Spangled Avenger.” I clicked on a file and opened it, revealing a file on our friend Cornwallis.

  “Surprise, surprise, it’s our good buddy the undying soldier,” I said. There was lots of information on the screen that looked too sciency for my pay grade. “Let’s get Dr. Korpanty back on the line and send some of this stuff over to her. Maybe she can make some sense of it.”

  * * *

  “This is fascinating, Eddie,” Dr. Korpanty said a few hours later. We’d spent the intervening time going through the data cache, pulling files at random to get some idea of all the information Carmen had. “The military’s kept this project a complete secret for almost twenty-five years. And the work they’ve done…it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  “What else can you tell us about Mr. Cornwallis?” I asked.

  “His amnesia isn’t amnesia,” Dr. Korpanty said.

  “Wait, what?”

  “He’s not suffering from amnesia after each death. He’s shifting personalities. Every time he dies, he moves on to a new personality. That’s why he kept changing his name after each death, and why he can’t remember what happened in his past ‘life.’ He’s not the same person at all!”

  I scratched my head. “Um, not to poo-poo your scientific jiggery-pokery, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how multiple personality syndrome works.”

  “If this were your regular, run-of-the-mill multiple personality disorder in the DSM-IX, I’d say you’re correct. But this is an artificial form of multiple personality disorder, coded into Cornwallis’s brain like a computer downloading an app. It boots up a new personality each time he dies. According to what I can figure out from looking at the blood sample you gave me, he’s died at a least a few dozen times in the past few years.”

  “Wait, so if we can track Cornwallis down again and get him to you, you could access the code in his brain and reset him to one of his previous selves, right?” I asked.

  “In theory, yes,” Dr. Korpanty replied.

  “And he’d still have all of his memories and knowledge?” I asked.

  “Again, in theory.”

  “Hmm,” I mused, stroking my chin. “That could be really useful. I’ll let you know when and if I come across him.”

  XII.

  We needed some way to access the personality we wanted in Cornwallis’s brain.

  “Probably Gregor, I’d imagine,” I said as the four of us sat around after our conversation with Dr. Korpanty. “So, if his brain is like a computer – which I think is a safe assumption, given what Dr. Korpanty’s told us – can we, I dunno, hack into it?”

  Maya sat wrapped around a mug of coffee. “I think I can, um, do that,” she said. “But I have no idea what operating system he’s using, or if it might trigger some other problems for him.”

  “Problems? Like what?” I asked.

  “The army might’ve put in a, uh, failsafe. It could erase all of his previous selves if someone tampered with his brain.”

  “Crap, I hadn’t thought of that. Okay, Maya, I want you to work with Dr. Korpanty. Check the Shurburg Chemical’s computer system for anything related to Mr. Cornwallis and his brain. Ellen, I want you to dig through the data cache and see what you can find. There was a lot of stuff to sift through on there.”

  “Right,” she said. If anyone could find a needle in a stack of needles at the needle factory, it was Ellen Typewell.

  “Vera, we need to go on a field trip,” I said, turning to the crime boss next.

  Vera arched an eyebrow at me. “And just who put you in charge?” she asked.

  “Well, you did, when you died, and I sorta got used to it after a while.”

  Vera’s mouth quirked up at the corner. “And just where are we going?” she asked.

  “I’m glad you asked. We are hunting down the most dangerous game. We are hunting Mr. Cornwallis himself.”

  * * *

  We rolled up to the now-completely collapsed building at 22nd and Sterling an hour later. It was midday, but this particular intersection wasn’t going to win any awards for heavy traffic. Sunlight filtered down between the buildings, somehow managing to cast nasty shadows into the alleyways and over most of the building where Cornwallis had hidden.

  “There’s not much left to it, I’m afraid,” I said, kicking at a stray piece of stone façade that had crumbled under the intense heat of the firebomb. “But it’s still the best place to start looking for Cornwallis.”

  We spent the next hour combing through the debris of his building, searching for clues to his whereabouts. We found nothing.

  “There’s nothing here to find,” I complained, swinging a metal rod at a chunk of concrete and cracking the blackened mound in half. “Anything that might give us a clue is buried under all this rubble.”

  “So why did you have us come back here?” Vera asked.

  I shrugged. “I dunno. I thought maybe there’d be a murderbot or somethin’ that would lead us to Cornwallis’s new hideout.”

  “That is tremendously dumb,” Vera said.

  Then I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.

  “What’s that in the alley?” I asked. I hopped down off the rubble pile and started toward the alley. Vera followed close behind, her gun drawn and ready. I saw movement again, and the glint of light on metal.

  “It’s a murderbot!” I whispered, grinning. “I knew that bastard got out.”

  “What,” Vera asked, as if she already knew she’d hate the answer, “is a murderbot?”

  “A robot designed for murdering people, of course,” I said. “Though, now that I think about it, Cornwallis’s robots didn’t do much muderin’. They were more like helper robots. Helpbots.”

  “Please never use that portmanteau again,” Vera pleaded.

  “Whatever. C’mon,” I said, entering the alley and falling right into the trap someone had so expertly laid out for me.

  XIII.

  Traps are kinda dumb, if you think about them for more than a second or two. You hope your nemesis or whoever not only goes to the place where you want them to go but also happens to bumble into the trap you set up. It’s wildly improbable.

  And yet, there I was, hanging upside down by my ankle, while Vera looked on, arms crossed, a frown plastered across her face.

  “You’re an idiot,” she snapped.
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  “An idiot like a fox,” I corrected.

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Well, in my defense, all the blood is rushing to my head.”

  “Well, well, well, my sister and her buffoonish detective? I didn’t realize it was my birthday.” From out of the shadows stepped Vera’s sister, Carmen, a knife in one hand and a gun covering both of us in the other.

  “I take umbridge at the ‘buffoonish’ characterization and ask that it be stricken from the record,” I said with all the dignity I could muster. Given the circumstances, that was pretty much none.

  “Would you prefer ‘asinine?’” Carmen asked.

  “Yes, I would,” I said. I started to spin slightly on my rope.

  “I’m surprised to see they let you out of jail so quickly,” Vera said.

  “And I’m surprised to see you can still fog a mirror,” Carmen snapped back.

  “Well, reports of my death were greatly exaggerated, as they say,” Vera replied calmly.

  “Put your gun down, sister. We both know how much you hate to get your hands dirty,” Carmen said condescendingly.

  Vera only gripped the gun tighter and made sure she was aiming directly at her sister. “I’ve come to appreciate a little grime now and again,” Vera said. She cocked the gun. “Go on, try something.”

  Carmen lazily pointed her gun at me, which I couldn’t really see but sensed. “Seriously? I will kill your idiot friend, Veracruz.”

  “Wait, your name is ‘Veracruz?’” I asked, then started to laugh. “That is so stupid!”

  “Eddie, you already have one gun pointed at you. Don’t make it two,” Vera growled through gritted teeth. To her sister, she said, “You should put down your gun. I’ll kill you before Eddie dies, I promise.”

  “Hey, wait, who said I was gonna die?” I asked as I spun around in a lazy circle.

  “Be quiet, Eddie,” Vera said. “Now, Carmen. I won’t ask again.”

  “Good, because you have started to bore me.” Carmen pulled the trigger. In the narrow confines of the alley, it was deafening. Carmen was so close, I was sure I was dead.

  But her shot went wide. A robotic claw was wrapped around her wrist, and all of Carmen’s struggle did nothing to loosen that grip.

  “Mur—uh, I mean, helpbot!” I cried.

  “I’m glad I found you,” the robot said. It then turned a couple of three-sixties and hurled Carmen down the alley. She landed in and on several garbage bins. “You must follow the robot.”

  “I’m a little tied up at the moment,” I said, “otherwise, I’d love to follow your robot.”

  “No, my sister is right there! I can end her!” Vera snarled.

  “There is no time,” the helpbot said. A metallic whirring noise, and I was suddenly falling. I landed hard on my head, neck, and shoulder and cursed for a moment. Vera helped me up as the robot trundled up to us. “Please, follow me.” The robot turned and took off down the alley.

  Vera looked back at her sister, who wasn’t getting up anytime soon apparently. She looked at me. “She’s so close,” Vera pleaded with me.

  “I know, but…” I gestured at the robot, which was waiting for us at the entrance to the alley. “I think we can learn a lot from Cornwallis.”

  “But my sister!” Vera exclaimed. “She’s right there! I could end her, now, and we wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore.”

  A brief blast of police siren from the opposite end, down by where Carmen was laying, settled things for us. “C’mon, we have to go,” I said. I all but dragged her out of the alley after the robot. What other choice did we really have?

  The robot led us down a series of winding alleys and side streets, avoiding any major road despite the fact that no one was out and about in Old Town right then. Vera kept her gun out, ready to shoot at a moment’s notice.

  Eventually, the robot came to a stop outside an old office building’s back door. “Enter here,” the robot said, then it shuffled off and disappeared around a corner.

  “Are you sure?” Vera asked.

  “Hell no,” I replied. “But again, I don’t see that we have any other choice.” I reached out and took the door handle, twisting it and pulling the door open. It was dark inside, but enough light slunk into the hallway that we could see it was long, straight, and empty.

  “After you, Vera,” I said, gesturing down the hallway. She rolled her eyes and started off down the hall. I followed close behind.

  The door closed behind us quietly, whispering closed on well-oiled hinges. “The guy has a thing for spooky digs,” I said conversationally.

  “I will have to take your word for it,” Vera said.

  With the door closed behind us, there was very little light in the hallway. Some faded, dismal light managed to trickle in from the offices on either side of the hall, but it mostly served to remind us that there was no overhead light in the place.

  “Think it’s a trap?” I asked.

  “Possibly. Probably,” Vera replied. “I don’t know Cornwallis, and I don’t trust him.”

  “Are those two things related in some way?” I asked.

  “Of course, they are,” she snapped. “If I knew the man, I wouldn’t fear him nearly so much. The fact that he’s an unknown variable is a concern.”

  “Hey, he’s a nice guy, trust me.”

  “The man you knew is dead. He has multiple personalities, remember? You have no idea who he is now. This may all be a ploy to lure us in and end us.”

  “He could’ve done that with the murderbot outside,” I pointed out. “If he wanted us dead, why go to all this trouble? Just let the murderbots take care of it.”

  “Please stop saying ‘murderbot.’ It hurts my sense of linguistic decorum.”

  “Spoilsport,” I said. We reached the end of the hallway and a single door. “Guess this is it, huh?” I said.

  Vera nodded grimly. I reached out and opened the door.

  We found ourselves in a well-lit, comfortable room. There was a couch against the far wall, and a massive desk with chairs positioned in front of it dominated the central part of the room.

  Cornwallis was seated behind the desk, his hands folded on the desktop. “Thank you for joining me again,” he said, nodding to me. “You, I do not know,” he said, turning to Vera. “I do know why you’ve come, though. You’re here to learn my secrets.”

  “I mean, sorta, yeah,” I said. “We’re also here because we know some of your secrets, too.”

  “I thought you might, Detective Hazzard,” Cornwallis said. I must have looked surprised. “Yes, I know who you are. The experiment was a success. When I died this last time, I was able to regain my memories.”

  “How?” I asked.

  Cornwallis smiled and tapped the side of his head. “Did you know the human brain is essentially an organic computer? And, with a bit of finagling, you can add a USB port to it and do data transfers?”

  “Wait, you backed up your own brain?” I asked.

  Cornwallis chuckled. “I did! Worked like a charm, too. All I had to do was figure out how to save the data on one of my robot’s hard drives, which involved a lot of file compression and creating a new file format, but it worked! All 50 terabytes of information that was in my brain before I died is in there again. It’s quite remarkable, really.”

  “Well, this makes our job a lot easier,” I said. “See, we figured out that you’re not forgetting things when you die. No, you’re switching to a new personality configuration thanks to some software someone stuck in your head. We have a hacker thingie—” I used the most technical term I could think of “—that should allow us to access earlier personality configurations. In other words, we can bring back Gregor or Halbert or any of the other few dozen personalities you’ve had over the years, along with everything they know.”

  “That sounds great,” Cornwallis said, “but my own modifications may make it kinda tricky.”

  I frowned. “How so?”

  “Well, I had to
do some updates to the firmware in my brain and added a bunch of new hardware. Then I had to create a user interface for accessing my brain, and develop a file type so I could save all the information that’s stored in my brain for re-uploading after I died. My brain is approximately…65% different from what it was whenever it was initially tampered with.”

  I looked at Vera. “Is that going to cause us a problem?” I asked.

  Vera shrugged. “How would I know? I pay people to do these things, usually.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I pulled out my computer and called up the phone tool. “Call Maya,” I said, and it dialed for me.

  The phone rang four times before she picked up. An image of her appeared in a vid window hanging in the air. “What’s up, boss?” she asked.

  “So, we ran into some complications with Cornwallis and installing the thingie you made for us into his brain.”

  Maya’s face on the vid window looked concerned. “You didn’t try to, um, modify it yourself, did you?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Because you said you’d leave my code alone after that incident with the, uh, toaster,” she continued.

  “No, I definitely remember the toaster. I didn’t mess with anything, I swear!”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Maya asked.

  “He’s done some…stuff to his brain,” I said.

  “‘Stuff?’”

  “Y’know what, it’d be easier if we just brought him in and showed you.”

  XIV.

  “This is fascinating,” Maya breathed as she checked out Cornwallis’s brain hole.

  “It’s a brain hole,” I said helpfully.

  “USB port,” Cornwallis immediately corrected. “And yes, it does interface directly with my brain. But can we please dignify the proceedings a little bit?”

  “Oh, sure, we can get as dignified as hell up in here,” I replied. “Anyway, think your hacking thingie will still work?” I asked Maya.

  The young computer expert shrugged. “I don’t know, sir,” she said. “I’ll have to run some tests.” There was a gleam in her eye when she said that, which led me to believe I probably didn’t want to see what tests she was going to run.