The Long Fall Into Darkness

by Charlie Cottrell

  “Okay, sure, run all the tests you want, just don’t leave him a vegetable, huh?”

  “Uh-huh,” Maya said, already focused completely on Cornwallis’s brain hole thing.

  “Great! I’m gonna go take a nap,” I said.

  * * *

  I was shaken awake some time later by a very concerned-looking Maya.

  “Um,” she said, biting her lower lip.

  “You turned him into a vegetable, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she replied, “but you should still come see.” I sighed and got up off the couch.

  “I was having a dream that I worked in an office every day from 9 to 5,” I said casually. No one ever shot at me, or kidnapped me, or told me the fate of the city rested in me getting my TPS reports turned in on time.” I sighed again. “It was so damn dull, and I loved every second of it.”

  Maya ushered me into the room where Cornwallis was sitting, a half dozen wires and leads attached to him at various points. His eyes were glazed over and his jaw hung slack, a bit of drool seeping out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Um, Maya, not to criticize or anything, but you appear to have completely vegetated the guy,” I said.

  “No, he’s in standby mode,” Maya replied. “I flashed his BIOS.”

  “That sounds absolutely depraved. I didn’t know you had it in you,” I said with a grin.

  Maya’s face flushed bright red with embarrassment. “No, sir, it’s what you do when you want to upgrade the motherboard or make any major changes to the operating system. I had to do it so I could check to see if my code was compatible with the changes he’d made. And, well…” Maya brought up a vid window and tapped a button.

  Cornwallis’s eyes suddenly brightened and sharpened. “Oh, hello, Detective Hazzard. It seems we both survived the firebombing of my apartment building.”

  “Halbert?” I said.

  Cornwallis seemed genuinely puzzled. “Indeed. Who else would I be?”

  “I mean, there’s apparently quite a list of possibilities,” I muttered. To Cornwallis, I said, “Look, Halbert, what do you remember about what happened after we left your building?”

  “Oh, I was horribly crushed by several tons of debris,” Cornwallis said cheerfully. “Thankfully, my companion bots rescued me and I revived soon afterward.”

  “Do you happen to remember anything from a previous life? Like, say, Gregor Cornwallis?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. He was the version of me who worked at Shurburg Chemical.”

  I turned to Maya. “Looks like you got him working perfectly,” I said.

  “Except I didn’t do this,” Maya said. “He did. On his own, in a dark pit with just a couple of, um, janky robots to help.”

  “I’m starting to think our Mr. Cornwallis might be a bit of a genius,” I said. “Halbert, how far back can you remember?”

  “All the way back to my first life,” he said.

  My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Wait, so you can remember back to before you were like this? Can you remember who did this to you? Or why?” We were tantalizingly close to something big, I could feel it.

  Cornwallis screwed up his eyes for a moment, deep in thought, searching his memory for that elusive nugget of information that would tie everything together.

  And he came up empty. “Sorry, I can’t remember that. I think whoever did it purposely burned out that memory so I couldn’t ever recall.”

  Damn! So close. I sighed. “Well, it’s still significant that you can remember something of your previous lives. That’s great. I’ve got a list of questions for you, so let me know when you’re ready to have a chat.”

  “Maya and I are going to run a few diagnostic tests to make sure everything is working as it should, but afterward I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you might have,” Cornwallis said.

  “Great, thanks,” I said. I patted Maya on the shoulder. “And good job to you, too. Let me know when you guys are done.”

  “Yes, sir,” Maya said.

  * * *

  It took Maya a few hours to get everything the way she wanted it with Cornwallis. By that point, she was sure he was safe – “No, malware,” she said, as if I would understand the reference – and said it was okay for me to have my talk with him.

  “So, I guess I’m still not quite sure what you are now, Mr. Cornwallis,” I said as we sat down across from each other. The room was sparsely furnished with just a few chairs around a coffee table and up on the second floor of our safe house. The windows were blacked out for our privacy and safety, or so Vera kept telling me.

  “I would say I’m a cyborg at this point, Detective Hazzard,” Cornwallis replied. “Part man, part computer, all Cornwallis.”

  I shifted in my seat. “So, how far back can you actually remember?”

  “My first life was as a general in the British army in the 1770s and 1780s,” he said.

  I choked on air. “You what, now?”

  Cornwallis chuckled. “Sorry, just a little humor, detective. I’m a direct descendent of British General Charles Cornwallis, who lost the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 and cinched American victory in the war. However, amusingly enough, I was actually named for him. My name is Charles Cornwallis, or rather it was before my first death all those years ago.”

  “And when was your first death?” I asked.

  “A little over twenty years ago,” Cornwallis answered. “I was working as a research scientist for Grummel-Hammond Consolidated at the time, working with robotics.”

  “Grummel-Hammon Consolidated? I’m not familiar with them,” I said.

  “No, you wouldn’t be. They went out of business a few months after I was killed. They were a military contractor working in all sorts of applied science sectors, including robotics, synthetic and artificial intelligence, and experimental genetic modification.”

  “Do you think they’re the ones who modded your DNA with tardigrade DNA?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I know they did, because I signed up for the experiment of my own free will,” he said.

  “Why would you do that?” I asked. “Didn’t you know they would have to kill you to test the gen-mod?”

  “Of course. It was an opportunity to learn something completely new. And I was working on the system that I finally perfected just a few short days ago, allowing me to upload my memories back into my body. My process wasn’t quite as refined back then as it is now, and I didn’t manage to achieve what I wanted, but now…” He chuckled. “Well, here we are.”

  “Right,” I said. “That brings us to another important question, though. Who put the artificial multiple personalities in your head?”

  “Actually, that’s a bit…blurry” he said. “But I think…I did it.”

  XV.

  “You did it?” I asked, surprised. “That seems a bit extreme.”

  “Well, when you know the things I know, you go to extremes to protect yourself,” Cornwallis said. “And the military would have spent years dissecting me, killing me over and over again, if they thought I’d known any of the things I hid in those different personalities.”

  I frowned. “Is this some sort of government conspiracy nonsense you’re about to get into? Why do I hear the X-Files theme song in my head right now?”

  “It’s only a little conspiratorial,” Cornwallis said. “You see, the military is behind everything.”

  I sat there for a minute. “That’s it?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s it?’ That’s everything!” Cornwallis exclaimed. “Every terrible thing that’s happened in Arcadia for the past thirty, forty years? The military did all of it.”

  “So, the military crashed our economy?” I asked. Cornwallis just stared at me. “Seriously? How? Did they somehow manipulate the Dow Jones Industrial Average to crater for a month straight? Or initiate eight years of tariffs on our major trading partners, causing the city’s shipping businesses to go under? That seems like a tall order, even for the US Militar
y.”

  “I know what I know,” Cornwallis replied simply. “The military did it all, and they’ll come for me if they realize I remember everything.”

  “Okay, putting all that aside for the time being,” I said. “Ten years ago, when you were Gregor Cornwallis, you were murdered. The police suspected a guy named Burt Warden did it, but then he ended up dead.”

  “Burt? I think he was a lab tech at Shurburg. Strangled me to death, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah. But I’m also pretty sure ‘Burt Warden’ is a pseudonym. Seriously, no one would name their child that.”

  “I always assumed. But I don’t know his real identity,” Cornwallis said.

  “Thankfully, we have experts who can figure that out,” I said.

  * * *

  “Hey, where’s Maya?” I asked Miss Typewell.

  “Asleep down in the basement, I think,” she replied. “She hadn’t slept in almost 48 hours, so it kinda caught up with her.”

  “Okay, then I guess I have a job for you, Ellen.” I showed her a vid window with the arrest report on Burt Warden in it. “Burt Warden. Guy who killed Mr. Cornwallis ten years back. Died mysteriously in his cell not long after.”

  “That’s an obviously fake name,” Miss Typewell said.

  “Exactly. Think you can dig up his real name?”

  She grinned. “Give me an hour.”

  It actually took her exactly forty-three minutes to discover the real identity of Burt Warden.

  “His name is Reggie Albertson,” she said, showing me a vid window with Reggie’s image in it. He looked exactly like Burt Warden, minus about fifty pounds and with dark hair instead of Warden’s blond locks. “Get this, he’s career military.”

  I arched an eyebrow at Ellen. “Really?”

  “Yup. Special Ops. Green Berets, Army Rangers, did some covert operations stuff back in the day.”

  I stroked my chin and discovered it had been at least a couple of weeks since I’d shaved. “Wait, why does that name sound so familiar?”

  “That really weird case you worked a few years back, when the precinct house got hit,” Ellen said.

  “Duh! The Albertson case.”

  Cornwallis looked between the two of us, confused. “What’s the Albertson case?” he asked.

  “A few years ago, Reggie’s brother, Jackson, came to my office asking me to track down his brother for him,” I explained. “Said he’d gone AWOL from the army. I tried to track the brother down, but ran into a bunch of his army buddies and got into a couple of nasty fire fights. Someone ended up blowing the guys up, and we never really got any sort of resolution on the case, but now I’m starting to think there was more to it than I believed at the time.” I looked at Miss Typewell and felt her expression mirrored my own. “If Reggie died after killing you ten years ago, though, then…”

  “Then how was his brother only just getting around to searching for him a few years ago?” Miss Typewell completed my thought. “Surely he wasn’t AWOL for several years.”

  “That does seem unlikely,” I agreed, “unless the army’s gotten way more lax on its rules than they used to be.”

  “Doubtful,” Ellen said.

  “So, where does that leave us?” I asked. “Was there a third Albertson? Were they triplets?”

  “No, just the two of them,” Ellen said. “I looked at his service record while I was digging around. There wasn’t a whole lot available to the public, but it looks like he was considered active duty until earlier this year.”

  “Okay, that just makes no goddamn sense,” I muttered. “Is he alive? Is he dead? Does he have a doppelganger running around? Or was he cloned?”

  “There’s a simpler answer,” Cornwallis interjected. “They gave him the same gen-mod they gave me.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “That’s a little scary,” I said.

  Cornwallis nodded. “Terrifying, even. Imagine what the army could do with a squad of undying soldiers. It’s not worth thinking about.”

  “All of which raises the larger question of what are we going to do about it?” Ellen asked.

  I laughed. “Do? Ellen, they’re the fucking army. You know what happens when little people like us go up against the entire military-industrial complex? We get stuffed in a dark hole and left to rot for eternity, assuming we don’t get drone striked first.” I stood and stretched. “No, there’s really nothing we can do about it at this point but just wait for the end.”

  Ellen stood, too, frustration flashing across her face. “What do you mean, we just wait for the end? Are you giving up?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Do we have any alcohol in this place? I might be able to drink myself to death before the military hit squad gets here.”

  “They don’t know that we know all this,” Ellen pointed out. “As far as they know, Cornwallis is buried under that building of his, and you’re still public enemy number one so who would listen to you?”

  “I know you think you’re making a strong case here, Ellen, but you’re really not,” I said. “We are well and truly screwed, darlin’. We are outmanned, outgunned, and so outmatched it’s not even worth considering how we could possibly win.”

  “So there is a way we could win,” Ellen said with a triumphant grin.

  “Hell no,” I replied. “We will be smushed like a bug on the windshield of life. Period, end of story. Let’s all go get drunk.”

  “Eddie, I can’t believe you’re giving up,” Ellen said. “You never give up on anything.”

  I laughed. “Really? Giving up is my absolute specialty,” I said. “I’ve given up on more things than most people ever start in their lives. There’s only two things I haven’t given up on in this life, and that’s drinking and smoking. You can take those from me when you pry them out of my cold, dead hands, which should be sometime in the next…oh, couple of days, the way things are going.” I headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Ellen demanded.

  “Where do you think? I’m going out to get as drunk as humanly possible.”

  Part Three: The Siege of Church Street

  I.

  They found me a few hours later in my favorite watering hole, the Funeral Parlor. When people ask me how the place got the name, I usually tell them it’s because someone walked in on a bunch of cops and cop-adjacent folks drinking themselves stupid in here one day and commented, “Man, it’s like a funeral parlor in here,” and the name stuck. But that’s not anything like true. I checked the architectural plans for the building, and it was originally an actual, honest-to-God funeral parlor back about fifty years ago.

  Not that any of that actually mattered to me right at that moment. I was busy dumping as much whiskey into my body as was humanly possible. I was about halfway down the bottle when Ellen and Vera walked in.

  “This seems overly self-destructive, even for you,” Vera said.

  “I really don’t give a damn what either of you have to say, so unless you’re here to drink, I’m gonna have to ask you to just piss off,” I replied without looking up.

  “Giving up isn’t the answer,” Miss Typewell said. Give her credit, Miss Typewell does not let go of something once she sets her mind to it. I’d be in a much better position to admire that quality were she not currently using it to aggravate the hell out of me.

  “I’m just gonna sit here until they either find me or I die of alcohol poisoning,” I said, taking another slug of whiskey. “The second one seems to be in the lead right now.”

  “Eddie, you need to sober up and come with us,” Vera said.

  “Nope,” I replied, taking another shot.

  “What do you mean, ‘nope?’” Vera asked.

  “It’s a slightly-slangy way of saying, ‘No, thank you,’ which you’d understand if you were a human being and not some sort of robot programmed to sometimes simulate human feelings,” I replied.

  Vera stood there, mouth agape.

  “Meep morp, beep boop, does not compute,” I muttered, then g
iggled and had another shot of whiskey.

  Ellen slapped me.

  It was a good slap; she put her body behind it, caught me right on the cheek and snapped my head around in a way my chiropractor would’ve approved of. I could feel the skin of my face burning from the hit, and it hurt enough to cut through the haze of alcohol I was currently in.

  “You absolute asshole, Eddie Hazzard!” Ellen snapped at me. “You’d rather just roll over and die than stick it to the man?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. “You think appealing to my anti-authority streak is going to be the tipping point here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what else to do. If you just sit here, a lot of other people are going to suffer. People like me and Maya, and maybe even Vera here.”

  “I assume I’ll be just fine, actually,” Vera said. A look from Ellen actually shut her up.

  “Listen, Eddie, I know it all seems hopeless, and I know you feel outnumbered. We get that. We all feel that way, too. But just turning your back on the city, on us? That’s not who you are.”

  I sighed. “My grandfather used to tell a story,” I said, pouring myself another shot of whiskey. “There were these two wolves that live inside a person, see. One was anger and hatred and all the darkest bits of humanity. The other was compassion and love and all that hippy-dippy stuff. ‘Which one grows?’ I asked him. ‘How the hell should I know, kid? It’s just a damn story.’” I took my shot of whiskey and stood up. “I think I understand that now.”

  Ellen and Vera looked at one another, then back at me. “That was the stupidest thing I’ve heard all day,” Vera said.

  “Well, I’m more than a little drunk. It sounded better in my head.” I tossed a few bucks down on the bar and turned back to my friends. “C’mon, I think I know what I need to do next, now.”

  “What? Take the fight to them?” Ellen asked, hopeful.

  “Well, no, I was thinking of taking a nap and drinking a whole pot of coffee so I can sober up, but afterward, yeah, I think I will take the fight to them.”