[Caucasian. Adult female. Twenty years of age (estimated). 5 feet 3 inches tall (estimated). Facial recognition: inconclusive.]
Because she has none – a face; or not much left of one. Tentatively, Percy picks up one cold hand, cocked at that unnatural angle, flung out as if in one final flamboyant gesture. He selects a finger and examines its nail.
[Degree of post-mortem cyanosis of the nail bed suggests—]
“This your first jumper, Inspector?”
[—a time of death somewhere around 03:15 this morning.]
The witching hour, don’t they call that? A time for hauntings and suicides, with no one around to witness either. He gently lays the mangled hand back in place and steels himself to give closer scrutiny to where the face should be. And there, emerging from a misshapen nostril, glistening amidst the gore and blood: a pearlescent glimmer.
[Fluorescence of mucous discharge indicates 93% likelihood presence of—]
“Inspector?”
[—soporifluene (street name: ‘Sop’, AKA ‘Jungle’, AKA ‘Haze’). Would you like to confirm via specimen analysis?]
Where’d a nice young Arc girl get Haze?
He detaches a pair of tweezers from the side of the handheld path unit and reaches forward, hovering uncertainly for a moment over the gory spectacle, and settles on a stray bright strand of golden hair standing out perpendicularly from her left temple, furthest from the damage of the impact. He plucks it, deposits it gingerly into the little compartment that opens obligingly in the top of the unit, all the while struggling to mask the slight tremor he is ashamed to note has crept into his right hand.
[Analysing…]
A little hourglass superimposes itself over the scene, dripping steady grains of time from the top bulb to the bottom; like an infinity symbol. Is that where that comes from, then? An emblem of time, itself made to stand for timelessness. Or perhaps the serpent eating its own tail, looping back in a figure of eight. What is that? To do with alchemy? Mythology?
He stands up from where he’s been crouched over the body, stretching out the stiffness that has settled into his back and legs, and looks around. The Arc’s inhabitants go about their daily affairs, some slowing now and then, attempting to pierce the drones’ visual dampening fields with the brute force of their curiosity. Percy can see them, but not they him, nor the sorry mess at his feet. But they know that something has happened.
When is the last time he’s seen an actual hourglass? An egg timer, maybe? When he was a child. His grandparents’ house. An antique, even then; an anachronism, ironically. Strange how these symbols persist, like some cultural afterimage, enduring long after the demise of the things they depict.
“No,” he eventually replies to the Arc’s head of security – the human head, anyway. “Not my first. And it’s premature to assume that.”
“What?”
“That she jumped.” He looks at the man, to whom, for a number of evolving reasons, he has already taken a dislike. “There are other ways to fall.”
It’s actually his second, though his first on dry land; and his fifth actual corpse.
His first jumper had been a boy, in his mid teens; some five months’ back, London, out near the City Arc. Given the proximity of the body, he’d been called in to rule out any connection with the Arc itself, and assumed at first that it had been a drowning. The corpse, white and bloated, had been floating for days, not far in fact from where it would turn out he’d jumped, snagged up amidst weeds, drink cans and plastic bottles, caught in the pocket of tideless, stagnant waters swilling around the Arc’s base. Still not clear how he’d got up there – he wasn’t Arc, just a local street kid, and it being the highest spot thereabouts from which to throw himself. But the age had surprised him, when the AI had suggested it, and later pathology had confirmed – then again, he could have been anywhere from fifteen to fifty, swollen up like that, which had concealed the signs of impact (for water, he’s learned, can be as hard as concrete, if you hit it from high enough or at the wrong angle, without a graceful tuck and dive). Shame. Such a … a misjudgement. Even for a kid like that, whose prospects would have been minimal – street gangs, hack-shacks; but even so, a waste. For what could so few years tell you about what life might have in store? How your future self might one day view what at the time felt no longer endurable? And what, in the hindsight of five, maybe even only two or three years, might turn out not to have required such a peremptory solution. Damn, fifty years of life wouldn’t provide enough data for that level of certainty, let alone fifteen. But when do we ever have enough? Data or certainty.
“Addict,” the security man asserts flatly; adding, with his eyes, You don’t need no fucking pathanalysis units to see that.
“We’ll see.”
The boy, it had turned out, had been an addict too. Which itself turned out to mean nothing. For drugs were often not the cause, merely a contributory factor; just another ingredient to be tossed into the mix, along with poverty, bad upbringing, poor education, joblessness, running with the wrong crowd – take your pick – and none of which were incorrigible defects. Life is not prewritten in the genes; that’s just lazy determinism, a bigoted excuse for washing your hands of all social responsibility.
He double-taps at his right temple to switch off his interface’s visual overlay. Freed of its graphical annotation and the AI’s cold, dry narrative, the effect reminds him of a painting – which one? The far-off gaze (the part of her face that remains most intact), the irises of pure azure, the look vacant, almost sad; her long blond hair splayed out in ray-like solar splendour. An Ophelia – that’s it – but borne afloat on a pool of blood and brain matter, her torso a shapeless bundle of broken bone, twisted sinew and crushed organs, the limbs extending off at crazy angles like those of a deranged spider; and underneath and around her, a nightdress (?), billowed out like a failed parachute. Reflexively, he looks up, past the hint of malicious amusement in the security man’s face, up through the central shaft of the arcology, attempting to infer an imagined trajectory from the position of the body beside him back up to its unknown point of origin. But impossible: too many variables, too many obstacles she might have hit on the way down – walkways, balconies, passing drones – pinballing her, slowing her fall, masking the jump point; if jump indeed she had. In fact, it’s a miracle she made it to the bottom. But the surveillance footage should settle all that; and if not, with a bit of luck, some actual witnesses.
A little ping prompts him to re-engage the interface.
[Identity: unregistered. Unable to connect with the deceased’s interface.]
No DNA record is odd, especially for an Arc resident; failure to connect with the interface less so. Damaged in the fall? The narration continues, confirming the presence of Haze – along with other, more curious drugs, of which the system has no record.
“Pity,” the security man says. “Looks like she was pretty.”
Percy nods and looks up in time to catch the man’s fleeting, almost lupine look.
“Still, that’s Haze for you,” the man adds sagely.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi/fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. All instalments are free, but you can support my writing by taking out a paid subscription, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments.